Broken Windows to the Past

It’s a building to hurry past: dingy, deserted, with dark, jagged holes of broken windows scattered across its 13 stories. “Hey, crackhead” is spray-painted on the black granite facade.

This was once a grand department store, but it’s been derelict for a decade.

Which means Lucas McGrail can’t wait to get in.

He clamps on a hard hat. “This is the last frontier,” he says.

Abandoned buildings like this one, the creepier the better, are treasured arenas for the treacherous -- but trendy -- sport of urban exploring. Slip inside and a hidden world opens up. Over broken glass and sodden lumps of fallen plaster, there’s an eerie beauty in the decay. Through dark hallways, up rust-pitted stairs, there’s a thrill in the adventure.

Scouting each step with his flashlight, breathing hard in the stale air, McGrail climbs to the top floor of the department store. Like most explorers, he’s in it for the daredevil fun of being someplace he shouldn’t. But he also loves the way these old buildings give him a glimpse into the past.

In an old records room, he finds a leather-bound diary, nearly a century old, kept by the owners of People’s Outfitting Co. They wrote about their golf scores and their swollen tonsils, about the trials of keeping the store afloat through blizzards, streetcar strikes and electrical shorts that had them working by candlelight. February 1916 was slow: They sold mostly Victrolas. In June 1919, business was good: “Brutally hot weather. Refrigerators and fans went like hotcakes.”

McGrail, a 27-year-old architect, rummages through the records room for other memories of an era past, coming across a framed optometry degree from 1935 and swatches of shag carpet in fuchsia and split pea.

“This is my way of opening a window into the past,” he says. “It’s the same charge other people get when they explore Stonehenge, or the ruins of ancient Rome.”

McGrail counts himself among an informal federation of adventurers worldwide -- mostly, but not exclusively, young men -- who regard “Danger -- No Trespassing” signs as a personal challenge.

Taking photos to document their exploits, they slink through steam tunnels and drainpipes, climb idle construction cranes, even descend into abandoned missile silos. Or, like the loose-knit Urban Exploration League in Detroit, they prowl forsaken buildings. Then they post their discoveries online, in narratives so packed with drama that an illicit crawl through a sewer comes off like an expedition to the North Pole.

In the last decade, urban exploring has developed its own vocabulary: “Seccers” are security guards; “to skunell” is to skateboard in a drainpipe; “to summit” is to reach the roof of an abandoned building.

There’s an online discussion group devoted to exploring steam tunnels under college campuses, including UCLA. There’s even a magazine, Infiltration, published three times a year in Toronto and claiming a circulation of about 2,000. The editor, who identifies himself only as Ninjalicious, says the movement has grown to include several thousand enthusiasts across the United States, Western Europe, Canada, Russia, Australia and Japan.

A Risky Hobby

Participants risk arrest. They risk injury, even death; every explorer seems to know someone who fell through a rotting floor or bashed his head on a low-hanging pipe. Lifting a metal grate in an abandoned cafeteria, McGrail once found a human index finger in a puddle of dried blood. He figures it belonged to an explorer whose hand got stuck under the grate.

“It’s probably kind of stupid to do this,” said Josh Kahl, 28, a Detroit explorer. “But it’s interesting. It’s an adventure. You never know what’s going to happen.”

Urban exploring is about discovery, about “looking behind the scenes,” the editor of Infiltration said in an e-mail interview. It’s about finding “the wonderful, neglected spaces that might otherwise go unappreciated.”

For explorers who thrill to neglected buildings, few cities are more enticing than Detroit.

Fueled by the wealth of the auto industry, Detroit built dozens of extravagant high-rises between 1900 and 1930. The downtown skyline sparkled with Art Deco office towers and luxury hotels -- some rising 30 stories. A red-brick department store built in wedding-cake tiers occupied an entire block. The enormous train station was designed like a classical temple, with stately columns out front.

But within a few decades, the businesses built with such opulence began to lose their customers. Between 1950 and 2000, Detroit lost more than 1 million residents -- half its population. The race riots of 1967, in particular, led to a mass exodus. Shops, hotels and theaters shut down.

The city of Detroit, which owns many of the old landmarks, has demolished several over the years, including Hudson’s department store, once the biggest in the nation. But it can cost more than $10 million to take down a building of such size. And many people, including Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, are reluctant to destroy the grand architecture built when Detroit was on top of the world. So the buildings have sat empty -- one for more than three decades.

And the heart of downtown -- a six-block radius around Woodward Avenue -- has become an irresistible playground for urban explorers.

“Growing up in Detroit, you see all these buildings all boarded up and fenced off. It captures your interest,” said Kahl, who processes claims for an insurance company when he’s not sneaking through moldy halls.

“I always felt like I missed something in Detroit,” said Robert Klatt, 31, a theater manager. “I always wished I could have seen these buildings in their glory.” He gets a taste of the bygone grandeur -- marble floors, brass drinking fountains, mahogany elevators and hand-painted ceramic tiles -- on monthly expeditions.

“It’s exciting and depressing at the same time,” Kahl said.

It’s also illegal: If caught, explorers can be charged with breaking and entering, or more commonly, with trespassing, which carries a $100 fine. But arrests are rare.

Detroit police Officer Shanita Petty, who patrols downtown, said police generally don’t look inside abandoned buildings unless they get a call for help, or a tip that someone is carting out valuables. It’s too dangerous.

“Some of these buildings have been sitting there for so many years that the floor might cave in if you walk on it,” Petty said.

Most explorers travel in pairs so someone can go for help in an emergency. But danger is part of the game, starting with the point of entry.

Most insist, quite earnestly, that they never break into a secured building. They will, however, exploit any opening they can find, even if they have to pry away loose plywood, crawl through broken windows, or clamber up a rickety fire escape.

City officials say they hurry to barricade any opening they spot. They also say it’s almost impossible to keep a determined trespasser out.

“Any time you board up a building, there will always be some people who will be very curious to see why,” said Amru Meah, Detroit’s director of building and safety.

After the loose plywood was nailed shut on one Detroit hotel, explorers found an alternative entry: They wiggle through a broken street-level skylight and drop down onto a heap of trash in the pitch-black subbasement. With a strong flashlight, they can usually make it through the labyrinth of rusting boilers to the lobby.

Once they’re safely inside such a building, adventurers can spend hours just looking.

“It’s spectacular,” said Lowell Boileau, 58, an artist who finds inspiration in the ruins.

He offered another description as well: “Moving.”

Perhaps the most stirring of Detroit’s ruins is the Book-Cadillac Hotel. Opened in 1924, it was once the premier address in Detroit, host to presidents, sports legends and movie stars. Today, the grand ballroom still evokes an air of elegance. Pale green curtains billow around the arched windows. Delicate balconies arch over the dance floor. A whisper of romance seems to hang on the breeze.

‘Urban Forensics’

But the breeze is coming through a row of broken windows. The ballroom floor is a lumpy mess of wet plaster, moldy carpet and buckled hardwood. The chandeliers have crashed to the floor, their crystals smashed or stolen. Water drips from the leaking roof, 30 stories up.

Debris is everywhere: an old lampshade, a filthy mattress, a toppled Admiral TV, wooden beams, the rubble of crumbling walls. Boileau compares the hotel to the ruins of the Titanic. And like a ship resting on the ocean floor, it seems frozen in time.

In the lobby, there’s a 1974 Playboy and a campaign poster from 1982 touting Bill Coffey for American Legion commander. The wine cellar still stocks a dozen sealed bottles of Harvey’s Rich Golden Shooting Sherry, untouched since the hotel closed in 1984. The pantry holds 5-pound cans of corned beef hash and jumbo jars of maraschino cherries.

“You can see how these buildings lived, and how they’re being torn apart. It’s like urban forensics,” McGrail said.

“You can imagine the noise, the traffic, people inside busy doing what people do,” said Dan Kosmowski, 22, an engineering student at Wayne State University.

He once came across the office of an insurance adjustor who apparently had died or been fired abruptly; no one had bothered to clean out his office before the building closed in the mid-1980s. His stamps, his mail, even his bowling trophies were all there, thick with dust.

“It makes you think about what these buildings were like 20 years ago. It makes you wonder why they can’t be like that now,” Kosmowski said. “You think, ‘How did it get to be this bad?’ ”

The simple answer is time: With decades of neglect, roofs leak and walls collapse.

Often, though, scavengers have hastened the decay.

Most of Detroit’s vacant landmarks have been stripped from top to bottom. In search of scrap metal, scavengers yank copper wiring out of the elevator motors, rip bronze directory panels out of the walls and find ways to get 200-pound radiators down a dozen flights. Some go after valuable architectural features, such as antique fixtures.

Blame for the destruction rests as well with vandals and vagrants. The windows in the abandoned train station are riddled with bullet holes; the walls are scrawled over with graffiti. Homeless people camping in the forgotten rooms of old hotels sometimes start cooking fires, blackening the walls with smoke.

Officially, the explorer’s code of ethics echoes the hiker’s: Take nothing but photographs. Leave nothing but footprints.

Like the rule about not entering locked buildings, however, this one breaks down a bit in practice. Indeed, so many explorers pocket historical artifacts -- bronze key fobs, doorknobs and the like -- that an informal trading network has developed on EBay.

McGrail’s “good” china set consists of plates he has discovered in vacant hotels and department stores. Klatt has created a mini-museum in his spare bedroom for the boiler gauges, exit signs, plaster friezes and other souvenirs he has collected while exploring (nearly all, he points out, taken from buildings slated for demolition).

Mayor Kilpatrick has vowed that within the next few years, he will find a use for -- or, as a last resort, tear down -- the empty landmarks that have become symbols of Detroit’s decay.

If he succeeds, urban explorers here will have to find other adventures. That shouldn’t be much trouble.

“There’s a lot of magnificent abandoned architecture in the suburbs,” Boileau said.