Alexis Turner

Nostalgia gets the better of me

(history, internet, reminiscence, urban exploration — )

17 Oct. 2007

Perhaps it's because I've just moved back to New York, where I haven't lived since the heady days of college, perhaps it's the miscreants I hang out with or spend time reading online, or perhaps it's the tantalizing sites and tunnels and buildings I've been passing since returning, but something today stirred a long forgotten memory of the time when I got deeply involved in urban exploration.

Perhaps it was the photo essay of the Arroyo Seco Dam that started it, but as I dug through the detritus of this hobby on the Internet, I started unearthing old archaeological memories, some still lingering with the tiniest shreds of neglect that the internet seems to foster. Forgotten websites; still remaining links and references to my own first site which was dedicated to the pursuit (and is now easily 7 years defunct); photos from collaborators whom I corresponded with daily, even as I never met them, but who are still going strong; memorials to others who have since passed away; books written by others still. Names I'd forgotten - Petr, Vlad, Ninj, or Julia - have been swimming back into my consciousness.

I don't know that this nostalgia is necessarily anything but - I don't fancy getting found dirty in a drain in Queens and having to explain myself in a post-terrorist court. And I suspect I get the same thrill of exploration now from books, networks, and ideas that I'd never, until now, considered as subjects that could actually be physically explored as much as they could be intellectually plumbed. But, even so, every day on my way home from work it's everything I can do not to hop off the train at Mount Vernon East and poke my head into the empty holes on the castle-like object under the train bridge.