Inside, the local police precinct house looks bleak and functional, lit by cold fluorescent tubes, but the atmosphere is congenial and lively. Officers bat about friendly insults and exchange serious compliments. They also volunteer, once they learn my purpose, the casualty list of officers who go into the tunnels: one beaten to death with his own nightstick by a tunnel dweller; another left with an eight-year-old mental capacity after a similar beating; and two officers killed with their own guns as they escorted tunnel people out of the Bowery tunnel. “The motherfuckers shot them dead,” an officer says, shaking his head. “You always got to be careful of those people.”
They show me mug shots of the most notorious graffiti writers—Smith, Reese, and Ghost—who mar subway cars and tunnel walls, and on particularly bold days, even walls next to the precinct or the bathroom of the precinct house with fingerprint ink left from a booking—Smith’s notorious trademark. Smart kids, they say kids that could go somewhere if they would clean up and shake this addiction of smearing paint to gain dubious fame.
Lieutenant John Romero stands tall with a mustache and unflagging warm brown eyes. He offers me a firm handshake and his beaten leather chair. His desk, sunk in the corner of the squad room and laden with papers and pictures of his young family, is separated by a thin, head-high divider from three other desks in the cramped room. Six officers stand around, waiting to take Romero and me on a night tour of the tunnels.
Romero is responsible for policing Bowery subway tunnels for the New York City Transit Authority. He explains the “tunnel situation” with a mixture of smooth public relations phrasing and sharp street-smart remarks.
“We first found people living in the tunnels in the seventies,” he begins, “and by 1989, when we believe the problem reached its highest peak, we estimate that there were five thousand homeless persons living in the subway system. That year, seventy-nine homeless persons died in the subways—some hit by trains, some electrocuted, some died of natural causes.”
By that time, much in the same way as graffiti-covered cars and seats had done, “the behavior of the homeless in the system contributed to public perception, commuter perception, that the subways were out of control,” he continues. As the problem grew, police officers began resisting efforts to oust the homeless. “Some cops felt it wasn’t police work. Other cops felt it was morally wrong to eject destitute people.”
Through special information sessions and videos, “we made our officers see that by enforcing the law [against trespassing], they were interrupting the behavior of these people that was causing them harm. And also by enforcing the rules, we were forcing these people to make a decision about their future. A lot of them chose to get out and accept the services for the homeless aboveground.”
Another program was needed to provide outreach services to the homeless in the tunnels, those who lived not in moving cars and on subway platforms but went into the tunnels, along the electrified tracks, to find some sort of sleeping place in the darkness underground.
“We’ve had a homeless outreach program since 1982,” Romero says, “but prior to 1990, it was only five officers and a sergeant. They worked with the New York City Human Resources Administration, which supplied two social workers, a driver, and a bus.” The officers and social workers would go into the tunnels only if a track worker had been seriously assaulted, or if a motorman driving a subway train spotted a person who was a threat to himself and the train. Then the team would search for the homeless, bring them up from the tunnels, and bus them off to shelters.
“That was a Band-Aid approach to a problem that was growing and growing. There was no regular patrolling into the tunnels, going in constantly to try to help these people,” Romero says. “We asked for more officers, but the city was in a financial crunch. Still, we managed to assign thirty officers to the job.”
That year, 1990, more than four thousand homeless were ejected from the tunnels, according to Romero. “It’s been cleaned up,” he says. “You’ll find pockets of one or two persons here and there, but a few years ago, in just a two-block stretch of tunnels under the Bowery, there were as many as two hundred people. It would take us six hours to clear them out because we’d constantly have to shut down the power [of the third rail]. Now we go in there with the power on.”
Throughout Manhattan, Romero claims, over seven thousand homeless were transferred from tunnels to aboveground shelters in 1990, and another four thousand in the first four months of 1991. “But it’s not enforcement,” he emphasizes, “it’s outreach.”
“Many homeless advocates saw this as a crackdown on the homeless,” he says. “It wasn’t. It was a crackdown on violators. We have a responsibility to our ridership to provide a safe environment in the subways. We see a lot of track fires set by people cooking down there in the tunnels. We know that debris they leave around causes fires when sparks from the trains hits it. So we target violations, not homeless.”
Officer Al Logan describes a typical encounter: “When you ask them if they want to go to a shelter, they say no, that’s not for me. You ask them three or four times, they say, maybe I’ll give it a shot. If they still say no, we eject them. Most of them won’t go to shelters; a lot are afraid of being beaten or robbed or raped there. But we never put our hands on them.”
How tunnel dwellers can be ejected without being manhandled is puzzling, but I let it go, just as I do Logan’s comment— which contradicts Romero’s—that most tunnel homeless do not go to shelters after being rousted.
“You’ll hear stories about the shelters,” Romero says, “and I’m not saying city shelters are the Ritz, but they’re a lot better than what you see in the tunnels. The real reason these people don’t want to go to shelters is that shelters have rules, and these people don’t want to abide by any rules.
“You see crack vials, hypodermic needles down there. You can’t shoot up in a shelter. You can’t drink in a shelter. The simple fact is these people choose this kind of environment because they don’t want to abide by any rules.
“Most people living in the tunnels under the Bowery are hard-core. Mostly male but some females, 95 percent are males between twenty and forty-five years old. At least 80 percent are mentally ill or chemically dependent,” Romero continues. “I’ve heard of families down there, but in seven years with this unit, the closest I’ve come to seeing one was a woman about sixty and her son about forty. Really, there are no families in the subways.
“We’re going to walk underground from Broadway-Lafayette to Second Avenue, about four blocks, and you’ll see firsthand. One guy described it as the closest thing to hell he’s ever seen. Really, it’s hard to describe. You have to see it to believe it.”
The officers making the patrol don fluorescent vests, cloth gloves, hard hats, flashlights, and masks to combat the stench and tuberculosis. “You don’t want to touch anything or anyone down there,” Logan warns me when I’m outfitted like them.
A few officers check their guns. “They are not all hostile,” Romero says. “We’ve never really had a problem. They know us down there.”
We enter the Broadway-Lafayette subway station, pass through the turnstiles, and walk down several flights of stairs to the lowest platform. We jump off the platform to the tracks, carefully crossing the third rail. There is no space, absolutely none, for a person to stand between the wall and a passing train without being struck.
“Don’t step on the third rail,” Sergeant Steve Klambatsen warns me. “I hate to see that happen. Sparks fly everywhere, but the worst part is that the electricity blows off the extremities. Hands, head, whatever, explode. It’s disgusting.”