A Wanderlust for Rust

This article originally appeared in SHIFT Magazine: Summer 2022 Issue (#10): Backyard Trips. SHIFT is an independent, student-run publication that aims to disentangle the practices of art, architecture, and design from the biases, exclusivity, and elitism that have historically shaped their canon.

Primer

‘Urbex’: a portmanteau— urb, short for urban; -ex, short for exploration. The act of investigating abandoned or hidden components of man-made structures and environments, whose practitioners explore our hidden urban environment. Also known as ‘urbexers’, they dare to venture into places which, under normal circumstances, might never be witnessed by the public eye, except by a select few. Think abandoned fallout shelters, factories, and ruined churches — these enthusiasts aim to see them all. Abandonments are the main attraction to the scene today, but other subscenes have emerged — ‘Rurex’, the act of conducting urbex in rural areas, documenting churches, farmhouses, convenience stores or the occasional ghost town. ‘Draining’ — the act of venturing into storm drains and sewers. Glimpse into a world you thought you’d never (want to) see. It should also be mentioned that urban exploration is also significantly cheaper than going on a holiday in France. All it costs is an overpriced sandwich from the deli which conveniently acts as an online forum’s meeting spot.

Autumn, 2021, Baptism

My first journey: A meet with fellow enthusiasts, some as amateur photographers, others as bloggers. I climb into the basement of a church whose congregators are long gone, grabbing a window frame for support while avoiding a pipe that threatens to pierce my forehead. The others find it fitting that my first urbex site should be a church. One of them calls it a baptism.

I, however, appear to have entered architectural purgatory. Walls covered in cryptic prose and graffiti, the charred remains of a small fire and the carcasses of a cat and rat (no foul play suspected) all point towards the various ways that life has persisted when humans have abandoned places of activity. While water drips in the basement and the pews are covered in dust, the place is relatively well-preserved. As urbexers, the saying ‘Take nothing but photographs, leave nothing but footprints’ is the name of the game.

Snap away with your camera; preserve all you can before its inevitable bulldozer-Armageddon. Every place tells a story, and you, as a forensic investigator/visual historian, are tasked with uncovering it.

In an abandoned low-rise apartment building, the doors we open tell various stories. Toys scattered in one room; a Hebrew alphabet poster in the kitchen. In the unit across the hall, classical 12” records and a Toshiba TV lie on the floor. On the level above, somebody has left a nursing chair set at an awkward angle, facing a balcony from deep within the apartment. In the opposite unit somebody has left photos of themselves from a party, scattered amongst Italian cookbooks, on a coffee table. The memories will be preserved so long as the building stands — which is no more temporal than footprints on a beach.

Winter, 2021

In the City of Toronto’s infinite wisdom, it has opted to transform a broom-factory-turned-art-residency-slash-collective into a new condo building, that at its proposed height sticks out from its low-lying neighbors, and whose design leaves no references to the site’s rich history. In a final, Sisyphean act of defiance, the evicted cover the building in graffiti art from floor to ceiling. ‘Remember us,’ they cry. We will. Get your camera out and start photographing that pair of leftover mannequin legs, the corridors bathed in green, fluorescent light, a chair covered with toothpicks, until you run out of memory space.

If you run out of camera memory, it’s okay because your mind will keep storing memories.

Memories

The first instance of urbex in collective consciousness: a Frenchman goes missing in the Parisian catacombs in 1793. Is the rest history? Not quite. Urbex occurred in isolated pockets of avant-garde and fringe activity, notably Dadaists, 1950s MIT societies, and by the 1980s, the organization Cave Clan manages to create a draining network across Australia. All by word of mouth, secret societies, and printed paraphernalia.

Now throw everybody a computer that can talk to anyone, anywhere, anyhow, and urbex explodes in the 1990s. Information dissemination supersedes the word-of-mouth/printing highway, preferring the superhighway formed within Internet forums, experimental ‘VR’ websites and dedicated messaging groups. Toronto was home and crucial to pioneering this growth, not least in thanks to urbex pioneer Ninjalicious’s zine Infiltration, but by also hosting urbex sites such as the Urban Exploration Resource (UER) since 2002. Take a cursory glance at the UER’s location index: America leads with more than two thousand listings, Canada coming second with well over 1600 spots. In Ontario alone there are over a thousand potential locations for an urbexer to explore, with a good portion in Toronto.

Nonetheless, it peaked in the nineties and noughties before going into a steady decline after 2005, neatly coinciding with the loss of Ninjalicious from terminal bile duct cancer, as well as Paul Allen Rice, creator of Urban Explorers Network — the oldest urbex website in existence. These networks provide support for each other but are on the verge of radio silence. A local meetup went from a large group to a handful of regulars who meet when their agendas line up once in a blue moon. Cancelled meets are not uncommon. The scene has changed. With dwindling activity and support — not to mention unfriendly, last-decade UI designs — at times, these very forums appear to be as abandoned as the sites we visit.

Viewing the Singularity

Yet it is possible to view this dead noise as an illusion to cover up activity, hidden behind a verification system aimed to reject malicious actors, vandals and the powers-that-be. To be verified is to possess knowledge of every documented, abandoned site in the world at your fingertips, and to possess site knowledge means to have the freedom to explore on your own time. But signs of a connected network of enthusiasts remain, like ‘Freaktography’, who prowls urban and rural Ontario on the regular, showing off numerous finds to a sizable following on social media. Newer sites like Ontario Abandoned Places aspire to replace olden chat forums with Discord servers with site updates on the daily. If one knew what they were searching for, these networks are not particularly hard to find. But of course, having an Internet connection can only get you so far past the firewall. The Internet may have helped to democratize and lower barriers to urbex at the cost of introducing anonymous, anti-trust protocols to the community. At the end of the day, what one needs is real connections.

Connections: Spring, 2022

Call it coincidence, serendipity, or divine intervention: in spring the network I thought I knew deepened when a twice-removed acquaintance of mine offered to take me on a scenic tour. On a cool spring night, we make like Jules Verne’s’ Professor Lidenbrock and Axel journeying to the centre of the Earth. In an active zone my guide leads me at an astonishing speed to the point where we appear to melt past walls and doors. It’s only when I feel an incredible dry heat emanating around me and my host that I realise we’ve come to the right place: a steam tunnel — tunnels that transport steam across large institutions, as well as the occasional cold water, electrical cable, or telephone connection. On paper, boring. In person, fascinating. I imagine myself as Lidenbrock following Hans down the throat of Snaefellsjokull. It’s not the act of trespassing that urban explorers get a kick out of, it’s the experience of exploring an uncanny environment in the flesh. While we like to think we can easily traverse what we know about, we stumble on the mesh gratings on the floor. I’d been told not to grip the steam pipes, but I cling to them with gloves anyway – otherwise I’d trip on the haphazardly completed terrain. Halfway through, we crouch through a section built for dwarves. A steady film of dust lines our boots and whatever we touch. The heat is getting to me through my jacket, and I am beginning to sweat. All this points to a simple fact: These tunnels were never designed for a human presence. Thankfully, the tunnel widens again, allowing us to take a water break in a low storage cavern.

A few minutes later we are melting through walls and doors again — this time, ascending. We wiggle around a Medusa-like entanglement of Mylar ducts and wooden railways. In pitch darkness, the lights from my headlamp and camera flash make the metallic surfaces glitter like C-beams.

We approach a door leading outside. The host urges me to extinguish my light before they open it, and once we are outside, they quickly shut it to hide light leaks. We are on a visible rooftop after all.

We sit and watch Torontonian city lights communicate in a metronomic pulse with the breeze cooling our backs. Perhaps at that very moment somebody else is scaling another rooftop, reading decade-old graffiti, or staring at unattended personal mementos. I can’t help but be reminded that I’ve barely begun to explore Toronto’s backstreets and backyards. But I have, and I hope it will never end.