George Lin has no trouble remembering how he began his vacation last August. He was hanging from the windowsill of a derelict hotel in Detroit, hoping hard that a policeman wouldn’t see him.
Lin wasn’t on the run from the law, though—he was trying to find a way in to the abandoned Statler Hotel. Lin is an “urban explorer,” a polite title for people who surreptitiously enter and poke around in old buildings, often in decaying areas of cities. A free spirit who also enjoys “train-hopping” through the Rocky Mountains aboard clattering freight cars, Lin, PhD ’97, in recent years has explored out-of-use high-rises, train stations, cathedrals and even a defunct children’s hospital in Palo Alto.
Lin says he’s fascinated by urban architecture and dismayed by the abandonment of historic structures like the once-glamorous Statler, a 515,000-square-foot edifice on the edge of Detroit’s famous Grand Circus Park. He traveled there last summer intending to climb to the top.
Built in 1914, the Statler was once a stopover for the rich and famous—Harry Houdini was staying there on the night he died, in 1926. A major landmark on the Detroit horizon until 1975, its demise paralleled the city’s own decline. Detroit has lost half its population since 1950, and its downtown is blighted and bleak.
Armed with a flashlight, a bottle of water and a Swiss Army knife, Lin faced a series of potential hazards inside the Statler. For starters, he would be trespassing—a misdemeanor that can result in a jail sentence of up to 30 days, according to Detroit police. But being locked up was only one of the risks. In recent years, urban explorers in Detroit have come upon bullet holes and discarded AK-47 shells in these abandoned hulks. In one case, a dead explorer in combat fatigues was found at the bottom of a multi-story elevator shaft.
Just getting in was an adventure. Lin could find only a single entrance to the boarded-up hotel—a broken window that led down into a sub-basement. He leaped, grabbed the bottom of the windowsill and chinned himself into the building, plopping several feet to the floor. The place was pitch-dark and he was forced to rely on the narrow beam from his flashlight to make his way. Easing along gingerly, he tested his footing on each step and was relieved to find a staircase that he could begin climbing.
As he rose from one floor to the next, sunlight began to filter through broken windowpanes, and the going got a little easier. Soon he was peering into wreckage-littered rooms where 80 years ago guests lounged after paying a whopping $4 per night for the privilege. Halfway up the 18-story building, Lin ducked into a tiny office and found a stack of ancient brochures moldering on a shelf, along with a dust-smeared bookkeeping ledger marked “1938-1943.” (As always, he left everything behind: “I never steal objects or damage the property, and I consider my trespassing to be a victimless crime.”)
After nearly an hour of creeping through ruins that “looked like the Battle of Stalingrad,” Lin located a warped metal door that appeared to lead outside. A moment later he was standing on the hotel roof, gasping with surprise.
A small forest was growing up here! As Lin later discovered, the restless wind from the nearby Great Lakes deposits just enough soil on local rooftops to allow a hardy species of tree (the ailanthus, or “Tree of Heaven”) to flourish. Five feet tall, the bushy-limbed trees were leaning into the summer breeze. Amazed, Lin pushed his way through the branches to the edge of the roof.
Suddenly, he was looking down on a world that time had forgotten.
“When you finally make it up to the rooftop of a derelict building like the Statler, you discover a landscape that looks like something out of Blade Runner,” Lin says. “All around you there are abandoned skyscrapers and abandoned hotels. I could see the old Book-Cadillac building only a few feet away. I looked up Woodward Avenue—once the Park Avenue of Detroit—and was thinking about this great city, this lively city, and its decline.
“Detroit is the most tragic case of urban abandonment in all of America, and whenever I explore places like the Statler, I sort of feel the presence of ghosts. I think of all the thousands and thousands of people who came here, from the teens up through the 1960s, and how they must have thought that the boom would last forever.”
Lin, who earned his Stanford degree in Russian history and now edits microbiology journals in Washington, D.C., says his passion for decaying architecture really developed in 1986 while he was studying Russian literature as an undergrad at Harvard. During an intensive Russian language course in Leningrad, he recalls, “one afternoon I found myself peering into the boarded-up Trinity Cathedral. This great old cathedral—Dostoyevsky had been married here—was now a rotting hulk. I looked into the shadows beneath the giant blue dome, and I saw several pigeons flapping back and forth. And I felt an overwhelming sense of sadness that such a gorgeous work of architecture had been left to rot.”
Like several thousand other U.S. urban explorers (the trend started in the Midwest about a decade ago), Lin often uses his vacation time for these adventures. In most cases, he prepares weeks in advance by studying the physical layout of the buildings and reading up on the architecture of the period.
“There are two types of urban explorer,” says Lin, a Taiwanese-American who grew up in small-town Illinois. “One is the sort who likes to go into the tunnels and root around in urban-rat fashion. But I like to get up to the roof whenever I can.”
He says he doesn’t worry much about the dangers. “I think the risks are fairly small, and they’re worth it. Don’t forget that I’ve also been train-hopping since I was 17.
“I guess my epitaph will probably read: ‘He wanted the view!’”
Freelance writer Tom Nugent is a former Detroit Free Press and People magazine reporter. He lives in Hastings, Mich.
