I got inside one of my dream destinations.

Once, a long time ago, I went in to the security desk, and asked if they gave tours. They gave me an email, which I emailed, and was told that the building had been sold and there would be no more tours.

I went in and asked the same question to different security guards at different times. I was brushed off. One time, though, on my way out, I pulled open an improperly closed employees-only door, used a nearby bathroom, and was getting ready to begin my explore, when the security guard I'd just spoken to appeared and asked what the heck I thought I was up to.

Many times over the past few months I've walked or bicycled slowly past the open bay doors, but there was always a security guard stationed at each one.

Then, this week, one of the bays was being guarded by a mere dude in a plaid jacket; and I saw a little colorful arrow in another bay door, the kind that points to film sets. Opportunity!

Some locked entrances on the other side of the building were posted with a sort of directory: "Production office, 7th floor; prop department, 6th floor; Circus, 1st floor; Crew park, basement."

So I entered, once again, the door leading up to the security booth, and said I was looking for the circus. Could I get in here, or did I have to go around to the crew park entrance on the other side of the building?

"What's your name?"

I gave them my name.

"Okay, just print your name here, and sign here, and I'll fill in the rest. Take those stairs down two flights to get to the circus."

"Which stairs? These? Thanks!"

I immediately went four flights down and found a propped-open door covered with "Authorized Personnel Only" and other warnings. I peered inside to a kind of engineer's office, which, with the computer still on and a reflective vest hanging on one chair, seemed in-use, or recently vacated, so I went back up one floor.

And came out in the basement, which appeared at a glance to be little more than a big, largely empty parkade. I was standing right in front of a security camera, which made me think: Maybe I should go through the motions of "reporting" to the circus, in the unlikely event that anyone's watching me on the cameras. So I sort of meandered around to the elevators and rode them up one floor. I followed some arrows ("Come join the circus!") past some big derelict machinery, nodded at a guy coming out of a big room filled with props and equipment (and about three other guys), then went back the way I came. Good enough. I didn't see any other cameras. I rode the elevator up to the 7th floor.

This floor was more bustling. Offices, audition rooms, what might have been small sets, meeting rooms, empty rooms ... Without too much gawking, I walked purposefully down the length of the hallway, saw a guy doing something in the far stairwell, and turned back. After using the washroom, I went up the nearer stairwell and pushed open a door to find myself on the roof.

Looking three floors down to the lower roof:

I took the stairs down to the 6th floor, which was more offices. Most of the doors were closed. I don't think I saw but I may have heard some people on this floor. Several doors had nameplates beside them: "Prof. Cornelius Stewmash" and "Prof. Yanif Purpledew" (e.g.). I couldn't think when, or why this floor would ever have been some university's off-campus office space. Later, I supposed that the hallway was itself part of a set.

(I only realized near the end of my exploration that there were not one but two productions filming in the building. Looking them up online after I got home, I learned that one is a CBC production about spies who get into romantic relationships with their targets, and another is a pilot for some NBC supernatural thriller.)

I went down the far stairwell to the fifth floor, which opens onto the lower roof, where the basketball court and helipad used to be (probably not simultaneously).

On the other side, there was a little rooftop patio. Moving back indoors, I found what used to be a cafeteria, a lot of empty offices,

a former fitness room,

and a few imitation hospital rooms! (One sign in the hallway read, "Isolation Ward.")

This floor was deserted. It was now about six p.m., and I hoped the building would only get emptier.

I went down a double flight of stairs and came out on a big empty hangar-like floor. The photos (especially crappy cell-phone photos) don't do justice to the size of this place.

Many of these pillars had digital clocks attached (now broken or turned off). A couple of yellow alarm lights were slowly rotating (which made me foolishly nervous). I slowly circled the perimeter of the floor, trying doors.

Some stairs led up to a mezzanine level of empty spaces and a couple of doorless washroom areas. There were a lot of drinking fountains around.

In opposite corners I found what must have been staff lounge areas.

There were a few empty offices along one wall, above which was another similar mezzanine.

I went down another double flight of stairs to the third floor, which was a lot like the fourth, but with a larger office area. Some signs showed this to be the other production office, i.e. for the second production, so, though the door appeared unlocked, I didn't go inside, in case there were still people around.

Most of the floors are connected by escalators (now dormant), even up to the office levels.

I flipped a lightswitch, braved some "Authorized Personnel Only" signs, and climbed a steep stair to the third-floor mezzanine level, also described as the "storage" level.

A couple of doors here opened onto narrow, dimly lit corridors --

-- which were actually suspended above the third floor below, as you could tell by the occasional hole in the metal floor, or these weird slanted peepholes, that seemed designed to let people spy on the workers below:

One of these corridors led me all the way across the ceiling, via a cramped valve room, and out into the bathroom mezzanine on the opposite side, through a door I assumed had been a locked janitor's closet or something. Like a secret tunnel!

Another completely dark corridor (the knee-level lightbulbs were all burnt out past the first corner) took me on a winding route, over a big duct, to a sort of ladder in a chute or chimney, going one floor down, or two floors up. I didn't think holding my keychain flashlight in my mouth was going to work very well, so I turned back -- then remembered I happened to have my bike light in my backpack. So I climbed up the ladder, opened a door, and looked out on -- of course -- the fourth floor. Climbed higher and found myself in a dead-end corridor, whose only purpose seemed to be those little angled peepholes looking down on the workspace below. Here's the hanging corridor from below:

I knew that the second floor was where security was, so I decided at this point to go back down to the basement and try to find the mythical tunnel. I'd been told by a CanPost employee that it had been filled in with cement, but I still wanted to see it. I crossed the basement level parking lot and went back down to the sub-basement engineer's office.

Still empty. One door said "Chief Engineer," another opened into a big machine room. "Ear Protection required beyond this point." I didn't have any ear protection, and didn't see any laying around, and it didn't seem too loud, so I went in anyway.

There were a couple of workshops, a tool room, and a door leading someplace dark but ultimately uninteresting.

I climbed a different set of stairs and came out into the basement again -- just as a security guard on a bicycle passed by. He didn't even glance at me, though I was obviously exiting from a locked off-limits area. (Perhaps that proved I had the right to be there; how else could I have gotten in?)

A little nervously, as people were starting to get in their cars and drive out past me now, I made my way to another stairwell and up to the first floor, where I tried some doors and kept well away from the circus. Then I went back down to the basement and found the tunnel in plain sight.

The photo didn't turn out, but there wasn't much to see. A ramp led down about two feet to a rough platform of cement, which extended like a sidewalk to the wall, where the top half of an arched doorway, also filled with cement, could be seen.

After ascertaining that the second floor was open to the view of the security booth, I let myself out of the building by one of the stairwells -- setting off a loud alarm in the process.

I'd been inside for just under two hours. I've never had so much fun. Partly I was pleased with myself for getting past security; partly my enjoyment was due to my long period of anticipation; but it's also a huge and interesting building, semi-abandoned, with lots of big spaces to see, but also lots of nooks and crannies to explore. I didn't see everything, but I saw a lot.

I entered an office building downtown on a weekday, late afternoon, rode the elevator to the top floor, took the stairwell another floor up, and pulled open the locked door -- only a slight tug was necessary to pull the latch past the electric strike. An alarm sounded, not very loud, while I passed through the door and entered a big penthouse machine room.

I went out through another door onto an L-shaped rooftop at one corner, and took a couple of pictures of the view.

I went back inside in search of other rooftops or interesting sites, and just as I was approaching what appeared to be the service elevator, a guy came out of it.

Of course I assumed it was security come to get me, so I immediately started explaining, in my dumb innocent voice, how, looking for a rooftop patio I thought I'd heard about, I'd found this door open, and maybe they should look into it? The guy had no idea what I was talking about, and it soon became clear that he was actually a building engineer, who had naturally assumed I worked in the building, and would probably have walked by me with a nod. It took a while to get him to understand that I was trespassing, and that I was trying to help him and building management prevent people like me trespassing in future. Oy. I should have kept my smiling mouth shut.

The street was empty, the night almost still. The condominium tower loomed above me, black against the lambent, overcast sky. It looked vast and abandoned, but of course it was only incomplete; no one had moved in yet. I wanted to climb its thirty-odd storeys, and look around at my city, Vancouver, from its rooftop. I had seen a security guard in his car on the opposite side of the building, but I decided to take my chances. I hopped—stepped, really—over the fence from some neighboring stairs, and walked with brisk composure to the nearest lighted stairwell leading down to the undeground parkade, from which I hoped to find another stairwell leading up. My palms were sweaty, my extremities tingling, and I instantly needed to pee. I took some deep breaths and reminded myself that I wasn’t doing anything bad, that my only crime was curiosity.

I had been doing this sort of thing—urban exploration, infiltration, recreational trespass—for about a year. I had got inside hotel pools, tunnels, attics, abandoned hospital wings, staff-only areas, boiler rooms, storm drains, and several other construction sites. But it was still scary and exhilarating.

My introduction to urban exploration had come from Access All Areas, a user’s guide to the hobby by the Toronto-based zinemaker Ninjalicious (aka Jeff Chapman), best known for his groundbreaking publication Infiltration: the zine about going places you’re not supposed to go. Chapman produced twenty-five issues between 1996 and 2005, when he passed away at age thirty-one from cancer. He’s largely considered one of the founders of an online urban exploration community that still thrives (see, for example, the zine’s web archive, infiltration.org, and Urban Exploration Resource, uer.ca).

Access All Areas and Infiltration were a revelation for me, not only for Ninjalicious’s well-crafted prose, his enthusiasm, or his humor, but the sheer joyous innocence that he exudes. It’s clear from his stories that he simply loves turning doorknobs, peering into dark rooms, squeezing into crawlspaces, climbing around on things, and figuring out how to get from here to there, or how this connects to that. Steam tunnels and machine rooms that only a film location scout could love he describes as “valve paradise” and “pipey goodness.” The city, in his writings, becomes a playground and a beguiling labyrinth. He too, like all of us, gets some thrill of excitement at evading the powers that be, but his primary motivation is not to defy authority, and his default method is not to skulk or sneak like a ninja.

In Issue 10, he admits, “I’m caught all the time.... I just smile, shrug, and leave, in a way that says, ‘Ya got me, I’ve learned my lesson, goodbye.’ I humbly walk, not run, away and live to explore another day.” In Issue 24, he climbs the dome of Maple Leaf Gardens in broad daylight: “I was fairly confident that no fewer than a thousand people were watching me intently from the high-rises that encircle the Gardens, but this was a once-in-a-lifetime chance. Zipping up my coat and pretending to speak something into my phone for the benefit of my imagined audience, I grabbed the rungs and began to climb.” And in Issue 12, he gains access to the TTR offices at Union Station by simply waiting outside a locked door for ten minutes, until “an employee finally emerged, and I prepared to accept the open door from him. ‘Can I help you?’ he asked, clearly employing the phrase in its ‘can-I-hinder-you’ sense. I said, ‘I’m supposed to be meeting someone on the fourth floor.’ ‘How do I know you’re supposed to be in here? I mean, you don’t look bad or anything ...’ I laughed and said, “Thank you, you neither.’ He smiled, weakening. ‘Okay, go ahead.’”

I think the average person has to overcome a great deal of inner resistance even to pass through a door marked “Employees Only” or “No Public Access.” We all silently acknowledge that, if we have no business someplace, we must be up to no good. But it was this assumption, ingrained by my superego into my very muscles and nerves, that I was now consciously trying to fight. I had come to view urban exploration not only as a fun way to see cool things, a kind of extreme local tourism, but also as a practice like zen, or what Alan Watts called a way of liberation: a way to see through and shake off some of society’s more useless constraints. The painter Fairfield Porter once said that if you are arrogant, to sign your paintings is arrogant, and so is to leave your paintings unsigned; if you are not arrogant, signing your paintings is not arrogant, nor is leaving your paintings unsigned. The same is true for going places you’re not supposed to go: If you are innocent, even trespassing is an innocent pastime.

“You should try to behave like a stereotypical Texan,” Ninjalicious says in Access All Areas. “Smile and wave at people who make even tentative eye contact. Speak loudly and laugh frequently. Make it clear as can be that you’re not trying to hide or go unnoticed, but that you want to share all that you have to offer with the world.” This is not only a good strategy when exploring places you technically have no business to be. It’s also a wonderful way to go through life.

I saw the security guard, and he saw me, as soon as I entered the parkade. I waved, smiled, called “Hi there,” and went over to talk to him. I told him the truth: that I’d hopped the fence, hoping to get a view from the roof. He was more sadly puzzled than officious or irate.

“You don’t seem like a troublemaker,” he said.

I’m not.

From broken pencil magazine.

I was in Las Vegas recently for a week of vacation, and had a great time just looking around the mega-hotels, which are humongous labyrinths of casino, hotel, and shopping mall. I quite recommend just wandering around, gawking at the lobbies, hallways, and other common areas, some of which are gorgeous, and as richly designed and ornamented as palaces. If you want to get away from the crowds of other gawkers, you often don't have to go further than the nearest "convention center." But the real fun begins when you start infiltrating.

If you limited yourself to unmarked and unlocked doors, ignoring all those that politely advise you "Authorized Personnel Only," "Staff Only," "Emergency Exit Only," etc., you'd still find a million to try. I only went through a couple dozen, but I managed to discover all kinds of interesting places, including a cavernous storage room (a former or unfinished ballroom?), a rooftop pool and wet lounge, an abandoned theatre, a rusting incomplete hotel tower under a faux-facade tarpaulin, a penthouse restaurant and club being renovated, and a couple of exclusive members' lounges with free food and drink (I helped myself to a little free food). Of about eight hotel roofs that I tried to get onto, I succeeded with two (including the tallest building in Vegas, which is almost exactly as tall as the tallest skyscraper here in Vancouver). One out of four is a pretty good ratio. Indeed, security in Vegas seems more lax than most office buildings here. These hotel resorts are so huge, and have so much traffic moving through them at all hours, that it's probably impossible to keep them really secure. A few hotel guest elevators have security guards stationed outside of them, who ask to see your keycard, and a few have employees stationed at the entrance to their courtyard pools, but there are many back doors or roundabout POEs for just about anywhere you want to go. Very few elevators seem to require keycards, and you can usually get access to them from another level (try the convention level, or the spa). I enjoyed being clever and indirect, but I think you could also get a lot of mileage by simply staggering obliviously past people or through doors, with a beer bottle in hand. It's what everybody else in Vegas seems to be doing.

p.s. The Riviera, closed since May but apparently in semi-use by police and firefighter trainees, would be tremendous fun to get inside. Even more so the massive never-quite-completed hotel to the north of it, which surely must be the largest empty building I have ever seen. I circled it longingly in the sweltering heat several times, but the sight of onsite security at the open gate deterred me from trying to hop any fences. Though I don't think it would be impossible. If I were a local, I'd be cruising that place once a week.

The easiest rooftop I've ever accessed:

To be honest, this photo was not taken from the rooftop, but from the penthouse Gold Members' Lounge.

And this one from a stairwell.

And for good measure, one from the basement of the domestic terminal.

One of my new favorite places to explore. There's a lot to see, but also a lot of people around, so I didn't whip out my camera much. I was amazed by how many off-limits areas are "secured" by nothing more than a do-not-enter / authorized-personnel-only sign. (To be fair, I don't think I ever found myself on the far side of security.) And I found a lot of unlocked or improperly closed doors. Next time I'll dress a little less like a tourist, a little more like an office drone, or perhaps a construction worker.

I broke my own rule, and wandered inside an (newly) active condo, which was just too appealing with its doors propped open.

Inside the "Lantern" at the top of the building

I'd been up here once before, at night, before construction was completed.

I always go back to the WBNS whenever I'm in the neighborhood.

Majestic view from three floors up, I think F. Fwd building on UBC campus.

Not quite a rooftop, but a stairwell window in I think Sprc Hs building.

And for good measure, a tiny piece of the fabled steam service tunnels:

Sometimes doors just aren't securely locked. I thought for sure this was my entrance into the whole labyrinth, but this tunnel ran the length of a building, and had a ladder leading up to another short corridor, which ended in a sprinkler valve room -- as I learned by the sign after I left it.

More hotel rooftopping, this time in Burnaby, thanks to some construction on the penthouse floor, and lots of doors left open.

Looking down on BCIT with contempt.

A not-bad week of exploring.

After sitting in a gritty hottub at Sndmn Sgntr hotel in Richmond (which was nevertheless wide open to infiltrators), I made my way to Sea Island and got on this hotel's rooftop:

There were fire exit doors leading out to the roof marked "Emergency Exit: Alarm Will Sound" but they lied.

A few days later on a weekend afternoon, I strolled into a condo construction site in the heart of Metrotown carrying my bag of groceries. This was one of the last towers in the neighborhood that I hadn't been able to get inside yet. It was a somewhat roundabout entry from an adjacent parkade where only construction personnel are supposed to park, but on the weekend it was empty, it was easy to ignore the signs, and a naive person could quite plausibly just have found themselves inside the fencing, and decide to take a little look around. Or climb the 41 flights to the roof and drink in the view.

I didn't have even my crappy cell-phone camera, though.

A few days later, up at SFU, I found my way into the Nvrsty Thtre through an improperly closed door -- just that easy.

The basement seems semi-abandoned. There's a dirty dance studio, a couple of empty rehearsal rooms, a former recording studio (I think), and dingy dressing rooms.

I moved this chair into place from another room and played a couple of songs on this unloved piano:

I looked all around the upstairs theatre, too, backstage and even above stage in the catwalks, but the photos I took were too dark. But I sure enjoyed myself.