Being a licensed New York City tour guide is notoriously difficult to accomplish. The test is on the order of the London Taxi Driver’s exam. Urban planner Moses Gates touts his license in the bio on his website. That accomplishment, as much as his extensive exploits in urban exploration, got me interested in his endeavors. This man has clearly done his homework. I look forward to reading his recent book Hidden Cities: A Memoir of Urban Exploration. I got a copy by unconventional means.

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The Woolworth Building, erected
in 1913, as seen from City Hall Park.

From The Woolworth ‘Cathedral of Commerce’ Marks 90 Years:

 ‘The Woolworth Building’s observation deck used to host 300,000 people a year, who’d come here to get the best view in the city,’ says Roy Suskin, property manager for the Witkoff Group, the building’s present owner. ‘The trip to the top used to cost a dime, and visitors would switch from the lobby elevators to the special [cylindrical] elevator for the last five floors — kind of a Willy Wonka experience.’

…He is quick to point out that the tower’s observation deck closed in 1945, the victim of competition from the newer Empire State Building. The rest of the landmark building was closed to the public recently for security reasons, and now hundreds of curious visitors are turned away each day.

This article was published in 2003, and security must have slacked off a bit since those tense post-9/11 days. Wanderlust took the band Amour Obscur up to the abandoned observation deck to shoot a Kickstarter video. Some 15 of us — instigators, band, camera crew and assistants — slid into the lobby and up as far as we could go by elevator before we needed to hit the stairs.

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    The shoot was my second trip to the observation deck. The first trip was just two of us. The view was spectacular.

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      Above the observation deck, up a few ladders and through some craw spaces until there was no more up to go, we found this:

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      Read about Gates’ fascination and meticulous exploration of New York’s abandoned observation decks in his piece Prohibited Panoramas on Narratively.