Today’s transit employees who work underground repairing track and cleaning debris are just as afraid of the world below the streets as those workers a century ago who, as they dug the tunnels, feared cave-ins, whirlpools of sand, and sudden water flows from springs below and rain above. Now the fear is more personal—rats, roaches, leaking sewers and water mains, loose asbestos, hypodermic needles that might be contaminated with AIDS, human waste, and ordinary garbage. They also fear the people they encounter in the netherworld.
Sullivan considers the presence of people living underground to be a significant change from 1940 when Granick wrote the first edition of Underneath New York.
“Homeless people who now live underground by the thousands were more an oddity than an issue back then, as the city was close to full employment,” Sullivan said of the immediate pre— World War II period. Now, although some maintenance crews get to know squatters in certain tunnel areas and even bring extra sandwiches for them, most workers believe the underground homeless are dangerous—criminals on the run, insane people, drug addicts, alcoholics, AIDS cases, tuberculosis patients—all of whom represent threats of one kind or another.
Most frightening to the workers is the area between 28th Street and Canal Street on the Lexington Line, and the abandoned stations like those at City Hall, 18th Street, 91st Street, and Worth Street—in all of which communities of homeless have settled. Only a bit less dangerous, they believe, is the Second Avenue Station, which is popular because it is an unusually warm tunnel and is situated near a couple of food kitchens and welfare shelters.
The train tunnels under Grand Central Station contain perhaps the largest collection of squatters. There, in a mere three-quarters of a square mile, thirty-four miles of track stretch out along seven distinct levels before funneling into twenty-six main rail arteries going north, east, and west. Police have cleared out as many as two hundred people living in a single community like “the Condos”—short for condominiums and so named because they consider it very posh—and “Burma’s Road” and “Riker’s Island.” Those evicted from Grand Central went mainly to the tunnels under Penn Station on the West Side, and into tunnels under the Port Authority bus terminal. Some went deeper under Grand Central, down below the levels of subways and trains.
The first of the inhabited tunnels to get publicity was one near the Lafayette Street Station. Several dozen people lived there in 1989. One underground home consisted of a “little living room” with a mattress, table, and couch. A group shared a television set and a VCR, using electricity diverted from the nearby station. Another group enjoyed a stereo set. One area was wallpapered. Kitchen utensils and food supplies were also found.
Finding ways into these small and large burrows associated with the subway lines has always been rather easy. Thousands of stairways lead into subway stations and hundreds of others serve as emergency exits from tunnels. Locks were placed on most entrances to prevent unauthorized entry, with only four hundred keys made for Transit Authority personnel. There is a Brooklyn hardware store within walking distance of Authority headquarters that sells the key for a dollar. During rush hours, when some station turnstiles are crammed solid with commuters, homeless people who have settled in abandoned side entrances sometimes open their “homes” to the rushing passengers who, in gratitude, are invited to drop a subway token or some coins into a proffered cup.
“I consider it my public service,” says Hammer with a broad smile, tipping his Mets cap to commuters as they pour like lemmings through his door. They ignore his neat bedroll piled in the corner and the small box that serves as a table. The waxy black residue on the box supports the remains of a candle. Hammer’s long, thin frame seems only a little thicker than the vertical iron rods in the gate he obligingly holds open with one hand. In the other hand is his Styrofoam cup.
6
The Bowery
COLD RAIN FALLS ON THE APRIL NIGHT AS A POLICE CAR WEAVES through the heavy traffic of lower Manhattan. By 8:30 P.M. the Bowery is already deserted. The crowning lights of New York’s Chrysler and Empire State buildings brighten the skyline to the north, but in the Bowery, where gray sheets of metal close like heavy eyelids over the sweatshops for the night, only headlights and flashes of red and blue police lights reflect off the wet streets.
“Please, you go,” a cabdriver calls in a thick Russian accent through his unrolled window to the police cruiser. “You go. American wonderful. You wonderful. You make the streets of American wonderful,” he enthuses, waving his bare forearm through the rain, his shirtsleeve rolled up beyond his elbow as he yields the right-of-way at the intersection to the merging police car.
Sergeant Steve Riley nods and smiles, but Officer Neil Farrell behind the steering wheel looks suspiciously at the cabbie, seeking a trace of sarcasm. He finds none, and we move on.
“This is a crazy area,” says Farrell. “You can expect anything. It looks OK because it’s been done up, well lit now and all, but you got bad elements here.” He glances toward poorly dressed men and women with beaten or angry expressions peppering the sidewalks.
Off West Broadway, the police car turns onto Hudson Street, still paved with cobblestones and grooved with the silver tracks of a bygone era over a century ago, when the filigreed steel network of elevated subway trains dominated the scene. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Bowery had acquired the seedy reputation that still hangs over its name, with roaming prostitutes, flophouses, pawnshops, and “slave markets” where manual workers were hired off street corners. For decades the Bowery was the single acceptable place for New York’s outcasts, and the disaffiliated found outside of the Bowery were ushered back within its boundaries by the law enforcers. It was the most infamous of the nation’s skid rows through World War II.
“No other road in North America has been disreputable for so many decades,” historian Richard Beard wrote of Bowery Street in On Being Homeless: Historical Perspectives, the two-way street after which New York’s skid row was named. The street runs for sixteen blocks in lower Manhattan, but the actual skid row section encompasses a larger area of side streets and avenues.
In 1949 almost fourteen thousand homeless were counted in the Bowery. Through gentrification and cleanup efforts, the population was more than halved by the early sixties. In 1987 another census claimed fewer than a thousand homeless lived in the Bowery.
Not all of them left as the census would suggest. Some went underground.
By day, many can still be seen on the streets. Some beg for change, some scavenge in refuse bins on corners, some pick through garbage behind restaurants. Some are bolder, approaching cars stopped at red lights with muddy wet rags, to “wash” windshields before demanding money. At night, the streets are clear. Some have gone to homeless shelters. Many have gone into the subways system and its network of dark, protective, and yet dangerous tunnels.
“I was pushed from a hotel into the street,” Joe, a Bowery tunnel dweller says, trembling either from anger or alcohol a few days earlier, “and I was pushed from the streets into these tunnels.” Joe, who says he’s seventy-two years old, has a grizzly gray beard and angry eyes. His face is lined with a constant scowl.
“You ask me why I’m here?” he said earnestly. “You go ask them,” he pointed a crooked finger ingrained with dirt toward a police car. “Ask them where I should go. They’ll say to hell. They’ll put you in a death house they call a shelter if they don’t kill you themselves. They don’t know anything about who lives down in the tunnels, how many of us there are. You ask and they’ll say no one. Well, I ain’t no one down there,” he spit, “only up here. You go, you ask them.”