In The News

The 130-acre campus of Byberry State Mental Hospital sprawls across the Somerton section of Northeast Philadelphia like the rotting corpse of a giant. Since it closed its doors in 1990, the notorious asylum has decayed, leaving behind a morbid, intricate skeleton. Windowless corridors connect enormous rooms flooded in darkness and filled with mangled medical equipment. A warren of tunnels, once used for transferring patients, runs beneath the 17 buildings that cover the compound. Some rooms are burnt beyond recognition. Many of those that remain intact are more disturbing, relics of an era when the criminally insane were strapped to their beds for days, crowded into barren rooms or locked in solitary confinement cells.

"I kind of had an obsession with that place since I first heard about it," says 27-year-old Goddog, a maintenance man by day and Byberrian by night. "At first it was about the history, and then after I started to hang there, there was a kind of culture about it that was really unlike anything else I've ever seen." For Goddog and those like him, Byberry has become a monument more to the trespassers themselves than to the hospital's dark past. He describes walls covered in "spray paint on spray paint on spray paint."

But Byberry and its unique culture will soon come to a violent end. According to contractors at Westrum Development, demolition of the century-old buildings is expected to begin as early as next month. Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation (PIDC), who bought the site from the city for $850,000 two years ago, plans to use roughly 50 acres for office buildings and 50 acres for housing aimed at the elderly, leaving 30 acres as green space. Minor zoning board issues are still being worked out, but only a thin line of red tape stands between Byberry and the wrecking ball.

Given that the asbestos-filled site's destruction will cost between $15 million and $20 million and will take nearly a year, the city's booming residential housing market has only recently made development worthwhile. With its empty remains replaced by new buildings, Byberry will become valuable property: The residential portion of the site alone is expected to fetch close to $140 million from its new occupants.

For Byberry's neighbors, the first building couldn't fall too soon. Mary Jane Hazell heads the Somerton Civic Association and has lived in Somerton's working-class neighborhood—what she proudly calls "the suburbs within the city"—for 40 years. She's been campaigning to have Byberry's ruins destroyed since the hospital was first condemned. "Those half-torn-down buildings, it sickens the stomach," she says. "It just doesn't belong in the kind of setting that we have here in Somerton."

After 16 years of abandonment, Byberry's initiates are skeptical that the hospital will actually be demolished, but even so, they're preparing for the end of an era. "We're just trying to enjoy it before it's gone," says Goddog.

"To us, it's more than just a bunch of abandoned buildings," says Chip, a 23-year-old software developer who visits Byberry about once a week. Chip has visited other urban exploring hot spots like Pennhurst State Hospital, Lambertville High School in New Jersey and Haverford State Hospital, but he always returns to Byberry. "I've gotten really attached to the place. I've met so many people there that I'm really close with, and we really don't want to see it go."

Like his friend Goddog, Chip first came to Byberry looking for evidence of the hospital's gruesome history. "For me, urban exploring is about seeing what most people never know exists," he says. "If you can find a place in good condition, it's almost like going back in time."

For Chip, Byberry's history becomes most compelling at its darkest. He has read and re-read Shame of the States, Albert Deutsch's 1948 account of atrocious treatment in American asylums, which compared Byberry to Nazi concentration camps:

I entered buildings swarming with naked humans herded like cattle and treated with less concern, pervaded by a fetid odor so heavy, so nauseating, that the stench seemed to have almost a physical existence of its own.

Deutsch's muckraking led to reforms, but the hospital's ever-increasing patient population was never matched by proper funding. Stories would sporadically emerge of patients sleeping in hallways, beaten and neglected by alcoholic staff members. After a final wave of scandal in the 1980s, the state gave up on Byberry.

Since the hospital's abandonment, it has rarely been vacant. The first wave of trespassers stripped the buildings of copper wiring, paneling, anything of monetary value. When curious urban explorers later discovered Byberry's shell, they picked over its remains, searching for any sign of the stories they'd heard. Chip recently found a patient's identification card. Goddog's most exhilarating discovery was a hollow cornerstone. He smashed it open to reveal a time capsule, complete with a newspaper from the day of the building's groundbreaking.

Hazell remembers the elegance of Byberry's interior before it was closed. "There was carved woodwork and marble, like the way City Hall is," she recalls. "You can't even buy woodwork like that today."

She blames trespassers themselves for the building's demolition. "I think it's sad that history can't be preserved," she says. "If someone had done something immediately, a lot of those buildings could have been saved."

PIDC's John Grady, who is responsible for the site's development, takes a less sentimental stance. "What's the history that's been there?" he asks. "There's a bunch of old hospital buildings."

Grady and Hazell express concern for the site's safety, and Hazell points to the fate of James Lowe III, a 49-year-old building inspector who fell two stories to his death when a stairwell collapsed beneath him last year.

Goddog dismisses these safety concerns, claiming that no trespasser has ever been injured in the buildings. Nonetheless, he sympathizes with neighbors who are ready to see Byberry developed. His opponents are less merciful: "I have no remorse [for the trespassers.] They don't belong there," says Hazell. "I have nine grandchildren, and they don't have to run and hide in Byberry. Find something else to do with your time. Volunteer to help some old person."

Beyond half-joking threats to stand in front of bulldozers, Byberry's visitors aren't putting up any opposition to its demolition. Still, Goddog and his friends will be sad to part with their beloved tramping ground. "For some of us it was a haunted house. For others it was a building with a lot of history," he muses. "I guess that's the thing about an empty building. It becomes what you want it to be.

Since the closure of Philadelphia’s Mt. Sinai Hospital nearly 10 years ago, the towering structure has become a gaping ellipsis in the city’s blueprint, forgotten and unnoticed even by its neighbors.

But though it is abandoned, the hospital is rarely empty. In its afterlife, Mt. Sinai has become one of the city’s most popular illegal playgrounds. The cavernous building is a magnet for urban explorers (UEs), practiced trespassers who see a locked door as an invitation for infiltration.

One such explorer, a 23-year-old software engineer who calls himself Chip R. Jones, has memorized every floor of the decaying complex: its chilly morgue, its musty library still packed with books and medical journals, and a radiology department housing enormous X-ray equipment shrouded in dust and darkness.

Emerging from a trap door onto the hospital’s roof, Jones explains his drive to explore such forgotten corners of the city’s landscape.

“In your normal life, it’s rare that you have a chance to see a place this amazing without a tour guide,” he says, looking over the city from the tallest point in South Philadelphia. “As an urban explorer, you’re on your own.”
Since the rise in popularity of the Internet, however, that solitude has been harder to find. Today, explorers are linked by a network of personal websites and forums as vast and labyrinthine as their beloved abandoned buildings. By giving “urbexers” a venue to meet, share information and display the photographic fruits of their explorations, the Internet has transformed the sport from a solitary pastime into a rapidly expanding subculture, one that stretches from urban exploration’s epicenter in the northeastern U.S. to hotspots in Chicago, Detroit, Toronto, Vancouver, and even as far as Australia and Japan.

But the very tool that has made the sport accessible to so many may be the cause of a tipping point that could lead to the downfall of this solitary activity. For older adherents, the Internet’s effects haven’t always been welcome. Originally drawn to urban exploring by the allure of a blank space on the map, they are often dismayed to find those blanks filled in by Web users. With their haunts revealed to the general public and to snooping police, explorers now contend with the increasing presence of well-informed law enforcement as well as hordes of less respectful trespassers who commonly vandalize and burn abandoned spots.

Keti Tonsberg works in a pharmacy by day, but found her true vocation as a member of Fallout, a small but well-known group of urban explorers in southeastern Massachusetts. She says that Fallout’s website began as a kind of “UE blog” but soon became an encyclopedia for a variety of local intruders, including some who didn’t share her particular exploring ethos.

“The general rule is ‘Take only photos, leave only footprints.’ That’s not something that people who just jump into the Web forums are going to understand,” Tonsberg says. “I’ve met up with people who think they’re doing the same thing as me, but we get to a site and they pull out a bat and start breaking windows and stuff. For them it’s really not the same thing at all.”

When Fallout realized its website was becoming a shopping list for police, vandals and arsonists, the group began to hold back key information about finding and infiltrating buildings and sometimes even included misinformation like false names and addresses.

Not every urban exploring website has been so discreet. Urban Exploring Resources (UER) hosts the largest forum of UEs on the web, and also maintains the Urban Exploring Database, a catalogued, comprehensive list of nearly 4,000 abandoned sites across the globe. Since its inception in 2002, UER has amassed more than 11,000 registered users and continues to grow by hundreds of users each week.

The site, and in particular its vast database, has faced furious criticism from long-established UEs, none more vocal than an explorer known as Mike Dijital, a 31-year-old tile setter and the creator of another forum called Deggi5. The debate between Dijital and UER’s founder, a Torontonian who goes by the handle Avatar-X, has torn a deep rift through the center of the exploring community.

“UER wants to create this Wal-Mart site with abandoned factories on aisle 10 and abandoned hospitals on aisle 17 and flashlights for sale on aisle 13,” says Dijital. “I’ve been doing this since before it was even called urban exploring. For a guy like me, who knows about the original meaning of this—getting away from people, exploring a place and exploring yourself—it isn’t about how many places I can say I’ve been to and how many pictures I can put on the Internet. Places like UER have turned it all into a pissing contest.”

Mike Dijital, once convicted of trespassing based on photographic evidence from his personal website, is more concerned with keeping the explorers’ illicit avocation hidden from police. He calls UER a “comprehensive database of trespassing” and “a police officer’s dream.”

Dijital’s Deggi5 forum, unlike UER, carefully limits its audience by requiring that current members vouch for all new initiates. One of those members, an explorer from Vancouver who goes by the name Jester, says that UER could take a lesson from Deggi5’s more exclusive approach.

“A good number of sites have gotten burned, figuratively and literally in some cases, after appearing with so much info on UER,” says Jester. “Previously pristine places, smashed within a week of being put in the database. Graffiti with the letters ‘UER’ scrawled across some places. Others burned to the ground shortly after being shown on UER.”

UER’s Avatar-X disagrees, arguing that his website and the Internet as a whole have been an overwhelmingly positive force for urban exploring.

“Without the Internet, urban exploring would still be in its infancy,” he says.

Avatar-X says that UER uses a hierarchical system that allows only full members—about ten percent of the site’s participants—to access all sites in the database. He also espouses a strict code of conduct that he claims prevents vandalism and arson. Avatar-X accuses Mike Dijital himself of stealing souvenirs from the sites Dijital visits, as well as encouraging theft and vandalism by forgoing ethical discussion on Deggi5. He argues that Deggi5’s criticisms are motivated by elitism rather than concern for the preservation of exploring sites.

“If Mike Dijital wants to run a site just for him and his friends, that’s his prerogative. You’re always going to have people who want to vandalize, and the more attention you bring to a place, the more likely it will get demolished or closed,” he admits. “But I don’t think that urban exploring should be about hoarding places. If a place gets shut down or demolished, well, too bad. Find something else. We’re not running out of places to explore.”

Conspicuously missing from the debate is an explorer known as Ninjalicious, a near-legendary figure who purportedly coined the term “urban exploration,” created the well-known zine Infiltration, and later founded Infiltration.org, the first major urban exploration website. Ninjalicious, whose real name was Jeff Chapman, died last year from cancer at the age of 31. One of few urban explorers highly respected by both UER and Deggi5 adherents, his untimely death has only added to the anger and division between the groups.

“Ninj was always the first person to say, ‘This is not about the Internet. This is about exploring,’” says Mike Dijital. “He wanted to share everything, but he wanted everyone to respect these places. I think a lot of the respect in UE died with Ninj. He was a guiding light, and without him, everyone is kind of fragmented.”

Recalling a less complicated era, Dijital describes his first urban exploring experience more than twenty years ago, wandering through an abandoned Nike facility when he was 10.

“It was this little world that was totally mine for the time I was there. I could do anything I wanted,” he reminisces. “There was a real defining freedom.”

Does the Internet mean the end of that freedom?

“I don’t think that urban exploring will ever die,” Dijital answers. “But the innocence is over.”

Andy Greenberg is a freelance reporter based in Philadelphia and a Dragonfire contributing writer. He last wrote about the high turnover rate in Philadelphia health commissioners.