Rome, London, and Moscow are just a few of the cities where the digging of long subway lines uncovered long-abandoned tunnels. In Rome, workers found cellars, caves, galleries, catacombs, and underground chapels. In Moscow, a warren of tunnels was unearthed that was said to be the semilegendary Secret City of Ivan the Terrible. Moscow’s subways are already said to be home for tens of thousands of postcommunist homeless. In Japan, the homeless frequent Tokyo’s subways.
TODAY, NEW YORK CITY’S UNDERGROUND HOMELESS LIVE IN THE secluded tunnels that run beneath the busy streets in an interconnected lattice of subway and railroad train tunnels, often unused now, that in some areas reach seven levels below the streets. Often shunned by the street homeless, the underground homeless are outcasts in a world of outcasts. They go underground for many objective reasons. The housing shortage and inadequate welfare budgets are only two. Some go down for safety, to escape thieves, rapists, and common cruelty. They go down to escape the law, to find and use drugs and alcohol unhassled by their families, friends, and society. Some families go into the tunnels to avoid giving up their children to foster homes. Some, ashamed of their poverty and apparent “failure” in society and impoverished appearance, go to escape seeing their own reflections in passing shop windows. Some fall into the tunnels to deteriorate slowly, out of the way of people aboveground and in a place they can call their own home.
Underground, they live often in groups, as if huddled like prehistoric men against the elements—as well as against the rats, human predators, and the dark. One community has a formal hierarchy, with a “mayor” and “spokesman” who are elected, and “runners” who are appointed; it seems to desire some semblance of societal structure from aboveground. There are communities of families, runaways, homosexuals, and diverse independent individuals. Some are loose-knit associations of individuals. Some are gentle and welcoming; others are violent and hostile. The largest single category is substance (drug or alcohol) abusers. The next largest category is the mentally ill.
“THEY CALL US THE ‘MOLE PEOPLE.’ IT GIVES US AN AIR OF MYSTERY wouldn’t you say?” laughed Squeeze, a thirty-two-year-old man who earned his nickname squeezing through pick-axed holes and between the forest of pipes that have been the burrows and trees of his world on and off for eight years. “Sure, they think we’re animals. We use our instincts down here. Outcasts? Well, we is. We don’t belong up there no more,” he shrugged. “If they scared of us, more power to us. We know what we are, most of us anyway. We human too, more human than most I would say. More human than most. But you, let them call us the mole people, cuz that ‘bout sums it up, how they view us and how they treat us. We are the mole people.”
The population of the underground homeless is not known precisely, and estimates are controversial. Transit and welfare authorities prefer to give sanguine estimates, in part to reduce fear among commuters about the potential threat of these tunnel people, in part to mute criticism of their efforts and their budgets to attack the problem. No census of the underground population has been taken, but a 1986 study for the mayor’s office estimated that five thousand people lived in the subway system alone. This was a rough estimate at best, according to Marsha Martin who authored the study, because homeless people are often evasive. Her figure did not count the homeless in the railroad tunnels, both those still in use and those long abandoned. A 1991 survey by the New York Health Department counted 6,031 homeless in the Grand Central and Penn stations alone.[1] One transit official dealing with the problem privately contended that the total underground population was about twenty-five thousand at that time, but my research leads me to conclude that the number is closer to five thousand.
MANY AUTHORITIES SEE TODAY’S UNDERGROUND HOMELESS as essentially irretrievable. The executive director of New York’s Mental Health Association has compared the difficulty of rehabilitating the underground homeless to “taking a wild animal and attempting to domesticate it.” The issue appears to center on whether a significant portion of homeless people, wherever they live, can hold jobs. Sociologists Alice Baum and Donald Burnes concluded that 85 percent of the homeless are “too crippled by mental illness or substance addiction to benefit” from the various programs and services. In a letter to The Washington Post, Suellen L. Stokes, the director of the Eleanor Kennedy shelter in Fairfax, Virginia, says she once believed most of the homeless were “employed or employable,” but after almost two years at the shelter, she reversed that view. “Denying or minimizing the extent of mental illness and substance abuse suffered by the homeless does them a great disservice,” Stokes says, “and prevents the channeling of limited resources toward programs that may make a difference for some (i.e., other) people.”
Transit authorities would like to ignore the issue, both quantitatively and qualitatively, and they would prefer that the media did the same, lest their accounts frighten off riders and give the city a bad name. Homeless advocacy groups are also reluctant to deal with the underground homeless openly—or at least to publicize their plight—for fear the public will lump all homeless people with the most violent and dangerous of the underground homeless and thereby lose their sympathy and support. The issue will not go away with ignorance. Nor will it be solved or even successfully managed by treating the underground homeless as people just down on their luck. Certainly silence will not prevent that underground population from increasing.
Deep in the tunnels under New York, there are people struggling to survive. Here rats run in dark waves toward, not away, from people and the crunch of roaches underfoot is as familiar as the stench of sewage seeping through the rock walls. Here the thin streams of daylight filtering through the occasional overhead grate barely penetrate to the floor in the stagnant blackness. “They eat, sleep, and defecate here,” one policeman says with a mixture of pity and disgust. “Your eyes are seared at times by the smell of urine until sometimes you can’t breathe. It almost knocks your brains out.”
Some of the homeless live on the catwalks just a few feet above the rushing roar of subway trains and in holes chopped out of walls that support platforms on which commuters wait, but most of the homeless find their homes far enough away from operating tracks where they hear only a slight tremor when trains pass. Still others live in relative splendor—in the frescoed waiting rooms of a few long-abandoned subway stations, at least one of which is said to contain a piano, a fountain, and mirrored walls.
They die of AIDS and overdoses, but also of common colds that turn into pneumonia, of physical violence, and of tuberculosis, hypothermia, and diabetes. Their life expectancy is three to five years, one health-care official estimated. Or perhaps only two years. “If a knife, bullet, train, or live [high voltage] wire doesn’t get them,” he sighed, “some illness that should only be lethal in medieval times will.”
Whether New York’s underground homeless are harbingers of the future is an open question. They are a crisis of our time which, with help, the future can overt. The homeless appear to be overcrowding; they seem attracted to, or at least more numerous in, huge urban areas where they can better live within the cracks, as it were. A great deal of food in cities is thrown out, particularly from restaurants, and a good deal of it reaches the homeless in one way or another. The large gaps between the wealthy and the destitute in cities also makes begging more successful and in some cases more profitable than a minimum-wage job. However, urban housing will always be in short supply, and accessible tunnels will always hold an attraction to some homeless.