collision detection: R.I.P. "Ninjalicious" -- the founder of urban exploration

September 13, 2005

R.I.P. "Ninjalicious" -- the founder of urban exploration

About ten years ago I was in a Toronto bookshop and found a copy of Infiltration. Subtitled "the zine about going places you're not supposed to go", it was devoted to the escapades of the author, Jeff Chapman -- or "Ninjalicious", to use his nom de plume -- as he explored the many off-limits areas in famous Toronto buildings such as the Royal York hotel, CN Tower, or St. Mike's Hospital. In each issue, Chapman would pick a new target and infiltrate it -- roaming curiously around, finding hilarious secrets, then describing it with effervescently witty delight. Chapman had the best prose of any zine author I've read anywhere. Many zinesters are clever, of course, but Chapman wrote with a 19th-century literary journalist's attention to detail; nothing escaped his notice, from the relative fluffiness of the towels in executive lounges to the color of the rust pools in a mysterious, hangar-sized room buried below Toronto's subway system.

It was like some postmodern version of Fodor's. Indeed, that was Chapman's genius: He approached the everyday world as if were filled with Narnia-like 'ports to hidden worlds of mystery. As he realized, when you walk down the sidewalk in your city, there are rooms and places barely twenty feet to your right and left that are so restricted -- being "private" areas of corporations, or even of public buildings -- that they are effectively as remote as an island in Fiji. To travel to them is like voyaging to the summit of Mount Everest. And of course, in the 15 years since he started the zine, private companies have taken over more and more formerly public space -- making Chapman's quest not only funny and engaging but somewhat political.

A few years after he started publishing, he'd inspired so many other people to follow in his footsteps -- in cities around the world -- that he had singlehandedly created the "urban exploration" movement. Though urban exploration involves trespassing, Chapman took the same attitude towards it that the Boy Scouts take towards the wilderness, as Eye Magazine wrote about him last week:

He was evangelical about the virtue and value of exploring cities, preaching ethics that encouraged trespassing but forbade theft, vandalism and even littering. Urban explorers in the Ninjalicious mould believed in leaving no sign of their tourism through the inner workings of urban life, and in taking nothing with them but photographs and a new appreciation for the world around them.

He also founded a web site for urban exploration, and documented his ongoing journeys not only in the zine but in gorgeous color pictures on his blog. A couple of my favorite recent entries: The snow-covered roof of Toronto's new art-college building; the enormous rooms under construction at the Eaton Center; and massive, corroded bins left behind in the abandoned Stelco factory.

Sadly, the reason Eye and I are writing about Chapman in the past tense is that he died of cancer last month -- and he was only 31. He'd apparently been struggling with cancer for years, and it was during his treatments at St. Mike's hospital in the early 90s that he became intrigued by the hidden areas in a supposedly public building.
Then he was off and running and thankfully never stopped. The world could use more brilliant obsessives like him.

Posted by Clive Thompson at September 13, 2005 01:13 AM

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Comments

I'm sorry to hear about Chapman's death. I hadn't read anything of his in ages, but I'm sorry to hear he won't be producing anymore stories about his forays into off-limit urban areas.

Posted by: Drew at September 13, 2005 11:19 AM

Thank you for putting a name to the alter-ego Clive. I first heard of Ninjalicious through Shift I believe, back in the late 90's.
He inspired me to do some urban exploring of my own, plus I always had to grin when I looked at different Toronto land marks and thought of the images and stories posted on infiltration about their inner workings.
So sad to hear of his death, so happy to know he lived to the fullest and inspired so many around the globe.

Posted by: garthbreaks at September 13, 2005 11:33 AM

Weird. I was just talking with my wife about this, I couldn't remember the information or the name of the zine, but I remembered how cool it was. I thought it had to do with boiler rooms and elevater machine rooms, but now that you remind me, it had to do with any off-limits area. These trespasses are a new thing for the human species, and there is a dizzy quality to exploring hidden, locked, and secret places. Often you are alone, in a totally human-made enclosure, silent, seeing in the dark.

Posted by: Alfred Cloutier at September 13, 2005 4:02 PM

Yeah, Chapman was a serious pioneer. The only upside here is that he seems to have left quite a legacy -- hundreds and probably thousands of people doing urban exploration around the world. I'd like to hope someone else comes along who can write as well as he did.

Seriously, it's worth hunting down and buying any back issues of his zine if you can. They're a blast to read. You used to be able to order back issues off his site -- but I wonder if anyone will be processing orders now that Chapman's no longer around?

I wish some publisher would print the entire run as a book. Though in a way, I think his work would lose something in being anthologized -- because part of the charm was in how he laid the stuff out. It was one of the most professional-looking zines around, even back ten years ago when tons of zines were utterly hideous in their design.

Posted by: Clive at September 13, 2005 4:18 PM

For some reason "Ninjalicious" sounds like some type of marketing buzz word to describe a cereal or something.

NEW NINJA PUFFS. THEY ARE NINJALICIOUS!

Posted by: Karnov at September 14, 2005 9:43 AM

Heh.

Posted by: Clive at September 14, 2005 1:34 PM

Turning to the editorial page in Eye and seeing that threw me for a horrible loop. I had been a fan of Infiltration for a long time, not because I'm any kind of urban exporer, but because Jeff's writing was so engaging and it was so fun to live vicariously through him as he went on all his adventures.

I'm glad that I got to speak to him once. I was still in j-school and Jeff and Liz agreed to let me interview them about an article I was writing on zines. I'm not sure why, since he never did many media interviews, but for some reason they decided to humour me.

I remember noticing the same qualities you mentioned: his eloquence, wryness and eye for detail. He told me a charming story about putting together the first issue of Infiltration, which basically came about because he got tired of having to show the same story and photographs about his Royal York Hotel jaunt to different friends and decided to just put it together into a magazine. He laid out the pages, printed them off as singles, and started sticking them together with glue. It was only towards the end that he realized that the pages needed to be in multiples of four :)

As for favourite entries, mine is Whitby Psych. How can you not think of Silent Hill?

Posted by: ErinB at September 14, 2005 3:31 PM

Dear Clive

I am a firm believer in property rights and the sanctity of contracts, and all that is right and good.

However, I have used his tricks to navigate the bowels of Union Station.

Posted by: Erik Weissengruber at September 14, 2005 7:10 PM

Excellent!

Posted by: Clive at September 14, 2005 9:16 PM

I was inspired by this story, especially by some of the photos of his website of the buildings around the University of Toronto. I started attempting to open doors whose contents I was unaware. You'd be surprised how many unlocked doors there are in a building.

I think it's a lesson for all of us. If you are being treated for cancer, and have the prospect of death ahead of you, you should spend every second you can opening as many doors (in buildings, as in life) as possible. But then again, why wait?

Posted by: Steve E. at September 14, 2005 11:22 PM

Ninjalicious was the Dean of Places-You-Probably-Shoudln't-Go, and a nice gut to boot. I interviewed him a couple of times for a newspaper piece and he was informative, friendly and very enthusiastic. So much so that he made his hobby seem as normal as knitting or stamp collecting.
I had no idea he was suffering from cancer - or that his interests were stoked during a stay at St. Margaret's. Great stuff - he will be missed.
- Brda.

Posted by: BradMackay at September 19, 2005 2:15 PM