Don't Look Down

Sunlight breaches a patchwork of boards at the far side of the room. Sonic finds a hole that opens into the clearing that leads back to the car. Everyone agrees to evacuate here instead of backtracking underground.

Finally, Wolf rushes to join the others at the new exit. "He probably didn't want to die," Gothstone quips, just before they dash back toward the car.

The crew fortifies with a greasy meal at Chubby's on Broadway before heading to the southwest side of the city to attack a grain silo. It looks like a skinny high-rise glued to a row of circular grain storage tanks. They enter through a sliding metal door overgrown with weeds. Inside, they hit a second-story office. There are rows of desks on gray carpet and piles of documents that smell like old newspapers. It looks as though everyone just called in sick one day and then never came back. Wolf spots a wall calendar and deduces that the place has been a ghost town since September 2001. Explorer reclines in a desk chair and spots a roach. He figures the silo is now used as a roost by stoners. Gothstone finds some blueprints and rolls them open on a desk. They reveal that the silo is seven stories tall. The group decides to climb it.

The stairs stop at the sixth floor. There's a room off the stairwell with a hole in the floor where a vertical conveyor belt hoisted men quickly from floor to floor. In another corner, someone spots a metal ladder propped through a hole in the ceiling. A gap in the floorboards around the ladder opens to the room below. They step over the hole and climb upward one by one.

The seventh floor features an enclosed walkway with a conveyor belt that runs from the main building and over the massive grain storage tanks. It reeks of smoldering feces.

Billionaire kneels, lifts a round metal lid and drops a piece of scrap metal into the first storage tank. Four seconds pass before it hits bottom.

"This would have been fantastic to see in operation," Billionaire whispers.

They find a doorway in the main room that leads to a rusting fire escape: their passage to the roof.

"I'm sure this will hold for a day or two," Gothstone quips.

Fearing that one person falling off the ladder could cause them all to drop, they decide to ascend one by one. Explorer stands back from the door. He looks queasy. He tells Gothstone he'll stay below.

Up on top, Sonic, Wolf, Gothstone and Billionaire lounge among metal tubing that sticks out of the roof. To the north is a posterlike view of the city skyline.

Billionaire spots a metal-caged ladder that leads to an adjoining rooftop. Sonic races to join him.

"Where are you going? Goddamn it, you are not going to climb that before me," Sonic shouts playfully. Sonic grabs the rungs and climbs, calling back that the bolts of the ladder have loosened. One anchor at the top has completely rusted away. The ladder rises more than 20 feet and shakes in the blustery wind. Wolf and Billionaire follow, but Gothstone bows out, smoking a cigarette and feigning disinterest.

On the second rooftop, the guys find a small metal shack that looks like a lookout post. A ladder hangs from the edge of the perch and dangles over the rim of the silo.

At the top, the wind blows so fiercely that all three must sit on the grated floor to keep their balance. There's barely enough room to move. Someone gloatingly shouts for Gothstone to call them on a cell phone so they can chat.

"I've got that feeling in my nuts," Sonic says with bravado.

Billionaire scouts the skyline for more targets. Wolf nods. "That's what keeps you alive," he says.

Still waiting in the seventh-floor room, Explorer rejoins the group as they head back down. Nobody explains what they found on the roof, and Explorer doesn't ask.

To keep their high, the troop leaves the silo and heads downtown. They park near a roadblock and continue by foot toward their target: the Empire Theater.

Generally, urban explorers don't enter live construction sites. The risk of discovery — and arrest for trespassing — is too great. But they see this as their last shot to investigate the 85-year-old building.

Earlier this year, AMC Entertainment announced that by 2008, the derelict former vaudeville playhouse and movie theater, where Charlie Chaplin once performed, would be transformed into a $25 million multiplex called the Mainstreet Theatre. The urban commandos have made it a point to get an inside look at important buildings being replaced for the downtown renaissance. Like the former TWA Building and the old Jones Store before they were refurbished, the Empire Theater now tops their must-see list. They don't care who knows they've been there; after today, construction obstacles will thicken enough to prevent even the most expert marauders from entering.

Billionaire and Wolf got in first a few weeks ago when someone left a back door open for the weekend. The door was locked the next time they checked, so the explorers have put the building under surveillance, driving by in search of more entrances.