Don’t condemn the Urban Explorers

On Monday afternoon, a 16-year-old boy fell 50 feet down an internal access shaft inside one of the towers of New York City’s Queensboro Bridge, the 350-foot-tall behemoth that links East Midtown Manhattan to Long Island City, Queens. The teenaged boy was the victim of what local news sources called a “social-media challenge” or “TikTok stunt” gone awry. He’d been with a group of friends who were filming the exploit, and who fled the scene without calling for help for fear of getting arrested — though, naturally, they also immediately posted video of the accident to social media.