Ayudemos a aliviar las tensiones mundiales !!!!!

Abrir artículo en el Browser. Julio 31 de 2007 Sección: Salud & Vida Sexo, una vacuna contra el estrés ROCÍO GAIA EFE REPORTAJES "En una relación de pareja lo más peligroso es mezclar el sexo con el amor".- Woody Allen. Para el psicólogo Stuart Brody, tener sexo antes de una actividad estresante, es relajante. Hacer el amor fomenta la producción de hormonas que resultan relajantes y revitalizadoras. Si no se le pone remedio, el estrés puede acarrear, a largo plazo, alteraciones en la salud física, mental y emocional. De acuerdo con investigaciones recientes, y la opinión de expertos, es posible que las personas combatan el estrés por sí mismas, de una manera muy agradable y en pareja. El médico naturista Santiago de la Rosa, de Madrid (España), señala que "mantenerse activo entre las sábanas aporta un rápido y placentero empuje de energía, y es una valiosa ayuda natural para manejar y aliviar el estrés". El orgasmo aumenta los niveles de la hormona oxitocina, la cual revitaliza a la persona temporalmente, y el sexo aumenta el riego sanguíneo y la oxigenación pulmonar, así como la producción de endorfinas, otras hormonas que mejoran el estado de ánimo. Hacer el amor también es un buen relajante e inductor del sueño. "Si ha relegado el sexo al último lugar en su lista de opciones, adelántelo unos cuantos puestos, y jamás lo desestime por falta de tiempo, porque ello es un ataque a su vitalidad", señala. Si no se está de ánimo en la cama, este experto aconseja probar con un abrazo, ya que los niveles de oxitocina se elevan incluso con las caricias, pero "si no se siente deseo, es mejor dejarlo para otro día, para que la sexualidad no se convierta en una exigencia más o un hacer mecánico". Stuart Brody, psicólogo de la universidad escocesa de Paisley, en el Reino Unido, ha comprobado que tener relaciones sexuales antes de una actividad estresante contribuye a mantener la calma, según ha explicado en un artículo publicado por la revista especializada New Scientist. Brody comparó el impacto de diferentes actividades sexuales sobre la tensión sanguínea cuando la persona experimenta más tarde un episodio de estrés agudo, en un estudio de dos semanas, con 24 mujeres y 22 hombres. Los participantes anotaron la frecuencia de sus coitos, masturbaciones o actividades sexuales sin penetración, y se sometieron a situaciones estresantes, como hablar en público y hacer cálculos aritméticos en voz alta. Aquellos que habían mantenido con asiduidad relaciones "completas" estaban menos estresados, y su presión sanguínea volvía a la normalidad más rápidamente que la de aquellos que solo se habían masturbado o practicado sexo sin penetración. Quienes mantuvieron la abstinencia sexual tuvieron una reacción más elevada al estrés, reflejada en su presión sanguínea. "Estos efectos no se pueden atribuir simplemente al alivio a corto plazo provocado por el orgasmo, ya que perduran durante una semana", ha señalado Brody, quien cree que la liberación entre los amantes de la denominada hormona "afectiva de pareja" u oxitocina, puede ser responsable del efecto calmante del coito. Hormonas amigables Para el psicoterapeuta José María Doria, "desarrollar actividades placenteras como el sexo es saludable, porque ayudan a generar endorfinas: unas sustancias que segrega el cerebro, aumentan nuestro bienestar y son una fuente natural de salud, vitalidad y regeneración". "Cuando una persona practica actividades que le dan placer o siente satisfacción ante un determinaod estímulo, su organismo segrega estos compuestos hormonales que no solo elevan las defensas orgánicas ante las enfermedades, degeneración celular e infecciones, sino que además aumentan el bienestar, combaten el estrés y alivian el dolor", señala el psicoterapeuta. "Actividades placenteras como el sexo son saludables, porque ayudan a generar endorfinas, sustancias que aumentan nuestro bienestar". dice José María Doria, psicoterapeuta español. Con los cinco sentidos Hacerse consciente del goce multiplica el disfrute, por lo cual es importante darse cuenta en el momento en que uno hace el amor o recibe una caricia física o emocional, diciéndose "qué a gusto estoy, qué bien me siento", dice Doria. Para muchos sexólogos y terapeutas sexuales, es importante amar "con los cinco sentidos", ya que la sensualidad es mucho más rica y excitante si se la despierta y percibe no solo con la vista y el tacto sino con el olfato, el oído y el paladar, haciendo vibrar cada uno de los terminales nerviosos de todo el cuerpo. Los expertos proponen poner todo el potencial de los órganos sensoriales al servicio del acto amoroso. Por algo el Tantra, el milenario arte oriental de las artes y energías amatorias, incluye entres sus preceptos un "ritual de los cinco sentidos". Cada sentido cumple una función diferente y capta diferentes estímulos, pero todos pueden aprovecharse para dar y recibir placer. Una cena afrodisíaca, una música sensual, un cubito de hielo sobre la piel, un perfume embriagador, una voz seductora... La sensualidad emana a través de todos los sentidos y hay infinidad de formas de sacarle partido a todo su potencial, para despertar y mantener el deseo. COPYRIGHT © 2007 CASA EDITORIAL EL TIEMPO S.A. Prohibida su reproducción total o parcial, así como su traducción a cualquier idioma sin autorización escrita de su titular. Reproduction in whole or in part, or translation without written permission is prohibited. All rights reserved.

El museo "Coca-Cola". Atlanta.

ARTS & DESIGN

MUSEUM REVIEW-THE NEW WORLD OF COCA-COLA Ingredients: Carbonated Water, High-Fructose Corniness ... By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN Published: July 30, 2007

Erik S. Lesser for The New York Times The lobby of the New Museum of Coca-Cola in Atlanta.

ATLANTA — You can't beat the feeling. Life tastes good. It's the Real Thing. A Large Taste of Pop I have just emerged from the Coke side of life here, where the Coca-Cola Company had its origins in a patent medicine concocted by an eccentric, ailing and possibly drug-addicted entrepreneur in 1886. And after visiting the company's new museum; after sitting in a theater, wearing 3-D glasses, feeling floating bubbles pop against my skin from well-timed puffs of air; after strolling through an exhibition hall with antique Coke ashtrays, vending machines and vintage ads; after watching a fully operational bottling facility produce the magic liquid; and after sampling nearly 70 different sodas made by the company, I can readily testify: Coke is It. Coke, adding to all those slogans, must now be the only soft drink in the world with its own shrine: a tabernacle for the faithful, constructed by its creator. I can't compare the New World of Coca-Cola — as this 92,000-square-foot, $97 million museum calls itself — with the old (which opened in 1990 and closed in April, a month before this resurrection). But if you want to have a Coke and a smile, and you don't mind being engulfed by an enormous commercial (at $15 for adults), this museum offers its own puzzles and pleasures. It stands in Atlanta's once-blighted downtown, on a 22-acre plot that the company purchased in the early 1990s. Coke donated nine of those acres for construction of the Georgia Aquarium, which opened next door in late 2005. Then, in October, the company announced it would donate 2.5 acres to the City of Atlanta for a civil- and human-rights museum. Nearby CNN offers tours of its headquarters. Media, liberty, fish and Coke. Maybe only fish spoils the composite image. But image is what this is all about, for as good as Coke is (and you are regularly told how extremely good it is), this mixture of caffeine, vanilla, cola, sugar and flavors (which are said to include oils of orange, nutmeg, cinnamon and coriander) would hardly be worth such devotion if there were not what is called in the marketing world "added value." The added value comes from associations that have accumulated over the course of a century. This exhibition space is devoted to them. You enter by walking under a 27-foot-tall bottle of Coke that hovers in a 90-foot-high glass pillar; the walls glimmer like chipped ice and are made bracingly cold to the touch even on a 90-degree day. In the lobby one of the few misjudgments of tone can be found, as on the wall you read what seem to be corporate goals: " To Refresh the World, Mind and Spirit; To Inspire Moments of Optimism Through Our Brands and Our Actions; To Create Value." The business school homily is flat, off-putting, like soda without fizz. The problems persist in a welcoming film, a computer-animated commercial that is a frenetic paean to the company and its mission: "Inside the Happiness Factory." Eccentric creatures speak with the voices of real employees, testifying to camaraderie and mission, promising happiness to all who are prepared to drink deep. It was only during these saccharine opening messages that I was apt to rebel. I recalled the controversies that dogged the company in the 1980s and '90s, from which it has been distancing itself in recent years. Was Coke fair back then to its African-American employees? Was it violating antitrust statutes in its aggressive attempt to control its independent bottlers? What about the Belgian contamination claims a few years ago? Or the overwhelming circumstantial evidence that Coke was originally made with cocaine — something the company denies? But no company, particularly one that thinks of itself as a "happiness factory," should be expected to tout possible flaws. Anyway, soon enough comes a pause that refreshes: an enormous entrance hall through which you can move into different exhibition spaces. In one, a survey of Coke's presence in pop culture demonstrates the populist nature of Andy Warhol'sobsession. ("A Coke is a Coke," he said, "and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.") There are videos showing collectors in Taiwan and Switzerland, whose private lairs are stocked with bottles and ephemera, all bearing the logo and promising ... what? Yes, what is being promised? In the drink's first decades its medicinal properties were featured; one early label calls it a "Tonic and Nerve Stimulant." Then its formula and reputation were largely stripped of such associations, but Coke, still laced with caffeine, remained "refreshing." Now, at the museum, nostalgia seems to flow freely; the main historical exhibition, "Milestones of Refreshment," begins with an extraordinary onyx and alabaster soda fountain bar from 1880s Toomsboro, Ga., at which a statue of John S. Pemberton, the secret formula's inventor, holds aloft a bronze-colored glass of Coke. The objects in the display cases also come from that supposedly simpler era and its successors: a Coke calendar sporting a silent movie star, or a Norman Rockwell painting in which the soft drink gets pastoral product placement. But these objects are also meant to illustrate the immense revolution waged by the soda's first overseer, a brilliant druggist named Asa Candler, who beginning in 1888 built Coke into a mass-marketing phenomenon by splashing its trademark over nearly every object in daily use, who handed out coupons offering free tastes, and who made the grievous error (some say) of practically giving away in perpetuity the rights to bottle the soda, leaving the company only the profits from selling the syrup. (That arrangement remained largely unchanged until the latter part of the 20th century.)

A Large Taste of Pop.

But it isn't really nostalgia that is being promised. Coke is not being associated with the 1890s and bicycles built for two. The main tradition it cares about is simply that it has been consumed in so many different times and places. The marketing of Coke now is about how successful the marketing of Coke has been. In the 3-D theater, with its vibrating seats and visceral thrills, a scientist seeks the secret Coke formula; he discovers it, in part, in the drink's "universal availability." Coke lore is full of stories of the company's leaders being obsessed with getting everyone everywhere to love it. The soda is marketed as if this goal has already been achieved. "I'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony" goes Coke's classic jingle. It is amazing to see this idea at play here in an Advertising Theater that shows historic and foreign television commercials. "At its best," a narrator explains, "Coca-Cola advertising opens hearts and minds." From diversity, the ads assert, Coke molds a coherent community, bound together by shared experience and taste. In a 2005 advertisement from Argentina, for example, a group of young people sit around a beach bonfire, playing music and passing around a bottle of Coke as if it were another kind of intoxicant. But then we notice that one of them is an enormous one-eyed alien whose entire body is covered with mucus. He slurps at the bottle and passes it to his neighbor, the slime dripping, and the next drinker stares in disgust. Suddenly the music stops, and his fellow communards are aghast — not at the mess of phlegm, but at the man so repulsed by an alien. He notices their shock, reconsiders, lifts the goo-coated bottle to his lips, and behold: All are again bound in musical and social harmony. Coke adds more than life. Distributed in more than 200 countries, it promises a utopian world, globalization without pain. Who was I to argue, particularly since I was getting thirsty after taking in all the good feeling? Besides, there in the final gallery was apparent proof: five pillars, surrounded by taps offering the company's sodas, each pillar devoted to a different continent. I filled and refilled my cup, drinking with my fellow Cokatarians in faithful communion. And if I remained wary of Italy's bitter Beverly beverage, there was Mozambique's Krest Ginger Ale or Estonia's Fanta Magic to offer multicultural compensation, while in its very own gallery, the transcendent, internationally invariant flavor of Coke held court. All the effervescence didn't allow too many cynical impulses to bubble up. Later that night when driving by Coke's New World, I could see the glass pillar through which I first entered, illuminated in a heavenly blue. Within it a floating green bottle hovered, glowing with the promise that, yes, in time, everyone shall taste salvation. The New World of Coca-Cola is at 121 Baker Street, Atlanta; (404) 676-5151.

Copyright by the New York Times 2007

Las gordas bailan el La Habana

INTERNATIONAL Havana Journal

A Super-Size Troupe Leaps From Ridiculous to Sublime By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr. Published: July 30, 2007

José Goitia for The New York Times Juan Miguel Mas, above, a 300-pound choreographer, formed the Danza Voluminosa troupe in 1996; its dancers are heavy, but light on their feet.

HAVANA, July 28 — The prima ballerina of the Danza Voluminosa troupe weighs 286 pounds, and as she thumps gracefully across the floor, she gives new meaning to the words stage presence. Her body is a riotous celebration of weight — of ample belly and breasts, of thick legs and arms, of the crushing reality of gravity. "I always liked to dance," the dancer, Mailín Daza, said later. "I wanted to dance in the classical ballet, but my mother told me fat girls could not dance. I always dreamed of being a ballerina. With this group, I feel I am a ballerina." Formed a decade ago by Juan Miguel Mas, this company of obese dancers has become a cultural phenomenon in Cuba, breaking stereotypes here of dance, redefining the aesthetics of beauty and, along the way, raising the self-esteem of heavyset people. While the troupe is not the first to employ larger dancers, its popularity comes as a surprise in a country known for its muscular, lean dancers in every genre from classical ballet to salsa. After all, food is rationed here, most people must walk or bike to work and the streets are filled with hard, lean bodies. Mr. Mas, a 300-pound choreographer and dancer who moves like a pampered cat, admits that he often uses the stereotypical humor of his dancers' proportions to bring in audiences. The troupe is well known for its parody of "Swan Lake" and engages in hilarious renditions of dancing clichés like the cancan. But Mr. Mas and his troupe are deadly serious about dance, and once the laughter dies down, they are capable of performing moving pieces that drill into the universal themes of love, death and erotic longing. The audience forgets the joke and begins to feel the dance, he said. "We use humor to get the public in," he said. "Then we can hit them with something stronger."

José Goitia for The New York Times Some of the troupe's pieces are funny, while others have serious themes like gluttony, prejudice faced by fat people and obesity's psychic toll.

Mr. Mas, 41, also choreographs pieces on themes like the tragedy of gluttony, love between obese couples, the prejudice that fat people face and the psychic toll of obesity. One of the troupe's recent successes, "Sweet Death," tells the story of a woman who, after being rejected by her family, tries to commit suicide by eating huge quantities of candy. The work has surreal elements, as the dancers use their bodies to create furniture in the performance. Another piece, "The Macabre Dinner," explores gluttony. Mr. Mas said it would be a mistake to think that his work was intended to glorify or sanctify obesity, or even to deliver a moralistic message that one should not discriminate against the overweight. Rather, he said, the troupe's art tries to face the reality of obesity while giving larger people a chance to express themselves through dance, a chance they are denied from childhood in most dance classes. "Although we are obese and dance, we are against obesity," Mr. Mas explained, saying parenthetically that he admires New York City for banning artificial trans fats from restaurants. "We are always trying to lose weight." But something strange happens when the troupe takes the stage. Classical and modern dance often give the impression of human beings flying, freed of the earth. The usual female dancers are like nymphs, the men like Greek statues. They soar, spin, leap and reach for the sky. Because of the size of the dancers in Mr. Mas's troupe, however, the work of Danza Voluminosa conveys something more earthy and human. Fat people move differently, he said, and the choreography must change. "We are more mountainous," he said with a smile. The dancers' movements are often slower than those of their slender colleagues. These dancers favor limbs swinging in pendulous arcs and wavelike motions that seem to ripple through their bodies. They seem to grip the floor rather than abandon it, keeping a low center of gravity, often crouching or dancing while kneeling or lying on the ground. And when their dance becomes frenetic, the sheer weight of the dancers thudding across the stage conveys an excitement akin to a stampede, something out of control and wild, yet made of human flesh and blood. It can be a riveting sight. Mr. Mas said he had borrowed from the work of Martha Graham and Jose Limón, but he also incorporates moves from African dance, jazz dance and the folkloric dance of the Caribbean, often with West African roots. "I use whatever I can," he said. For the dancers, working with Mr. Mas has changed their lives. Several said they suffered from constant embarrassment and guilt over their weight before they began dancing. But dancing has taught them to accept, if not love, their bodies. They also say that after a performance, they feel self-esteem that is foreign to most them, having suffered from the gibes of their peers since childhood. Barbara Paula, 29, who weighs 275 pounds, has been dancing with the troupe for five years. She said it still felt strange at times to be on stage, as if she were constantly discovering the potential beauty hidden inside her body, which for years was a source of shame for her. "It's something new," she said. "I don't have this complex anymore that because we are obese, we cannot dance, we cannot walk in the street." The reaction of audiences has been immensely positive. The government lets the troupe practice and perform in the National Theater of Cuba. Mr. Mas now receives a state salary to continue his work. The dancers who have been with the troupe for years say that when the group started in November 1996, they faced ridicule and laughter. These days, people take them seriously. "We have always had those who laugh at first, but by the end of the show there is a standing ovation," said Xiomara González, 43, a 180-pound mother of two who gave up her job to dance. "And this is a beautiful thing, a very beautiful thing."

Copyright by the New York Times 2007

"Arqueología Urbana". New York City.

THE CITY

Children of Darkness By BEN GIBBERD Published: July 29, 2007

ON PAGE 1 Miru Kim, crouched amid the ruins of the Revere sugar refinery in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

JOE ANASTASIO, a slim, dark-haired Web designer for a Wall Street publishing company, was standing outside Madison Square Garden, dressed in black work boots, a torn blue check shirt and a bomber jacket. It was a brisk Sunday morning in the spring, and among the swirl of tourists clutching maps and hockey fans in Rangers jerseys, he might easily have been mistaken for a Metropolitan Transportation Authority track worker heading to a shift. That is how Mr. Anastasio likes it. A 33-year-old native of Astoria, Queens, he is an urban explorer, to use a term he and his fellow adventurers accept somewhat wearily, along with urban spelunker, infiltrator, hacker and guerilla urbanist. Urban explorers, a highly disparate, loosely knit group, share an obsession with uncovering the hidden city that lies above and below the familiar one all around them. And especially during the summer, they are out in full force. Alone and with cohorts, Mr. Anastasio has crawled, climbed and sometimes simply brazenly walked into countless train tunnels, abandoned subway stations, rotting factories, storm drains, towers, decaying hospitals and other shadowy remnants of the city's infrastructure the authorities would rather he did not enter. Although he records his adventures on his Web site, ltvsquad.com, anonymity is, for him, a necessary tool. A few minutes later on this Sunday morning, Mr. Anastasio was joined by a Korean woman in her 20s named Miru Kim, who with her delicate looks and glossy, shoulder-length black hair offered a striking contrast to Mr. Anastasio's grizzled appearance. The two headed off, bound for the netherworld beneath their feet. A few blocks west, they looked around cautiously. Several trucks were parked behind a wire mesh fence, its gate wide open, but no one seemed about. Beyond the fence lay an entrance to the Amtrak tunnels that run north-south along the West Side. They stepped through the gate and headed for the tunnel's mouth. Almost immediately, the space became not pitch black, as expected, but a dirty gray, lit by sodium lights and narrow shafts of sunlight from the open street crossings every few blocks above. Faded curlicues of graffiti formed a pattern as dense as wallpaper on the concrete walls. As the two headed deeper, the sounds of the upper world, of voices and cars, faded. A train thundered past, and the two stepped to one side, averting their faces until its red taillights were dots in the distance. After about 20 minutes, the murky outline of a disused, darker tunnel appeared, and they followed it, holding their flashlights carefully. This new tunnel ended at a strange contraption, resembling a vast air-conditioner on stilts. Near its base sat the abandoned remains of a homeless person's encampment: bags of filthy clothes, milk crates full of mismatched sneakers, a few swivel chairs and, lying forlornly in the middle of the tracks, a champagne cork. Only 20 feet above lay Manhattan's busy streets, but it might as well have been 20,000 feet, the sense of human desolation was so intense. For Mr. Anastasio, however, the setting was perfect. He whipped out a digital camera and clicked away. A few days later, the photos were up on his Web site. "Don't you just love this dump?" the text read. "About the only real thing left in NYC is the underground, the dirty, filthy underground."

The Shadow City

Trying to calculate how many urban explorers there are puts one in the hapless position of the reporter who asked Bob Dylan in 1965 how many protest singers there were. "Uh, how many? I think about 136," Dylan replied sarcastically. Many American cities have urban exploration Web sites, as do British, Canadian and Australian cities. New York, whose vast infrastructure provides a mecca for those drawn to such things, has dozens of Web sites devoted to recording their owner's adventures within it. At the more extreme end are those like Mr. Anastasio's and nycexposed.com, which is run by a teenager named Sean and contained, until recently, a practical if tongue-in-cheek guide on how to cut through chain-link fences, as well as photographs of speeding subway trains perilously up close. Not surprisingly, the authorities do not take kindly to such activities. "Trespassing on the M.T.A.'s infrastructure is not only illegal and extremely dangerous, it's a pretty stupid idea," said Jeremy Soffin, a transportation authority spokesman, echoing the sentiments expressed by officials for Amtrak, the New York Police Department and other agencies. "I personally took a track safety class recently, and then you really appreciate how dangerous it is — how big the trains are, how fast-moving they are, and how narrow the spaces are. "It's dangerous even for very experienced track workers. There's no place for urban explorers." While Mr. Anastasio and Ms. Kim, a quiet-spoken artist and arts event promoter, have never been arrested while exploring, Mr. Anastasio said he knew some explorers who had been. And many other sites, while they don't thumb their noses so willfully at authority, are extreme in their own way. Ms. Kim's site, mirukim.com, which has made her something of a legend in urban explorer circles, contains a section devoted to a project she calls "Naked City Spleen." The site features color photographs of Ms. Kim, naked, posed in abandoned tunnels and structures in New York and elsewhere. In one, she crouches like a cat on a vast slab of rusting steel amid the ruins of the former Revere sugar refinery, now demolished, in Red Hook, Brooklyn. In another, she appears, back turned to the camera, squeezed into the narrow heating tunnels below Columbia University, her alma mater. The effect is powerful, not just because of the eroticism, but also because her nakedness seems to emphasize her human vulnerability. Ms. Kim took considerable risks to obtain her images. A few years ago, she and a friend encountered a body on a trip in Washington Heights. Another time, while she was making a solo visit to the same mysterious tunnel she and Mr. Anastasio visited together, the occupant of the homeless camp appeared just as she had removed her clothes. Despite her initial fear, she continued with her photography. "In my mind," she wrote later on her Web site, "he is a dweller in one of the darkest rooms in the collective unconsciousness of all the inhabitants of New York and possibly of all modern cities." This sense of communicating with the city on a secret frequency may be what is most appealing to urban explorers. Steve Duncan is a self-described "guerrilla historian" whose explorations of the city's forbidden structures — among them the old Croton Aqueduct in the Bronx and the long-closed upper viewing platform 216 feet above the 1964 World's Fair in Queens — are documented on his Web site, undercity.org. "Most people experience their life in the city in a two-dimensional way," said Mr. Duncan, a sandy-haired 28-year-old. "You know, they go from Point A to Point B along streets and don't realize there are these multiple layers to the city. By going 20 feet below or 20 feet above, you can go to a place that is practically unvisited, that maybe 100 people get to see a year." Seeing something inaccessible, he said, is special. "You experience it differently and more directly," he explained. "The history and city becomes alive." To prove his point, Mr. Duncan led an expedition around one of his favorite places, the heating tunnels that honeycomb the foundations of Columbia University, a maze he discovered as a student there. Bent double in their confines one afternoon, sweat dripping from his forehead as the pipes around him wheezed and groaned, he pointed out in a subbasement the remains of the original coal hoppers that fed the boilers before the buildings' conversion to oil. Beneath another building is part of a 19th-century stone wall that Mr. Duncan said was part of a city insane asylum before being demolished to make way for the university. Mr. Duncan's greatest coup came when he wiggled through a vent in the ceiling and emerged from a door on the other side of a room. A quick step through the door and across the corridor outside led to a densely cluttered room, piled high with cases of ancient electrical machinery. This, Mr. Duncan announced, was the original Pupin Laboratory, where the university's physics department built a particle accelerator and split the atom in 1939, in an early stage of what would be known as the Manhattan Project. Mr. Duncan said he believed that in 1987 he became the first urban explorer to discover it, although others followed suit, as attested by the graffiti around the room. The particle accelerator — a circular green mass in the center of the room that resembles nothing more alarming than an enormous food processor — was too heavy and too dangerous to safely remove after the project moved to Chicago, following the attack on Pearl Harbor, he said, so the university decided to keep it here, "in their mildly radioactive junk storage room." The discovery left him jubilant.

Steve Duncan A sewer deep beneath Queens.

"It's just a great example of how you peel back one layer and you get to old coal hoppers," he said. "You peel back another layer and you find the foundations of an asylum when this area was all grass and farmlands. You peel back another layer, and here's the building where the atom was split." For some urban explorers, the search for shadow cities does not entail venturing down tunnels or scaling high walls. Kevin Walsh, the 50-year-old, Brooklyn-born creator of the Web site forgotten-ny.com — a vast cornucopia of facts, photographs, conjecture, mythology and infrastructure — rarely goes urban exploring in the guerrilla sense of the term. Instead, armed with a camera and the combined knowledge of a small library of books on New York, he stalks the city's streets looking for its secrets hidden in plain view. From faded advertisements to ancient streetlights to streets named after long-obscure luminaries, he obsessively records the ephemera of what he terms "the lost metropolis" on his Web site. Much of this information is collected in his book, "Forgotten New York," which was published last year and is grist for the tours he conducts of forgotten corners of the city. During a recent stroll with Mr. Walsh around Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, it became clear that his love of the city's ephemera goes beyond brick and stone. While on a hunt for the gravestone of the infamous 19th-century figure Bill the Butcher, he noticed some ancient lovers' graffiti carved into a tree trunk near the gravestone. "That's what I love!" he said as he examined the blend of hearts and names, their edges softened and indecipherable with age. "That's what I show people on trips." Beyond the thrill of seeing what others have not seen, or dare not see, and the sense that it should be recorded for future generations, urban explorers are driven by another motive. It is impossible to visit some of their more spectacular haunts without experiencing a touch of the sacred. This was apparent one afternoon when Mr. Duncan's good friend and co-conspirator on numerous adventures, Moses Gates, a 31-year-old tour guide and graduate student in urban planning, undertook a journey into the abandoned Red Hook Grain Terminal on Brooklyn's waterfront. "Generally, climbing urban structures and being high up really allows me to connect with the city," Mr. Gates said, "although I sometimes get that connection from other places, or just from walking around town. I love the feeling of being at one with the city — it's a spiritual experience, I won't deny it." The grain terminal is one of the waterfront's industrial masterpieces, a series of 54 concrete silos about 12 stories high, built in 1922 to hold grain arriving by barge from the West. The cold gray waters of the Erie Basin lapping around the structure's edges give it the sense of an island fortress. The terminal was decommissioned in the 1960s and now stands in a small industrial park, surrounded by concrete walls. Recently, a 17-year-old plan to turn it into a recycling center was revived, though its future remains uncertain. Mr. Gates negotiated the walls, then swung himself lithely beneath a rusted steel grating at one corner of the building. Suddenly he was inside what might at first glance have been mistaken for a cathedral. Fat concrete columns lined up as far as the eye could see, creating a dreamlike procession of naves in all directions. Light filtered in from the sides, casting long diagonal shadows across the floor. But what really gave the building its rarefied air was the silence. Amid the daily cacophony of the city, where every place is packed with a scrum of people, this space stood empty, a still counterpoint to everything around it. Mr. Gates began to climb the corroded metal stairs that led to the roof. Graffiti lined the inner walls — a good sign. "Graffiti artists are almost always first," Mr. Gates said. "If there's no graffiti, there's a good chance it's impossible to get there." At the end of his climb, as he popped his head out of a hatch on the roof, a magnificent — and utterly illicit — 360-degree view of the city opened up. In the foreground lay Red Hook's 19th-century industrial sprawl of warehouses and narrow streets lined with row houses. In the distance rose Manhattan's dull gray skyline. Tiny cars crawled along the elevated Prospect Expressway, an F train made its way over the Gowanus Canal, and airplanes banked steeply as they headed for Kennedy Airport. "Planes, trains and automobiles, you got it all here," Mr. Gates said happily. Pausing to look out at this perspective, seen by so few, he added: "There's no doubt about it. You've got romance here." Ben Gibberd's book "New York Waters: Profiles From the Edge," with the photographer Randy Duchaine, was published in May by Globe Pequot Press.

Copyright by the New York Times 2007