URBEX STORIES
46 years of urban exploring stories from John Law
Pic by Chris Beauchamp
I sat down for a chat with John Law to pick up his brain on history of San Francisco Suicide Club (urban exploring club) which he was a member of between 1977 and 1982. As I plan to release ‘history of urbex’ podcast series John was a perfect guest to start this crazy journey of discovery. I might end up calling it ‘History of Urban Exploration’ actually, now that I think about it, but anyway… John and I talked for over 4 hours total, met twice (video calls), and in the first half he covered the birth of the San Fran SS club with its quirky and unique members lead by the man John describes as visionary – Gary Warne, to the club’s ultimate closure 5 years after it was created (more on Suicide Club – stay tune for when the series is out). After two hours focused on Suicide Club I switched the topic to Burning Man, which John is the co-founder of, but God of Internet had another plan and we lost connection. Decision was made to return to the conversation few weeks later.
Burning Man shenanigans
Two weeks later we picked up where we left off last time around – and this is only my impression – a topic I feel John is tired of talking about – The Burning Man.🙄
It was clear that it simply didn’t sit well with John how Burning Man organizers put their ambitions over “safety, good feelings, brotherhood, or joy or love or anything else” – he recalls. John wasn’t too fond of how the event erupted. “It grew too fast and it was too publicized, too many people attended”. John felt the group in charge weren’t capable of taking care of the safety of the visitors. The year he left, 1996, many accidents occurred, there were drug overdoses, tent was run over by a car and crippled two kids and many more incidents happened. The death of his rock-n-roll musician friend Michael Furey who was killed in a car-motorcycle accident was the last straw for John. He left the Burning Man, moved on and went to do other things including some solid urban explorations.
We moved on to the main meal – urbex. One of the reasons John loves urban exploration is because “you can’t make money of it, you can’t make a business out of it, it’s impossible” – he says. Since the hobby is not technically legal (depends of the country, ‘Google trespassing laws in your country 💡 ), hence taking people to dangerous sites might not end up well, someone will get hurt, injured or worse. Urbex insurance is pretty tricky to obtain, hence in the long run it might not be the best business strategy. Eventual liability issues will certainly occur.
Good feeling in the crotch
When John was 5, he climbed to the top of a swing set on the playground and wrapped his legs around it to slide it back. It gave him “a good feeling in the crotch” and that is the reason he liked climbing. He also recalls early memories of exploring sewer system under the college campus buildings when he was 10. “It was a best thing ever” – he said about sneaking into the tunnels, what he and his friends called Cowboy Creek back then. Few years later, now 12 years old, John started going under the bridges. He remembers climbing under the road deck of the bridge using the bridge beams. The bridge was 20-30 meters above the river. “There was just one other kid that would do it. Great fun. It was really exciting. There was this little island in the middle of the river. You could climb onto the island from the stanchions of the bridge. I just loved it. I love climbing and exploring.”
“There is always a gateway to weirdness” – he says. During childhood something happens to shape your future and it gives you the direction in life. For John it was a series of fantasy short stories by Clark Ashton Smith that took him on crazy adventures in a prehistoric lost northern continent called Hyperborea. I can totally relate to John in that aspect. As a kid I used to read ‘Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators‘ book series and was totally mesmerised by the adventures those boys were having and I imagined having similar experiences.
Pic credit: goodman-games.com
Some events included 'kidnapping'
He was 17 when he moved to Frisco and right away he started exploring the city. One of the first things he did was climbing the fireman statue and few apartment buildings on Russian Hill. Less than a year later he ran into the folks behind the famous Suicide Club and joined them immediately. John recalls how some of the SS club events included kidnapping. “We did this type of game where we would kidnap one person. We would hide out, find out where they were going back from work, and we would jump on them, stuff a bag over their head, sometimes handcuff them. But they knew it was a game. Initially it was very frightening but then they would realize, oh those are my friends.”
The ‘kidnappings’ as well as the blindfolding events (as we will learn soon) were quite popular in Suicide Club. John wasn’t just “abducting” other members,😁 he was on the receiving end too! One day, he found himself being tricked by two kids who told him about strange noise coming from the alley. When he opened the door to the alleyway, 5 people wearing masks jumped on him, put him in a car and took him to a salt mountain. Soon they changed clothes to all white and they successfully avoided security by standing still. They blended right in with the salt. “We were on a salt mountain, and we just stopped moving. He drove right by us, he didn’t see us because we were invisible. That was Suicide Club urban exploration event where we used the urban environment that we sneaked into. The urban environment was a playground for us.”
Pic by John Behrens
Portals of Illumination
There were a lot of blindfolding events in Suicide Club where the participants would get their eyes covered, dressed up in costumes, put into a van and driven to unknown to them location. John recalls one of those events called Portals of Illumination where the blindfolded members were driven to where the Golden Gate Bridge cable cart housing was. He would walk the guests out, hand in hand, around 60 people. When the organisers took them to the middle of the cable housing the members were allowed to take the blindfolds off. Boom! Look where you are! Someone performed an exotic snake dance and “fire reading”. There was a lights show under the cable house and fog machine was used. On top of that there was a treasure hunt in the huge chamber searching for missing items and few other performances. Originally the events were designed to challenge the fears but with time they got better and better and they became more challenging.
From the left: Justin Fornal, John and Chris Hackett. Pics by Christopher Beauchamp. Big mutton chops & white suit pic by Sebastian Hyde
Mysterious Julia Solis
One of the interesting aspects of talking to John is that fact he’s been around for a while (obviously) but he also knows many key and influential individuals who had profound effect on urban exploration. This was one of the reasons I wanted to talk to John: to learn more about the history of the hobby I love so much. When we talked about Ninjalicious (urban explorer and author, sadly now passed away due cancer) John dropped a new name I haven’t heard before, someone he claimed to be very influential with the author of Access All Areas. I was immediately intrigued. “I met Julia in 1992 in Los Angeles for Cacophony Society event. She was a central character for Cacophony, very instrumental in starting many events in Los Angles at that time. She has a very beautiful artistic sensibility. She has been involved in Zine world. In the 90s many creative people were involved in that. Julia’s stories where beautiful and very dark in a lot of ways. I saw her take her ideas, her sensibility, her ascetic and impose it on the world. She started doing events and explorations. To this day she is still one of my favorite artists. In the mid 90s she moved to New York and she and New York came together like hand and glove. New York was her natural environment. She started exploring tunnels there and run into other explorers like Christos Pathiakis…” (soon also on the podcast!) “…and when the Brooklyn Cacophony Society blew up apart in 1998 she ended up forming Dark Passage and became friendly with Ninjalicious through the zine world.”
Doing a ‘history of urbex’ podcast series without an episode dedicated to Ninjalicious would be insane hence, I was soaking all the new juicy information hoping to learn more!
John with Julia Solis, photo from johnwlaw.com website
Packard Automotive Plant Frozen Body Story
Obviously I can’t mention every single story John brought up in the podcast interview. I want you to listen to the episode after all but I couldn’t leave this one out. This one was nuts. John was in Detroit and fireworks were kinda trendy at the time. He would climb abandoned buildings and bring bags of fireworks to shoot them off. He went to abandoned car factory: Packard Plant and even though it was located near the city centre no one cared when they were setting fireworks off. “Detroit was such a post-apocalyptic environment that the police didn’t care” – John said. One night he was there with few friends on top of the roof and he saw another crew blowing off some fireworks. Just like he was. The other crew was getting closer and both parties started shooting Roman candles at each other. Later on, when John and his friends were leaving they run into each other. They seemed friendly and both parties started drinking beer and talking. At some stage one of John’s friends: Nick got into a massive fist fight with another dude from the opposing Detroit crew. They started fighting each other and it looked serious! “This is personal, stay out of it” – two fighters yelled, so no one came to break them up. The fight eventually stopped with Nick applying full Nelson and the other bloke tapping out. Few minutes later, they were best buddies again. Drinking beer, bleeding and talking. Nick was a big guy, an iron-worker but also he was a skilled and sensitive photographer who was interested in preservation of historic abandoned buildings. The other Detroit guy used to video himself and his crew going into places and smashing and destroying them. Both of them, prior to this incident, actually met online and made threats to each other because of those videos. Coincidentally, on this particular day they met each other in real life and realized who was who. This was the whole reason why the fight started.
The story doesn’t end here however. A year later…
Now I’m thinking… this would be a great tease to get you to listen to the episode, right? Or you will hate me. 🤔
Okey, I’ll tell you. A year later, John receives an article about a guy who was found frozen in a basement of abandoned building. Can you guess where this is going? Apparently bunch of guys were playing hockey on ice over there and one of the players who went to the corner to relieve himself spotted two legs sticking out from the ice. There was a frozen guy under the ice! Calling Detroit post-apocalyptic wasn’t far off, was it? The crew who were playing ice hockey were the same crew John’s friend got in fight with! Bam 💥
Pic by John Behrens
Another story, a beautiful moment, involved John falling asleep on top of the abandoned building. As you sometimes do when you feel tired and all your friends are busy taking pictures, right? That hasn’t happened to me yet but I’m sure some of you can relate 🙂 Anyways, he took a nap. Julia Solis ended up waking him up few hours later and when he got up he realized his dreams and the real world were the same thing. “My dream life and my waking life were completely conjoined and that is the best thing in the world”.
There was one hilarious story that got me in tears of laughter when John took a dump off the side off the top of the Golden Gate Bridge and wondered what the car drivers blow thought of that. “I always wondered, since it was kinda watery, if there people driving the cars blow ever wondered ‘what the fuck kinda bird that was?’😂😂
Among other stories mentioned by my guest was one where he got chased by the cops. At this stage I was chuckling to myself – chased by the cops? He is an American urban explorer after all. Classic. He was lucky to get away by hiding in a tunnel and to his surprise, the cops wouldn’t follow him. Later he realized, it all made sense. Police officers had no idea what’s inside the tunnel contrary to his tunnel-rat experience.
Pic by Don Plumb
John, obviously, mentioned many many more stories and he went to much more depth to what I described here. I feel like I only scratched the surface. It was a fascinating few hours spent with the legendary John Law and I hope to hear more San Francisco Suicide Club stories from the other club members. When the ‘history of urbex’ series is out I will dive into more UrbEx stories for sure and let you know. To find out what else my guest said I recommend listening to the episode below:
More pics of John thanks to Chip Flynn, Monica Canilao, John Behrens, Petrina Robins, Chris Beauchamp
Social media: johnwlaw.com (website), Cacophony Society Book (website), johnwilliamlaw (Instagram), John Law (Facebook)
2 Comments
Thurland Wagner
June 4, 2022 /
You are still one of the founders of the greatest show on earth. It’s not your fault the show isn’t great any more?
שירותי ליווי בבת ים
May 8, 2023 /
I need to to thank you for this good read!! I certainly enjoyed every little bit of it. I have got you book-marked to check out new things you postÖ