"It was a very real place, definitely not a Disney attraction," Perez says. "Disney left it to go wild, and it certainly did."
Days after his photos were posted, they were spotted by a Disney fan site, which notified the company. In one day, Perez's web traffic shot up to more than 80,000 hits. NBC affiliate WESH in Orlando reported the incident, and Disney reportedly responded by banning Perez from all of its property for life.
Courtesy of Shane Perez
Shane Perez at the Aerojet facility silo.
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Perez and his friends laughed it off — in part because they knew getting banned from a theme park is the least of an urb exer's worries. Besides arrest and incarceration for trespassing, death is a real possibility. Earlier that year, a 23-year-old urban explorer in Denver named Johnny Polzin had died after plunging down an elevator shaft in an abandoned rubber factory.
Perez admits his friends and family worried constantly. Once in 2009, Perez sprained his ankle while rappelling down a shaft in a New York aqueduct during a solo trip. Unable to get out, he had to call friends for help.
Other Miami urb exers have run into "scrappers" — scrap-metal-jacking thieves high on drugs, often armed with knives and other weapons. Robert Canas, 42, a Miami resident who goes by his online name, "RobTech," remembers an incident during a trip to an abandoned church in Coconut Grove where he encountered a lone scrapper looking disheveled, high, and ready to either fight or bolt. Canas was freaked out, but held his ground until the scrapper left.
"If you show these people that you're scared, you sort of get manhandled," Canas says.
Heather McTiernan, Perez's ex-girlfriend and former urb exing partner, says she suspects that without the danger — and without the adrenaline — urb exers wouldn't be as passionate about their hobby. She was once almost arrested with Perez while checking out an old power plant. Thanks to his smooth talking, police eventually let them slide.
"What really, really helped was that Shane is very exuberant," she says.
Dangerous or not, urb exing doesn't look to be going away. Reality shows such as Urban Explorers on Discovery and Fear on MTV feature the hobby. Perez has his own starring scene in the rising subculture. Melody Gilbert's 2007 film, Urban Explorers: Into the Darkness, follows the lives of a handful of urban explorers across the country, including Perez. One scene shows him climbing into the missile silo and posing for the camera.
Perez has since left Miami for New York City, but the local scene has found new adherents. "Bullet," as Bulit calls himself online, is the main writer, researcher, and administrator for AbandonedFL.com, along with his friend E.J. Walsh. In all, at least a dozen locals are regular urb exers and many more are semiregulars. The crew has steadily added to the list of explored sites. Inside the "Big Easy," a massive yacht outfitted as a casino but left derelict in a Tampa dry dock after Hurricane Wilma, the crew found dusty chandeliers made of Mardi Gras beads and dead slot machines; at Jungleland Zoo, a deserted animal park near Kissimmee, they photographed themselves with discarded "Animals May Bite" signs.
Bulit agreed to take a New Times reporter with him on his most recent trespassing exploration into the Aerojet plant. Getting there was tedious — first a long drive through rural South Dade and then a long hike down a paved road. But decades after the plant closed in the late '60s, there's not much in the way of security; fences have long since rusted into the marshy ground.
Inside, the once-cutting-edge buildings are tagged with obscene graffiti; every metal bit has been stripped away by looters. It's a desolate scene. But to guys like Bulit, that's the point.
"That's part of the thrill of it," he says. "It's serious and it's edgy and it's exciting."
