5.  The Abandoned Spaces Inside the James A. Farley Post Office

As urban explorers know well, even when you’re shown off-limits places, you know there are even more. The post office supported 16,000 workers at its peak, but less than 200 today. You can imagine just how many abandoned spaces there are inside, a concept explored by the artist Katarzyna Krakowaik in a past art installation by Storefront for Art and Architecture.
The project took place in a former police corridor just above the service counters in the main hall. “The lookout gallery,” a name dubbed by the workers, is actually an extensive system of secret corridors that connected thousands of rooms in the old Post Office, with small eyeholes for postal policemen to control the working environment through an analog CCTV.
We also did our own exploring (see photos) until a postal worker kindly took us seemingly lost souls back to the main hall, exiting at the quirky Museum of Postal History. It looks like some other readers took the cue and got even deeper into the post office than we did, infiltrating the very areas that inspired Krakowaik — the spaces for workers that were under observation by the police lookout gallery. Instagram user rysgam submitted several photographs to the Untapped Cities photo pool, which you can find here.