http://tags.library.upenn.edu/tag/exploring PennTags Feed http://tags.library.upenn.edu/makerecord/url/18614 http://tags.library.upenn.edu/makerecord/url/18614 <div class="timestamp">July 29, 2007</div><div class="timestamp">Children of Darkness </div> <div class="byline">By BEN GIBBERD</div><p>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. </p> <p>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. </p> <p>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&rsquo;s infrastructure the authorities would rather he did not enter. Although he records his adventures on his Web site, <a href="http://ltvsquad.com/" target="_">ltvsquad.com</a>, anonymity</p> <p> is, for him, a necessary tool.</p>