An Urban Explorer Gone

The three friends approached the old factory. It was mid-morning on Sunday, September 9, so traffic on South Broadway was slight, reducing the likelihood of being seen. They scanned the perimeter, took a quick glance back. Then they walked through the unlocked gate and into the alleyway, looking for a way in.

The reasons for staying away from Gates were the same reasons for going inside. Behind its thousands of grime-caked windowpanes, the former factory was massive, antique, abandoned, filled with air ducts and conveyor belts and who knew what else.

That mystery is what attracted the three housemates, who were looking for a little diversion and adventure before their college classes kicked into high gear. Adam Buehler, who had his camera, walked alongside Michael Craig while John Polzin led the way — as usual. Known as Johnny to family and friends, he had just begun his final semester at Metropolitan State College of Denver, where he was earning a bachelor's degree in botany. But the 23-year-old was no science geek. At 6' 2", Johnny was nearly 200 pounds of solid muscle and athleticism. Above his heart was a flower, a Stargazer Lily, which he'd had tattooed on his chest when he started his official study of plant life. With subsequent ink sessions, the flower had grown around his shoulder and onto his back, a forest of vines and petals.

Nothing blossomed inside Gates except rust on the old machinery, but the factory was a hidden part of the world. And for Johnny, that made it worth seeing.

The friends found an unlocked door and stepped inside. After the sunshine, their eyes had trouble adjusting to the dim light beyond the threshold.

Johnny went first. A few steps later, he was gone.

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Joe Hicks read about the accident in the newspaper the next day. The story was barely a blurb, and simply reported that the fire department had rescued a man who'd fallen down an open elevator shaft at the Gates plant. But that was enough to shock Hicks. The night before the accident, the University of Colorado student had been exploring the factory himself. He and a buddy had snuck inside the building about midnight, armed with flashlights and waterproof boots, and hadn't emerged until daybreak. They'd missed the rescue by only a few hours.

"It was really weird, because we actually exited out that side," Hicks remembers. "I've racked my brain trying to remember places where he could've fallen in. There are lots of places where elevator doors had been pried open and it's just a straight drop down."

For Hicks, going into Gates is both a hobby and a sport. That's what urban explorers do, he explains: seek out abandoned, manmade structures and get inside them to see what they can see. Subway tunnels, empty mental hospitals and forgotten shopping malls are all fair game. Enter without breaking in and exit without getting caught. Post pictures on the Internet and trade tips with your peers. Hicks runs a website called Denver Drainers (www.denverdrainers.org) that lists the storm sewers and other tunnels beneath the city and describes what an explorer can find there.

Compared to East Coast cities with their massive metropolitan overlays and former manufacturing centers in the Rust Belt, Colorado has few options for explorers, mostly abandoned mines and forgotten missile silos ("Search Party," November 20, 2003). By far the most popular exploration destination is Gates, conveniently located south of downtown just off I-25.

A few years ago, Urban Explorers, a reality show on the Discovery Channel, featured Gates in a lengthy segment. The on-camera hosts crawled through steam tunnels beneath the buildings, explained the purposes of long-dormant machinery, scaled the famous water tower on the roof. The show didn't last long, though. Since the network felt obliged to obtain prior permission from property owners — in the case of Gates, a redevelopment company named Cherokee Denver — the action inside looked artificial and painfully cheesy.

Equally bad, but in a campy, B-movie way, is the sci-fi horror flick Shadow Walkers, which was filmed at Gates in 2005. When the factory went largely offline in the early '90s, there were more than 2.3 million square feet of industrial and warehouse space on the property. A little less than half of that could be attributed to Unit 10, where the majority of the manufacturing had taken place. Built in 1919, it was one of the oldest remaining structures on the site.

"It was really almost perfect for us," says David Marchiori, producer of Shadow Walkers, whose plot follows a group of soldiers and scientists being stalked through an underground bunker by a mutant monster. "It was supposed to be this kind of old, out-of-date, dormant facility, with circa 1910-to-1970s equipment. [Unit 10] is a million square feet of creature haven. Every corner you turn is just some new, creepier inspiration."

Between takes, the actors were asked to wear protective breathing masks to limit their exposure to the dangerous chemicals and asbestos that still contaminated the buildings and the soil below. And those weren't the only dangers. Thieves had been stripping copper wiring and other electrical fixtures from the factory, which meant that areas were torn up and power for the shoots had to be provided by rented generators, whose cords snaked across the floor. Crew members frequently stumbled on evidence of squatters, including discarded clothing and food wrappers. The brave few who ventured into the factory's darkest corners had to watch their step because of all the used syringes and crack pipes.

About three weeks into the film project, the movie crew arrived on the site one morning and saw that someone had scrawled "Death to the Daywalkers" in red paint across the entrance. The message was clear, Marchiori says: Gates had become its own underground province, and the natives were getting restless.

The movie-crew members were authorized visitors. But Gates also attracted graffiti crews that roamed the upper levels, covering the windows with their work. "Once we got the rooftop spots and the water tower, it sort of turned into a contest to get all the best spots," says ACEE, a leader of RTD, a local crew whose initials were spray-painted on the tower for months. "Once the windows were done, pretty much any kid and their grandma could tell that was the spot to be. Then everybody came down there and started painting."

Cherokee Denver had already hired a security company to periodically patrol the buildings at night, and now it brought in a graffiti-abatement team to cover the work of the crews. But nothing stopped the curious from coming. Particularly the urban explorers.

"Places like Gates — there has been so much traffic through there, it's sort of like a public forum," says Hicks. "There are so many stories to tell. It's what makes it interesting."

Most of the hard-core urban explorers in this town are geeks and hackers looking for an adrenaline kick away from their computers that isn't too illegal. But local law enforcement often doesn't appreciate the distinction. Legend has it that a few years ago, a police dog took a bite out of one Gates adventurer. And in mid-September, shortly after Hicks spent a night exploring the factory, police spotted Zachary Helm and a friend exiting one of the buildings. The 32-year-old Helm runs the Denver Hearse Association, a group devoted to tricked-out funeral cars. This was his seventh time inside Gates, whose impending demolition had induced him to break a cardinal rule of urban exploring: He took souvenirs — a small sign from one of the buildings and a few switch boxes because they looked cool. Police charged Helm with felony burglary, and he spent three days in jail before posting bond.

"You have no idea how large that complex is until you really get in there," says Helm, who was able to plead the charge down to a misdemeanor. "It's absolutely amazing. Just the roof alone is like a small city."

A small city that attracts many strangers.

Though John Polzin liked to explore, he was not an official urban explorer. In fact, he never knew the activity had a name, his friends say. He was more of a nature guy, an all-around vagabond. He scaled fourteeners, hopped freight trains, climbed rainforest canopies in Hawaii and biked through the Nevada desert during Burning Man wearing only a loincloth. He liked to go on long runs with his father in the foothills near where he'd grown up in west Arvada.

Hicks is also a middle-class child of a 'burb, Littleton, where the built environment of chain stores and office parks stands in sharp contrast to an old-school industrial icon like the Gates plant.

"It's got this defined American production feel to it," says Hicks, who researched the factory's history online before starting his exploration. "Even when I was in there, I could kind of imagine the industrial revolution with people clocking in and busting asses on the line. Or during World War II, when they made Jeep tires. I've never really known anything like that, when America still made things. Now everything is outsourced overseas, and there's nothing left except this huge empty thing."

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Charles Gates Sr. had a saying: "Throw your hat across the creek!"

He would say it at board meetings, to business associates and in company newsletters. Throw your hat across the creek! It was an Old West expression that had something to do with pioneers tossing their hats to the other side of waterways as incentive for covered wagons to cross. He liked the symbolism of it. Independent men taking risks to forge new frontiers. He thought that the Gates Rubber Company, which he'd built out of nothing along the banks of the South Platte, was an extension of that same entrepreneurial, Western spirit.

A former mine superintendent, in 1911 Gates had paid $3,500 for the Colorado Tire and Leather Company, located at 1025 South Broadway. He came up with the idea of a durable tread, a strip of leather that wrapped around the metal wheels to extend their lifespan, and based on the success of this invention, within a year the company had expanded to seventeen leather cutters and stenographers to handle the mail-order business. But Gates didn't want to waste any leather scraps, so he decided to make horse halters, too, and gave Buffalo Bill Cody a half-dozen to test on his wild mustangs. Cody liked them so much that he agreed to endorse the halters, and Gates soon became the nation's largest horse-halter manufacturer.

The tire business was on a roll, too, and Gates next introduced the half-sole tire cover, which replaced the leather with a rubber tread set in a fabric carcass. This innovation completely changed the industry, not just making tires more durable, but adding traction. The company expanded further down South Broadway. Then in 1915, an employee inadvertently invented the Vulco Flat Belt, with rubber replacing the leather straps of engine belts. Charles Gates's brother John soon improved on this with the rubber V-belt, which replaced the hemp rope then used to run automobile-engine fans and quickly revolutionized the belt business.

When rubber prices dropped in the 1920s, Gates renamed the business the Gates Rubber Company and began making actual tires, including the Super Tread and a slew of other products. On the roof of the factory, near the water tower, Gates built a testing facility where a tire attached to a pole could roll along a circular track. But he didn't stop there. In keeping with the City Beautiful movement that was sweeping the country, he added a rooftop garden featuring grand pillars and vine-covered lattices, as well as an ornate dining area where Gates could host orchestras, socialite parties and even boxing matches.

Sales grew to more than $3 million annually. Facilities were opened in Chicago and San Francisco, and the Denver plant was dubbed the "West's biggest factory." In a newsletter, Gates opined that his company symbolized the dawn of a new day in industrialism: "Old-fashioned methods are dying, and the greedy labor-sweating employer whose horizon is no wider than the disc of a dollar is slowly being pushed to the wall. The men of the new school inject a broad humanity into their relation with the wage-earner and find their return in increased satisfaction and contentment — and efficiency."

Gates's rapid growth proved that it was possible to have a manufacturing seat west of the Mississippi. "The rise of the Gates Co. has given the West considerably more recognition than it had been receiving from Eastern leaders in automobile and rubber manufacturer organizations," the Rocky Mountain News declared in 1927. "Denver, President Gates concedes, is not 'industrially minded.' Very likely, he suggests, that's the only reason why there are not more factories here the size of his own."

By the 1930s, the complex had grown to thirty interconnected buildings over a 25-square-block area that manufactured some 120 products, including the world's first synthetic belt. During World War II, when the supply of raw rubber from Indochina was cut off, Gates went into round-the-clock war production, making everything from tires and gaskets to gas masks and TNT buckets. Newspaper stories described the complicated process of producing synthetic rubber from scratch, as "grizzled men" dumped the base materials into huge vats, "gray-haired women" stirred in chemicals and a "young girl" trimmed the still-warm products.

In the 1950s, Gates grew into a multinational corporation with dozens of plants across the Western hemisphere. When a strike by the United Rubber Workers Union in the '60s immobilized U.S. production for months, the company pushed for even greater geographic diversification, which put it at the forefront of the business trend now known as globalization.

At its peak, the Gates factory in Denver employed over 5,500 people. One of them was Egon Topp, who worked as a maintenance electrician at the plant for thirty years. Now 78 and living in Northglenn, Topp was raised in Germany, where there were few jobs for young men. He emigrated to Canada, then moved on to Denver, where he found work at Gates in 1961. At the time, the thousands of employees were divided between three shifts; as one shift clocked out, the next shift was already clocking in. It was Topp's job to make sure that the vast array of machinery was ready to start at the push of a button.

"There could not be any downtime," he explains, since any breakdowns or problems with the power generators could mean tens of thousands of dollars in lost productivity. The complex even had its own power plant. Topp's role required that he know every sector of the massive operation. The biggest was the tire division, which could produce up to 2,500 tires daily. From the rubber tires to their steel rims, everything was made at the plant.

The company kept growing — and diversifying. Under Charles Gates Jr., the company invested in Learjet, and also got into the development business in Colorado Springs. At the Denver facility, Gates created a health center complete with doctors and dentists. In 1971, the company opened a $21 million tire plant in Littleton, which could crank out 3,000 tires daily. But that facility was closed just three years later, when Gates discontinued tire production altogether. By then it had expanded into myriad products such as plastic bottles, cassettes and battery casings.

During the '80s, Gates began acquiring competitors in Europe and started a relentless push into Asia, India and China. Although the company built a new administration building at 990 South Broadway in 1985, two years later it announced that it was closing most of its manufacturing divisions in Denver, eliminating thousands of blue-collar jobs. "Soon only the belt division was left," Topp recalls. "Whole sections were shut down. They were laid off." When the union contract finally ran out in 1991, many more Gates workers simply retired, Topp included.

In 1996, what was by then known as the Gates Corporation was subsumed by Tomkins PLC, a British conglomerate, ending 85 years of family ownership. The company chose to maintain an administrative headquarters in Denver, but moved it to a new office building at the edge of the Platte Valley, which is reserved for upper-echelon management. The South Broadway facility was shuttered.

Topp has only fond memories of the company from which he receives a pension check every month, though it now comes stamped with the name of the British firm that purchased Gates. And he still recalls the Christmas party that Gates held every year at the Denver Coliseum, where all the children of employees would get presents. His daughter is a grown woman now, with a grown daughter of her own.

A few years ago, he was even able to go inside the old plant, when that granddaughter worked on the horror movie filmed in the basement. "It was just the basement floor," he remembers. "Not one machine was left from the tire division. Nothing. Thirty years."

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It was a pit. A big, fucking pit. The floor just dropped away into a ten-foot wide abyss, and then started again level and sturdy on the other side. They heard yelling, and screamed their friend's name.

Mike pulled out his phone and called for help. He was the dweeby red-headed kid no one would talk to in middle school — but Johnny had marched right up to him and announced, "Hi. I'm John Polzin." The only boy in a family of three sisters, from then on Johnny regarded Mike as his brother.

While Mike made his frantic calls, Adam decided to climb down into the shaft. They didn't have a flashlight; they hadn't thought they'd need one. Adam made it down one level, then another. The shaft went farther. Five feet below basement grade, thirty feet down, he finally reached the bottom and stepped into water that came up to his shins. He felt around and found Johnny. His friend was still breathing. Adam remembers that the water smelled grimy, like corrosion and stale air.

Adam is thin and bookish and looks younger than his 24 years. One of his first memories of Johnny is the time that Johnny helped him make soup. They didn't live together then; Adam had just joined a mutual friend over at Johnny's house for dinner and offered to help. Johnny seemed to know what he was doing — he'd taken cooking classes — so Adam asked for instructions. How big should he cut the carrots? What about the potatoes? Spices?

"I don't know, man," Johnny had answered. "Do it however you want."

But he didn't say it like he didn't care how Adam made the soup. He said it like it was more important that Adam do the soup his own way, whatever way that was. Adam had never thought of it like that.

"I felt that same kind of push from him," Adam says now. "I saw him encouraging people and myself and everybody else to do what they wanted to do and not worry about what people told them. Just follow whatever you think is right."

Johnny was like that about everything. Last year, after seeing some tap dancers at Boulder's Dinner Theatre, he'd asked his sisters to get him lessons for Christmas. But when he showed up at the Arvada Center in his brand-new tap shoes, he was the only student who wasn't a girl under the age of ten. His sisters suspect there may have been a class recital, but he refused to clue them in on the date and time.

Johnny's interests were nothing if not eclectic. He convinced his father, Larry Polzin, to take accordion classes with him. He practiced making funny faces in the mirror the way others lift weights. He served on his college's student election commission. For birthday gifts, he wrote letters that methodically detailed what he viewed as the recipient's talents and unique qualities. He volunteered at the Denver Botanic Gardens and gave tours of the fauna and flora, sharing Latin names, geographic origins, all of it.

His parents were planning a move to Seattle in January. Johnny was going to move there, too, and get his master's in botany while working with his father in a new business creating gold-leaf plaques. He wanted to own a small farm, grow organic vegetables and save the world.

But in the blackness of the shaft, everything had changed.

Adam isn't sure how long they waited. Ten minutes? Twenty? Then the Denver Fire Department arrived, and the Engine 11 team put its ground ladder down the shaft to provide access for rescuers. The basement elevator door was pried open so that Johnny could be removed safely.

A body with less of a he-man physique might never have survived such a fall, and even so, Johnny's injuries were bad: broken bones, internal injuries. He drifted in and out of consciousness. Up top, local TV camera crews had already arrived. Mike and Adam refused to speak with reporters.

They did speak with Denver Police Department sergeant David Williams. The factory is part of Williams's sub-district in District 4, and he is quite familiar with the different types of people that Gates attracts. Since 2003, when the factory officially closed, police have been dispatched to the property at least twelve times on burglary reports, and nearly a dozen more on calls about trespassers or unwanted persons in the building.

But Williams doesn't believe the three friends had nefarious intentions.

"In my heart at the time, I don't think they were in there to get copper," he says. "They were college students and they had heard through the grapevine that it's kind of neat to explore. That was their story, and I believe it."

It was a different situation in April 2006, when Williams and other officers took on an organized gang of as many as twenty copper thieves looking to strip anything they could out of the buildings to sell to the scrap yards. Usually they'd use the money they got to feed a meth habit, Williams says. Seven people were arrested immediately, but because the remaining suspects were spread out over multiple levels, officers called in the K-9 unit.

"When you get into the sub-basements, it's pitch black," he explains. "It's an old factory. It's a dangerous environment."

So dangerous that one of the police dogs was overcome by chemical fumes. Another crawled beneath a machine and fell into a pit filled with debris and fluid. "His handler crawled under the machine and tried to grab the dog. I held the handler's legs so he wouldn't fall in," Williams remembers. "And we pulled the dog out finally."

The dogs were taken to a veterinarian for treatment and are now back in service. One of the men arrested in that sweep, 48-year-old Robert Bordas, was later sentenced to four years in prison.

Ferd Belz, president of Cherokee Denver, says that break-ins have been a huge problem for the company. "We have a constant program where somebody breaks a fence, we come back in and rechain it," he explains. "In some places, we literally welded doors shut, and then people come in and break through welded doors. So it's just a constant, ongoing effort."

The sheer size of the site, coupled with the archaic design of some of the buildings, offers any number of permeable spots where trespassers can find entry. During the day, Belz says, the company relies on asbestos-removal workers and other employees to keep an eye on the property. At night it contracts with a security company to do patrols and "close things back up," he adds. "We've done everything that the police and insurance companies have advised us as far as posting it and making sure that things are sealed up."

Louis Adams would disagree.

For months, Adams waged a one-man campaign to warn the contractors and property owners of a dangerous, open shaft at Gates. The fifty-year-old Adams has no connection with Gates or the Polzin family. In a videotaped statement that Adams gave police, he said he first became aware of the "hazardous" shaft in March, when he decided to take an impromptu tour around the exterior of the site with his eight-year-old daughter, who's always had a thing for what she calls the "rubber band" factory.