BY COLIN MIXSON | Daredevil shutterbug James McNally professes to have scaled just about every marquee high-rise in New York City — with One World Trade Center and the Empire State Building being the only notable exceptions — and he’s happy to admit that his trips to the city’s highest reaches never come with an invitation.
“We know it’s illegal,” he said, “but we want to show these amazing views.”
McNally, who operates under the alias jamakiss when posting images of his exploits online, is one of NYC’s hotshot rooftoppers — a recent craze amongst thrill-seeking photographers, in which camera-carrying urban explorers sneak their way to the top of highly secure skyscrapers in the pursuit of vertigo-inducing snapshots.
And he’s generally not concerned about the risks to life and liberty that his illicit hobby entails, and says he takes the legal dangers of trespassing 1,000-feet above street level as a necessary step on his way to the top.
“Anyone who’s serious about it needs to realize the risk, and that you can spend time in jail and money on court fees and that kind of stuff,” said McNally.
However, after a picture appeared on McNally’s Instagram account that seemed to have been taken from atop the towering construction site at 10 Hudson Yards — which he does not admit to taking — McNally said he began receiving some extra-legal attention from an undercover detective working for the building’s property managers, which made the hazards he invites really hit home.
“I’ve always taken the position that to do what I do assumes physical risk and the risk of getting monitored and tracked by people,” he said. “I wasn’t naive to the fact that it’s a possibility, but it brought it home in a more personal sense.”
Shortly after the images from atop the Hudson Yards development surfaced on McNally’s Instagram account, he received an email message from a man claiming to be a big fan of his rooftopping work, and said he wanted to meet and talk shop.
The photographer took his self-proclaimed fan up on the invite, and the pair arranged to meet at a Williamsburg coffee shop — but not before McNally did a little research on his alleged admirer.”
“I saw right away his LinkedIn, and it was a whole list of security company jobs…and I already knew it was not a photography fan,” McNally recounted. “But I wanted see if they would go through with it and see what their whole spiel was.”
At the coffee shop, McNally met a “nice” gentleman in weekend casual attire, who was armed with a photo album that only served to confirm the rooftopper’s suspicions.
“They were terrible pictures,” he said.
“I was like, ‘Why are you talking to me about photography?’ ”
It wasn’t long before the so-called photography fan spilled the beans, and admitted he was a private investigator with a security outfit contracted to protect Hudson Yards — but the game wasn’t quite up, McNally said.
The surreptitious security professional continued to stroke McNally’s ego, and spoke of the possibility of paying the photographer for penetration tests, in which he would sneak into the building in an attempt to work out flaws in the building’s security system.
However, the conversation kept coming back to the Hudson Yards shots on McNally’s Instagram, and the urban explorer said he’s certain that the investigator merely wanted McNally to cop to the alleged trespassing there.
“He, probably a dozen times, if not more, tried to get me to go on record saying that,” McNally said. “He was very focused on that property.”
McNally declined to share the investigator’s name, or the security company he worked for, but said the encounter proves that private security companies are starting to focus on combating rooftoppers as a means of shoring up their client’s liability, and deduced that his “fan” was an expert in repelling the kind of trespassing McNally routinely perpetrates.
“I think he was a subject matter expert on this. I’m not so naive to think this isn’t on the radar of security companies,” he said. “If I’m a big security company, whose bread and butter is protecting big construction sites, this is going to be on my radar.”
As much attention as McNally has received from Hudson Yards — whose developer, Related Companies, declined to comment for this story — he’s infamous, if not more so, amongst Downtown property owners.
Late last year, McNally “hacked” the tower at 70 Pine St., located between Pearl and William Sts., in an escapade that he documented with a Go-Pro camera that recorded his ascent from the lobby all the way up to the top of its airy spire, nearly 1,000 feet above the streets of the Financial District.
In response to that trespass, property managers at 70 Pine St., along with representatives from other towers similarly invaded by outlaw photographers, met with members of Community Board 1 (CB1) and officers of the First Precinct on Mar. 2, in an effort to better understand how to defend themselves from the rooftopper rampage.
The property owners are concerned that this fad among young photographers is exploding in popularity, and that the trend is only going to pick up steam once the weather warms, according to a representative for 70 Pine St.
“It’s cool, and everybody’s going to want to do it,” said Josephexander, development project manager for DTH Capital, which along with Rose Associates owns the former office tower, now being converted to a luxury residential building. “There’s a clear intention that people want to continue to climb, and when the weather gets nicer, with these videos getting several thousand hits, each year there’s going to be an incident.”
In December of last year, a man fell to his death from the top of the 52-story Four Seasons Hotel in Midtown, according to police, who said he was trying to take pictures from a rooftop catwalk.
However, the penalties for such trespassing aren’t particularly stiff, especially when a private building has a public lobby. In such cases, defense attorneys can easily argue for a motion to have charges pared down to a simple violation, according to officer Brian Nelson.
“Private buildings, even though they’re private, if the public has access to them, their lawyer will claim they have a right to be in a building…which would knock it down to a violation from a misdemeanor,” Nelson said at the meeting.
And even if prosecutors were able to make a misdemeanor charge stick, judges usually avoid handing out the maximum 90-day sentence to first-time offenders in favor of an adjournment in contemplation of dismissal, or ACD, which essentially lets the culprit avoid jail while doing community service, according to Zachary Johnson, a criminal defense lawyer and former prosecutor with the District Attorney’s Office.
“For a first offense that would probably be an ACD, which is a six-month stay-out-of-trouble and a few days community service,” said Johnson.
McNally certainly isn’t immune to prosecution. On Mon., Mar. 21, the photographer was arraigned in criminal court for reckless endangerment and criminal trespass, in charges stemming from the alleged Pine St. trespass. The adventuresome shutterbug says that management at 70 Pine St. are concerned that shots of his exploits will embolden other thrill seekers to scale the 952-foot tower, but that having him arrested won’t do the trick.
“They are concerned about publicity around the building as an [urban exploration] destination, and presumably about me potentially intending to go back there,” McNally said. “However, having me arrested will not get them any closer to their goals for the property’s security or profile.”
Ultimately, community board members walked away with the impression that the police have bigger problems to deal with than Instagramming trespassers, and that it’s up to building owners and their security staff to ward off the illicit photographers.
“I think it becomes exceptionally difficult to expect the NYPD to be able to arrest and actually incarcerate these people that are guilty of trespassing,” said CB1 member Paul Hovitz. “There was an announcement that, as a reaction to the subway slashing, they’re now assigning a police officer on every train. So when you consider how thinly spread they’re going to be, what’s the chances of getting a response, even though you want to curb this problem?”
For his part, McNally has every intention of continuing to seek the heights — even if it makes landlords queasy.
“It’s not something I’m going to stop doing,” he said.
You can look for him on Instagram — or maybe just look up.
