AT MIDNIGHT, ON THE TOP OF A TREE, FACING THE TIET

To rethink the city, a hidden bar on a tree, in Playcenter's field

For a month, a hidden micro bar set up on a tree took almost a hundred people to break into the field where Playcenter used to be, in So Paulo. The idea belongs to the American N. D. Austin, who makes up experiences for people to think about their cities in a different way.

"Hey! Me and Rodrigo really want to offer you a unique and super secret experience. You only need to tell us where you are, so that someone can get you your invitation. And you need to keep it as a secret until September."

Carla sent me this message in early August, via whatsapp.A mensagem da Carla chegou no comeo de agosto, via whatsapp. As I answered yes, the next day, a Friday, I got a visitor that brought me a silver pocket watch as a gift. Inside it, a little rough paper with the basic instructions and a link for me to sign up on a website.

"Valid for two peopleThe Night Heron20h 24h. Fri Sat Sun - August 2014You can visit Night Heron only once. Entrance is only allowed if you carry this watch with you. Wear adventure shoes and get a coat. Be prepared for stairs and heights. Don't be late"

As I have the right to bring a companion with me, I call a friend: "Look, you're gonna think I'm crazy, but I want to invite you to something I can't even explain. Do you have plans for tonight?". I explain the little details i know and forward the informations i got by e-mail, after filling in the registration: we had to be at ten o'clock in a little square in Barra Funda, and wait for a driver wearing a hat to come pick us up. She goes with it.

I can't stand the curiosity and google "The Night Heron". The first link shows a "speakeasy" (secret bar) that worked hidden for two months last year in New York - precisely, inside the water tank of an abandoned building in Manhattan. The following link shows a video recorded there - an incredible party, for a small amount of people, in that absurd scenery. I call my friend back and obviously she has been researching the same thing, and risks a hunch: "I know, they'll take us to an abandoned building, we'll go up the stairs and up there there's gonna be a dinner for us".

At 10pm sharp of one of the coldest August nights, there we are, standing on the square, next to Barra Funda's street, together with four other people, waiting for the same driver wearing a hat. Some minutes later, he shows up, in a kombi (station wagon), and tells us: we are embarking on a journey that carries a certain number of risks. We should leave our cell phones in a backpack that will stay with him. And we will sit on the floor of the car, that had his seats removed.

The driving is fast, like 5 minutes. When the door opens, two girls welcome us, telling us to be quiet, and take us to a little door. It takes us like 15 minutes to silently walk in a straight line through a dark place, full of trees and roots and branches that we have to surpass with a certain difficulty, near a river that had been transformed into an open-sky sewage. I start thinking I got into a fraud. The girl walking in the front has got a radio with a earphone and communicates our steps, whispering in English, to someone we don't know who is. At some point of our walk, the tiny space opens up to a clear glade with some sheds, where she asks us to get down. I ask myself if the risk of being spotted (by who?) is real, or if that is all staged. I start feeling slightly irritated.

And because everything can always get worse, we get to the point where we need to cross an improvised bridge that goes above the river. No, not bridge: actually, we have to make our way between two parallel steel cables, wrapped up in a protective net. I remember Fausto's Olympics, but I can't find it funny. My friend goes straight to the question: "There's no way I'm climbing on that thing".

I face the crossing, and I can't deny that, in the end, the feeling of having done it is good. When the "bridge" is over, there's a wooden staircase leaning onto a tree. I face that one and, in the last steps, I see a new face that smiles, gives me her hand and, next thing, a glass of water. She presents herself as being Maria, colombian living in So Paulo and who's helping "the group". What group?, I ask. She laughs.

We're in a little wooden house set up on the top of an enormous tree. There are benches to sit on, pretty ilumination, a "little bar" with bottles and glasses and a pretty old sign saying: "The Night Heron". A guy with a moustache, wearing a hat and a coat, gets me a drink. He's a foreigner and his name is Nathan. In a higher floor, a girl plays the sax, Lvia.

My friend finally shows up: some way, the "leader" down there convinced her to cross the bridge. We have our water, look around and we notice that we're facing the Tiet's border. I am not that pissed anymore, but I keep my skeptical attitude and whisper: "I bet this is some drink's launch and we're gonna hate this people". We giggle about our own distrust. We manage to relax.

We spend the next hour and a half listening to Lvia playing and singing, having Nathan's drink, chatting and even dancing, despite the tiny space we found ourselves in. All the six guests (us), plus the singer, the host, the girls that drove us (Luciana and Carola) and Maria, we're eleven people total, all having fun. On top of a tree, 10 or 12 metres from the ground. Almost midnight on a Friday. Facing the river's border. I start to think that it's a genius idea. And that the drink, a mix of cachaa, vermouth and I don't know what else, is really good.

I learn that we're on a field where Playcenter used to run, the amusement park where every single paulistan had fun several times in their lives, and that was closed two years ago, to create space to commercial buildings. I gawp.

It's almost midnight and they tell us that it's time to go down and give us a paper that explains that this is some kind of "guerilla action", and that we can offer the same experience to anyone: for 200 reais (Brazilian coin), a friend can get the watch and call someone else to the seret adventure. Me and my friend, the both of us pretty distant from the rich women category, are so excited that we buy two watches. The idea of offering the experience to more people makes a lot of sense right in that time.

We finally climb down the tree. It's not needed to walk the same path on our way back: a shortcut takes us to a fence where we squeeze ourselves and get out walking in thr border of the river. Brad's kombi (that's the name of the driver with a hat) waits for us and takes us back to the initial little square. I almost feel like I'm in "Midnight in Paris", Woody Allen's movie where the main character flies every night to a different place in time, without his wife or anyone else notice. A few hours later we're drunk in a party, not being able to tell anyone. "Have you noticed we've just been through a hardship and left 400 reais to a foreigner?", I ask. We cannot stop laughing. And thinking it's a hell of a gift, this one we're offering four friends. (In this same logics, almost a hundred people we're given a watch and were there).

Next week I go have lunch with Nathan - or N. D. Austin, as he prefers to present himself - to understand the story. Before finding him, I've already found out among New Yorker or New York Times' stuff that he's a 32-year-old American born in Alaska in a pretty hippie family, and that he moved to Boston with the age of 17 to study cinema. I also already know that a few years ago he started working on "building experiences", through projects such as Wonderlust. Hosted in Vila Madalena, he picks So Pedro Groceries as our meeting point. He risks one of the Tuesday menu's options: dobradinha. He's a man that goes for big thrills.

After Manhattan's action, that took almost seven hundred people to that water tank transformed in a bar - and that was only talked about after it had been deactivated - he got invitations to take this project to several cities in the world. He picked So Paulo for being a hard one, ugly, where people "crave for change, for new solutions".

"A few years ago I worked on a project [the FloatArt, that put together drawings painted on the top of fishing boats in Urca], but I didn't enjoy being there. Everything is so beautiful, adorable, that people just want to go to the beach. Of course it's great, but in a place like this you don't see that willingness people have of changing their city, that I see in So Paulo. Here, there's a movement of people taking on spaces, doing things for themselves, without waiting for the government's permission".

While he eats a mix of tripes, sausage and white beans, he tells me he thought about several places to set up his secret bar, and got enchanted by that field, because of its wonderful trees (hidden behind sidings and fences, while the construction of the commercial towers doesn't begin) and above all the polluted river [precisely, the little brook Quirino dos Santos, a part of the dirty watershed of the Tiet]: "The idea is to bring a little bit of love to places that aren't loved. Call attention to places that people abandoned. This river hasn't always been that polluted and it wouldn't be that hard to clean it today. So, why is it better to cement it, to cut the trees around it and build more buildings?", he asks.

Brad Haynes, the kombi's driver, is actually a Reuters agency correspondent in So Paulo. Friends with Nathan since college, he helped him researching the possible places for the project and assembling the group of people that set it all up - from building the tree house, that took them a week, to all the logistical questions involved in the action that took almost a hundred people to invade that field hidden in the night and to admire the city in a completely new angle. I chatted with Brad after Night Heron's closing in So Paulo (the last meeting was in the night of the 24th of August, when finally the participants were allowed to tell the secret to whoever they wanted). The journalist, 29 years old, thinks that the project contributes with a thought to spaces occupation - and about the tough house market that is transforming all the landscapes without giving it much thought. "This Playcenter's field has a great value in today's market But is that one the only value to recognise there? Doesn't anyone recognise the value of that little river? Or of those trees?".

In the same week, the two of them were in a debate in the Lighthouse builgind, in the city center, debating what they call "Urban Hacking" - term that comes from the idea of "hacking" big cities: breaking the codes that limit what you can and cannot do with spaces. "Sometimes we need some transgressive actions so that people get to know places like this, apparently empty, but full of potential. I think it's really valid, even if it's only to call people's attention and imagination", Brad says.

"The idea that everything needs to be cleaned, secured and monitored takes people to live inside bubbles. But I see a lot of people wanting to challenge this system and experiencing the city in a lot of different ways", Nathan finishes, he who this month is returning back to his home in Brooklyn, New York.

There's no way to disagree. Being in that place, in that night, had such an impact that I went back to the field, a few days later, during the day, to understand what we had lived. I didn't go through the fence and never walked in the polluted river's border, but I looked at that place as I had never done yet. Walking on the border where the paulistans only drive inside their cars, without paying much attention to what is around them, I came to understand that sometimes some crazy people like this foreigner are needed to make us see obvious stuff - and get inspired. Now it's our job.