Invisible Frontier: Exploring the Tunnels, Ruins, and Rooftops of Hidden New York

Invisible Frontier: Exploring the Tunnels, Ruins, and Rooftops of Hidden New York | L.B. Deyo, David Leibowitz | Well, there's four hours of my life I'll never get back.

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Invisible Frontier...

	Invisible Frontier: Exploring the Tunnels, Ruins, and Rooftops of Hidden New York L.B. Deyo, David Leibowitz Three Rivers Press, 2003 - 240 pages average customer review:based on 22 reviews view larger image
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In the shadows of the city waits an invisible frontier?a wilderness thriving in the deep places, woven through dead storm drains and live subway tunnels, coursing over third rails. This frontier waits in the walls of abandoned tenements, hides on the rooftops, infiltrates the bridges? steel. It?s a no-man?s-land, fenced off with razor wire, marked by warning signs, persisting in shadow, hidden everywhere as a parallel dimension. Crowds hurry through the bright streets, insulated by pavement, never reflecting that beneath their feet or above their heads lurks a universe.

Led by its two founding agents, L. B. Deyo and David ?Lefty? Leibowitz, Jinx is a stylish urban adventure out?t known for its daring?if sometimes ridiculous?forays into the hidden wonders that lurk above and beneath America?s greatest city, New York. In Invisible Frontier L. B. and Lefty chronicle Jinx?s dramatic?if sometimes absurd?exploration of a Dante-esque New York, from the depths of the city?s underground Hell (abandoned aqueducts and subway tunnels) to the pinnacles of its Paradise (rooftops and bridges) and everything in between, capturing the genius of the city?s engineering, the vibrancy of its found art, and the elegiac beauty of its ruins. Here is a true series of wittily narrated adventures into the hidden world beneath a great civilization.

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disappointing

If the writing and adventures could match the inflated perceptions that the authors have of themselves, this would be a great read. Unfortunately, the writing is downright pedestrian and the urban adventures are either lackluster and/or poorly described. Also, the flow of each chapter is interrupted with uninteresting asides and juvenile commentaries on a scattershot laundry list of topics.

A typical example of this is the uninspiring breakin of an abandoned Harlem row house. The author starts off with a truncated textbook-like history of Harlem that lasts a few paragraphs. Once that boring bit of exposition is done with the writer and his friends drive around a little bit and then enter an abandoned building. They look around a little bit (not exactly thrilling) and then attempt to leave via the fire escape. Here, we are presented with a another aside about the author's 'love' of fire escapes.. "What, in fire escapes, do I admire?... their constancy... firm as Gibraltar... like Ulysses to his barque.. supporting, as Atlas, the gravid snows of winter". Ugh, at times like this you wish the author would have consulted with an editor.

Not everything is terrible. Things pick up here and there, there are a few interesting tid-bits of history, but overall the book does not live up to it's potential.

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Well, there's four hours of my life I'll never get back.

This book was a tremendous disappointment. Many of the "missions" are laughably boring and/or carried out in a stunningly inept fashion, much of the writing is markedly narcissistic in its tone and yet inconsistent in content, and perhaps most disappointing the descriptions of the places where the authors go are remarkably poor.

First, the missions. The mission to the UN mostly involves trying to get inside by asking for an interview. Wow, it's like working for my high school newspaper all over again. Once they're shot down, one member of the team briefly sprints past a barrier and `explores' a plaza outside the building for less than a minute (the main point of which is to hold up the Jinx flag while his friends take his picture). Another involves staying on the subway even after the conductor announces passengers should get off! - oh the bravery and cunning!. This is made all the more ridiculous when two non-English speaking tourists inadvertently do the same thing and when the authors do not even get off the train once it's stopped at the abandoned subway station they had planned to explore. Later, they go into an abandoned house, where they discover that a lot of other people have also done this over the years.

Second, the writing. Much of the text focuses on how cool they look in their "uniforms" (dark suits and sunglasses), how cool they look walking to their missions, how cool they look on their missions, how cool it is when they all get together and how everybody else in New York are mindless zombies who don't appreciate what is around them because they are trapped in their sad, meaningless lives. The whole uniform thing is particularly stupid. There's one throw-away sentence explaining that they wear these uniforms because otherwise "scientists" and "philosophers" will not take their "empirical data" seriously, but you simply can't shake the feeling that they just want to look like they're either in "Reservoir Dogs" or "The Matrix" (particularly when the ridiculous `uniforms' keep attracting attention when they're trying to sneak into some place.) Throughout the book the authors bounce between stressing that they explore places for the scientific, empirical value of doing so and that it is not at all for a sense of adventure, only then to talk later about how much fun the adventure of it all is (including one author's admission that he believes the other has a death wish and that is why he engages in so many dangerous activities while exploring). In addition, much space is taken up with various diatribes on the evils of modern life (including a particularly passionate rant against the United Nations that comes totally out of nowhere), and all the horrible twenty-somethings of the world who spend their lives drinking iced coffees (which is a particularly hollow complaint when - a few pages later - the Jinx crew sits down to iced coffees after having screwed up the UN mission). You almost get the sense that after trying in vain to improve the writing, the publishers finally decided to spin the writing as "witty" and hope that people fell for it.

Finally, the descriptions are no better than what you'd get if you wrote down what you think the locations look like without ever actually going. The Croton Aqueduct is dark and slippery. An abandoned subway station is eerie. When you're on top of the George Washington Bridge, the Hudson River looks a long way away. And that's about as good as the descriptions get.

Don't waste your time or your money.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

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