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  THE GREATEST casual-nonfiction writer in America during the twentieth century was a sweet, unassuming Tarheel named Joseph Mitchell, who spent nearly sixty years at the New Yorker before retiring, in 1996, to a country cemetery in Fairmont, North Carolina. This is what the critics say about him: After an early blaze of prolificacy, during which he romped around New York writing on oddballs and low-lifes, Mitchell's work became ever more infrequent and began to reach towards a sort of formal perfection. And as his technique reached its final magisterial pitch, he began to focus narrowly, almost exclusively, on a small number of basic themes, such as New York's waterways and seafood. This is the "so long, and thanks for all the fish" interpretation, and it serves to obscure Mitchell's true genius. Besides all the clams, fishing boats, and old oyster villages, Mitchell stands as the century's foremost practitioner of urban exploration -- poking around a city, looking for odd, mostly archaic things that somehow got left lying around, like old street signs, abandoned railway architecture, or oystermen. Mitchell's innovation in the field may seem obvious in retrospect, like all true breakthroughs, but it remains staggering in its potential: illegal trespass.

It all began at the railroad piers in Hoboken, New Jersey and its environs. Mitchell used to go sneak around there every now and then in the forties and fifties, and unlike any other respectable journalist of his time, he wasn't shy about telling you so. He even mentioned how easy it was to evade the guards. The piers are still there for the taking, but the ferry slips are better -- more neglected and tumbledown but easy enough to break into; and twice-glorious for being kept like a secret beneath the vaulted patina-bronze terminal. But whether the notion of sneaking into places like the Hoboken slips for aesthetico-historical purposes really derives from Mitchell, or whether he's merely the intellectual father of the movement, make no mistake: the movement is burgeoning. Recently, in the New York Press Andrey Slivka expostulated at long length about hopping fences in the Hudson Valley, and there exists an Urban Exploration webring of some seventy sites, some of which are strictly members-only.

But while it's unclear how much archaeological trespass is really going on, or the limits to the weird places that people might've managed to visit while the guards weren't looking, the accounts that have leaked out recently are highly impressive. Interested parties have, for example, found routes into each of the prize "ghost stations" that lie abandoned throughout the New York subway system. The jewel of these is the unused, but still maintained, City Hall terminal in lower Manhattan, a cavernous space lit by chandeliers and bedecked with mosaics and ceremonial plaques. The City Hall station was formerly the showplace of New York's light rail system, but these days it's accessible only by hiding on a certain train after the last official stop, after which the tracks loop through the abandoned platforms, and one can catch a good, long look out the window.

More challenging, but just as rewarding, is the old 19th Street subway station that's barely visible from the adjoining PATH line. It was sealed in the early fifties, and until a few years ago it was so unspoiled that the original ad placards still hung on the walls. The state at the other end of the PATH line, for its part, is rich in old mansions and architectural oddities (many break-ins of which are chronicled in the fanzine, Weird New Jersey). One well-traveled site is a notorious former nunnery in Far Hills borough, originally built as a country estate for a Jazz-age tycoon, and surrounded by a gorgeous stand of old-growth forest. An abandoned nuclear missile base is another.

Mitchell's beat comprised the hidden areas at the far boundaries of New York: the depths of the harbor and the ranges of the city's fishing boats, the rural fringe-lands of Staten Island and the Jersey waterfront. But ultimately, his beat was the unvanished past, which is preserved best athwart the borders between one place and another -- between the shore and the open sea -- wherever long memory illuminates an older, changeless world together with the changing one that superceded it. There's more of Mitchell's world gone now than when he was out exploring; but today's boundary-spaces are like that as well, vanishless and uncanny. And they're available for the cost of a crowbar.

Gavin McNett is enamored of Far Hills, NJ, and other beautiful places.

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For more trespassing tips, check out infiltration -- the zine about going places you're not supposed to go. Also see "Hudson Valley Ruined" in the New York Press: "We cleave to the ostrich theory of trespassing on the grounds of a notorious cult: pretend you’re invisible. We shuffle along -- casual, casual."

Frank Kermode recalls the talents of Rebecca West in The New Republic: "If ever a writer so young demonstrated what Shakespeare called 'the flash and outbreak of a fiery mind,' it was she. Hardly anybody now writes such devastating reviews, and few later feminists have written on politics with such accurate fury."