Meet the Clevelanders Climbing Bridges and Chasing Rooftops for the Best Views in the City

To most Clevelanders, the crane that arrived to help construct the new 32-story downtown Hilton hotel was just a crane, if they noticed it at all. A piece of construction equipment.

To a select few, it was something else completely. A beautiful rarity in Cleveland, an invitation of sorts: It was something new to climb.

Kevin Inthavong (@churkh) mentions the crane just a few minutes into a recent chat at an Ohio City coffee shop. He’s talking about the scope of the climbing community in Cleveland compared to cities like Chicago and New York. It’s a small group, but you’d be surprised at how many of them there are and where they’ve been.

“Take the crane,” says the 21-year-old. “Aside from construction workers, I know of 24 people who’ve climbed and photographed the crane from the top. And that’s just people who have photographed it, that’s just what I’ve found on Instagram.”

When Inthavong says “climbed the crane,” he’s being literal in one way and descriptive in another. He didn’t scale the crane from the bottom while pulling himself up the outside of the equipment.

“There’s a stairwell right in the middle of it,” he says. “And if you go into the building, you go up and there’s a platform you walk across to get into that and it’s a few flights up from there.”

So while he wasn’t impersonating Spider-Man on the ascent, so to speak, he did climb onto the outside of the equipment once he was at the top.

Inthavong pulls out his iPhone, finding a picture he’d posted to Instagram of one of the nights he was up there. And there he is, left hand grasping a thick wire and his feet at the intersection of the crane’s arm, the top of the Terminal Tower in the background and the pavement some 30 stories below.

“I like to say that the construction company was probably aware of us,” he says. “They made a barricade at the base of the crane and tagged someone else that had climbed it and posted a picture. We just laughed because that’s not even how we got on there in the first place. We’re pretty popular among their group, though, construction workers. I’m not special, I make that clear. If construction workers had cameras then I’d be out of business. They find our pictures though. ‘You hear about these climbing kids?’ you know. ‘They do what we do.'”

Except the construction workers are supposed to be there.

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As long as there have been bridges and rooftops, there have been people on the top of both. The evolutionary differences here are two-fold: First, in the case of buildings, a rooftop barbecue is a far cry from sitting on the ledge of a high-rise you have no business or legal right to be on. (Which doesn’t mean you should discount the very legal ways climbers gain access to roofs: Many times it’s as easy as simply asking someone you know in the building. More on that in a little bit.) Second, the ability to take and widely share magnificent photos. Just because you (and we) started noticing them in recent years doesn’t mean it wasn’t being done before.

“The very first time I attempted to climb a lift bridge, in what must have been 2003 or 2004, I remember walking up to the lifter at the mouth of the river known as the Iron Curtain,” says one climber who’s been doing this for more than a decade and who preferred we not use his name. “When I got to within 20 feet of the bridge and paused to figure out a game plan, my eyes focused on the bridge and I realized there were at least six people scattered all over the bridge wearing all black with white bandanas over their face. One of the strangest things I’ve ever seen while out exploring. Just goes to show that people have likely been climbing those bridges since the day they were built. But in terms of recent growth, you could probably chart the growth and it would follow the exact line of growth of Instagram.”

It’s where we found Lisa A.M., otherwise known as @amusemymuse, a little more than two years ago. Lisa’s a mother of two in her mid-30s who, at the time and now, sported one of the more scenic and badass IG accounts in Cleveland. She started the feed about two years before that, and after the climber, who has a background in ballet and yoga, posted awe-inspiring pics from the tops of bridges, she started getting pings from others. She traveled to Chicago and Detroit and found a scene that didn’t really exist at the time in Cleveland, at least not semi-publicly.

“The big thing in Chicago is rooftopping,” she explained to us at the time for an interview for Scene’s People issue. “Everybody’s chasing rooftops there. Coming home to Cleveland, I was like, ‘Why isn’t there anybody here doing this kind of stuff?'”

She ran Instagram meetups which mainly drew people interested in photography and urban exploration, two hobbies that have a natural overlap.

“Instagram has literally changed my life,” she told us back then. “It’s weird to say that about an app on my phone, but it’s connected me to so many people around the world. I was always into adventure and just living, and then I kind of lost that at some point along the way. But last year, meeting all those people in Detroit and getting out to explore abandoned buildings, and then meeting all those people in Chicago — it just kind of reminded me how much I love getting out, seeing what’s out there. It’s inspired me to get out here, to see what’s here and dig deeper, finding the hidden side of Cleveland.”

That they have.

Lisa is kind of the central figure in the community, which counts somewhere between 15 and 30 regular climbers in that loose definition. When Inthavong, who besides working at H&M takes photos of various events around town, first got the bug, it was because of Lisa’s feed, and an Instagram meetup is where they first met. The same goes for Tim Long (@timothyplong), another climber/photographer, and Pierson Trimarchi (@pierson_), a 26-year-old mechanical engineer and photographer.

“I started following Lisa on Instagram,” says Long. “I went to a couple meetups and met her in person and just went out a few times, taking photos. It felt like something that was unique. They’re a very private, close-knit group in terms of who they hang out with. It’s almost like being accepted into this exclusive clique.”

“It’s a tight group,” says Trimarchi. “You have to kind of know people who do it. You can’t just ask. So I went to the meetups and started from there. I knew Kevin from Instagram and whatnot, but I didn’t meet him intentionally. I was climbing early in the summer and I was on top of the bridge that connects Whiskey Island to the east bank of the Flats late at night. I was by myself, alone for a good 20 minutes. Then I see these two black figures descending from one of the tresses. We didn’t get close enough to talk to each other and I had no idea who it was, but I posted one of the photos the next day and Kevin commented, ‘Oh, you’re the guy I saw up there!” And then we started exploring and climbing together.”

There’s an affinity there that binds them together, but also a host of motivations that bring them there in the first place.

“I’ve always loved heights. I’ve always been a climber,” Lisa told us back when we first talked to her in 2014. “If you ask my parents, they’ll tell you I’ve been climbing since before I could walk. It’s a lifelong obsession: Anything climbable, I’m up there.”

When we caught up with her this month, she elaborated a bit. “For me, it is a lifelong obsession with heights, as well as a curiosity, love, and respect for history and architecture. I thrive on challenges and believe the research and discovery process is part of the adventure.”

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The anonymous climber mentioned earlier echoes that exploration sentiment. “I could say that I was exploring and climbing things that I shouldn’t have been since I was in grade school — drain tunnels, the building at the park, the neighbor’s garage. I was a dumb kid, we were all dumb kids. You get in trouble. You wouldn’t know people were doing it before, because no one was taking pictures and posting them on Facebook. If there were photos, they were maybe on Flickr, but Flickr really was by and for photographers.”

And most of these climbers are photographers either from the start or by virtue of wanting to capture what they see.

“I was looking at it more from a photography perspective, views that no one else has access to,” says Trimarchi. “You see the same pictures of the skyline over and over and you can only make it so nice. Climbing roofs and bridges, you get views of the city that no one else gets. I like it for that respect. I have no real fear of heights. I just like being able to experience the views; it’s peaceful and secluded and kind of only for you.”

The mundane yet extensive documentation of the Cleveland skyline is something you’re probably familiar with. There are only so many buildings, so many vantage points. Drive by and through the city enough and it becomes white noise. Walk around downtown and it can only present itself in so many variations: How many identical pictures of the Terminal Tower have you seen on IG? It’s boring as a viewer. Imagine how boring it is as a photographer.

“For me it started as getting a cool angle to document our city,” says Tim Long. “We’ve seen shots from Edgewater and the east side and here you have these people who want a different angle, one above the city. You’re part of it. You can see an alley that maybe not everyone else sees. We want to document things that we think are important. There’s buildings that no one really paid attention to until this community took notice of those rooftops and you see what you can only see when you’re on top of it.”

The view is certainly unique, which is why the snaps get attention. The buildings and bridges, the crosses and tresses and reflections, they are integral parts of the composition. So too is the body, which when perched at the top — the very top — of say, the Detroit-Superior Bridge or seated on the ledge of a 15-story building, legs dangling off the edge, becomes startling. A prop. A reason, beyond the high technical quality, that the pictures stand out.

“Some people take pictures of their food,” says Inthavong, putting it simply. “I take pictures from the buildings I climb.”

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Anyone climbing, taking photos and posting them has been asked by someone to take them up. They come weekly, from out of towners and friends. Some say yes, some say no, some give recommendations on some of the easier locales around the city.

“I’m willing to take people: I’d rather show them than they do it themselves and get hurt,” says Inthavong. “I’ve taken people with rock climbing experience, people with military backgrounds, and others who I just might know from high school. I’ve shown like eight people, the people that I’m responsible for. From there, you can figure it out and you know what to do and what not to do. I don’t take minors though, as a rule. That’s a bad idea.”

Inthavong took us out on a beginner’s crash course one evening in late November. We started with a walk in Duck Island that winds its way up to the plateau and bridge that carries the RTA’s Red Line.

“I come here a lot,” Inthavong says. “It’s quiet. We’ll just come here and hang out.”

It’s not high or dangerous, just quiet and secluded. The view looking east toward downtown is magnificent. He points out the ease with which you could scale the bridge to the top. He points to the various bridges dotting the Cuyahoga River: He’s climbed them all. He’s climbed just about every climbable building in Cleveland: Progressive Field (there’s a shot on his Instagram feed of him sitting atop the script “Indians” on the scoreboard), The 9, most of the Warehouse District buildings, most in the Flats. There are few places he and others haven’t been. And access is pretty easy. Walk into a hotel and go into the stairwell. Ask a friend to let you into their apartment building. Hop up on a fire escape in an alley.

Lest you get visions of the crazy daredevil Russian teens posting videos of themselves dangling off buildings by one hand, or dangling their friends off buildings arm-in-arm, that’s not what this community is about. “That’s just cocky,” says Inthavong. “I’m not a huge fan of that.”

“I weigh my risk vs. reward every time I do it,” says one climber. “I could say, ‘Well, if I just hang on to this one spot, I could get a really cool photo,’ but is that worth the reward if I have to dangle from this tower crane? No, no, no. I don’t always act like an adult, but I am an adult, so I can’t help but think like one.”

Kevin and Lisa and a few others stand out for the precarious positions they put their bodies in — on the arm of the crane, for instance — but many more err on the cautious side of that risk vs. reward equation.

And in terms of access, this also isn’t Jason Bourne-style alley-hopping. There is certainly climbing, especially for some of the tougher, unique locales — scaling to the tippy top of the Eagle Avenue bridge, for instance — but most times it’s simply a matter of going where you might not think to go. Like up a winding dirt path to the RTA tracks.

“It’s basically like climbing a ladder,” says Tim Long. “Some of them are more difficult. I’d never loved heights, but I like pushing myself and getting out of my comfort zone. The people you’re with make you feel comfortable. You have to have balls to get up there, but there have been times I’ve assessed a situation and thought, ‘This might be a badass photo, but it’s not for me.'”

“If you can climb a ladder you can basically do it,” says the anonymous climber. “For a long time I couldn’t walk an I-beam under a bridge, an 8-inch I-beam. My knees would go to jelly. But you get up there, you get up there a couple more times, and now it’s like, ‘Okay, I’m jogging across it.’ It’s amazing how quickly the fear kind of goes away.”

We can climb a ladder, so Inthavong drives us over to a near-westside four-story building after the trip to the RTA tracks. We park down the street and walk to the side of the building. He steps over a fence that isn’t so much a fence as a trampled down bit of metal on the ground. Next is another fence, this one still standing, about 6 feet tall. We climb it and reach up to a fire escape and pull ourselves up to the skinny set of stairs that zag up the side of the building like a line graph. There’s a rush, a small one, but the adrenaline is flowing. It pumps a little faster on the third floor where there’s a light in a window and a woman who bangs on the glass, clearly unpleased by our presence. We could be robbers, for all she knows. The mission, so to speak, is aborted. After we quickly scamper back down the way we came and make our way back to the car, the thought materializes that we probably scared the shit out of her.

“Sometimes that happens,” says Inthavong. He’s talking about someone putting an abrupt end to a climb. We’re more concerned with the woman who saw two men traipsing up the side of her building late at night. But after that thought fades away, it’s replaced by one that very clearly wants to go do this again, somewhere else.

“There’s part of it that’s definitely that you’re doing something bad, but it’s not the worst thing,” says Tim Long. “It’s like when you were 13 and you were doing dumb shit. You feel like a kid.”

It’s actually rare to get noticed or draw attention in most situations, simply by virtue of the fact that people on the ground pay little attention to their city.

“It’s surprising. I could be on a rooftop that’s only six stories up and I can be hanging out there for 30 minutes and I won’t be worried about anyone looking up. No one looks up,” says Pierson Trimarchi. “I could climb up the face of a building and no one would pay attention.”

There are dangers, of course, that go beyond injuries or falling. You can get chased out by private security, you can get caught by the cops and maybe get a trespass citation, you can get your camera confiscated and spend a few nights in jail if someone really wanted to throw the book at you. But that rarely happens, and it certainly doesn’t stop anyone.

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There’s an odd sort of binary going on with the climbers when they talk about their hobby and why they wish it didn’t get so much attention. That doesn’t go for everyone. Pierson, for instance, talked for this article because, “I don’t feel like it needs to be that close-knit of a secret. I don’t want it to turn into something that everyone is doing, but I don’t feel like it has to be mine and mine only. It’s not my community, I feel a little more detached and I’m getting into it from a photography perspective.”

Others disagree to a degree and for a variety of reasons, but they acknowledge that there’s an interesting intersection in posting and sharing their photos far and wide on Instagram while still not wanting too many people to know about it.

“I’m not big on the publicity aspect of the hobby,” says the anonymous climber. “Normally I’ve turned down interviews, but there’s definitely a little hypocrisy there. It’s one thing to post a photo of some gorgeous view and it’s another to share those photos and the stories behind those photos with a much broader audience that normally wouldn’t be exposed to them.

“It’s a fun hobby,” he continues. “But — I don’t know if this is going to come out the right way — but I don’t necessarily think some people doing it deserve the attention they get. It’s not that difficult to do, and it’s gimmicky. The line between art and ‘look at what I did’ is pretty small. I think there’s less art and more shock value. I love taking the photos and the experience but I could go out tonight and take a photo from the top of any bridge and post it, and in the morning I’ll have a couple hundred Instagram likes and new followers and comments. I could also go out and take a beautiful black and white portrait and I could spend a long time on it making it this perfect, breathtaking photo and post it, and it’ll get half as many likes and I’ll lose followers. It’s shock value.”

The undercurrent there is that as the crane was an invitation to the climbers, the publicity is an invitation to others to do what the climbers are already doing. “It’s flattering that it’s becoming popular and people are into it,” he says. “But the more attention it gets, you wonder how much longer I can do this. I miss the hobby when it was a little underground. Now, you post a photo and two weeks later six other people have posted the exact photo. When you’re talking about a bridge, if you get to the top, you’re standing on a 10-by-10 platform and there’s the skyline and you’re limited, you can’t help but take the same photos as everyone else.”

For Lisa, it’s more a matter of climbing being a very personal activity.

“Exploring is just something I do. It feeds my soul and I don’t mind sharing my photos online — much like someone would share photos of any hobby,” she says. “Doing so has allowed me to connect with explorers around the world and create wonderful dear friendships, beyond exploring. On the other hand, I do not like the way mainstream media sensationalizes the activity, and I just don’t care about that kind of attention. I have been approached by all of the major local news channels multiple times for stories over the past few years, and I have declined.”

There’s also the issue of newbies perhaps going further than most members would go. Not in terms of danger, though there’s certainly a matter of that with some fresh hobbyists, but also in going beyond simply quasi-illegal trespassing.

“We abide by personal property law, you could say,” says Tim Long. “There’s been a huge rise though and this is what’s dangerous: You have kids who are breaking down doors, breaking fire doors, and our reputations suffer because of that.”

“I have respect for explorers who put in that work and tread lightly, leaving places exactly as they found them,” adds Lisa. “It breaks my heart to see destruction and the lack of respect some explorers have for iconic buildings and bridges.”

Visibility also has a more direct effect. “When you talk about publicity,” says the anonymous climber. “When it comes to articles talking about where we’re going, you’re announcing to the whole community, to the city, to the county, to ODOT, to the property managers, to the police. You’re saying, ‘Hey, we’re out here doing this every night.’ And now those guys who are responsible for security are going to say, ‘I didn’t know they were doing this. I gotta pay attention now. I gotta weld this door shut.'”

There are only so many spots and only so many shots in Cleveland, which is why most if not all of the climbers travel to other cities as well, exploring abandoned buildings and hooking up with local climbers to scope rooftops. Inthavong has hit Detroit, Columbus, Cincinnati and New York. Lisa has hit those and dozens of others. Her feed is a travel-bug’s dream (and an acrophobe’s nightmare). There she is high above Las Vegas, there she is overlooking the streets of New York, there she is in Detroit on top of the defunct Pontiac Superdome, its dome already gone as the demolition of the stadium continues. There she is guest hosting the Instagram feed for Palladium Boots beaming out pics from around the world.

“Exploring and climbing are important to me, but my family and other things in life come first. Sometimes I get out a lot and other times I go weeks between adventures. I travel as much as I can and have done lots of that in the past year or so … Chicago, L.A., NYC, Las Vegas, Detroit, Denver, and even Amsterdam. I have more big trips in the works, too,” she says. “Traveling has always been a priority for me. I want to see as much of the world as possible. One of the reasons I love living in Cleveland is that I can afford to travel often to places across the country and around the world.”

As far as new local urban climbs go, Kevin and Lisa and others will eagerly await each new building. Development is great for Cleveland, and it’s great for the climbers. Once the scaffolding and Flats East Bank sign went up, they were on top of it. Once the crane arrived for the Hilton hotel, they were up there too.

And as one climber noted, looking toward the future: “As soon as they put up the next tower crane, the same thing will happen again.”

Now see: 22 Photos from Atop Cleveland’s Rooftops and Bridges

This article appears in Dec 9-15, 2015.