In February 1990, New York Daily News reporter Samme Chitthum wrote about Bernard and his camp. Several former friends recognized Bernard and sent the article to his family. His brother, a successful Chicago lawyer, flew to New York and pleaded with Bernard to return aboveground. “He offered me $10,000,” Bernard recalls, shaking his head. “He just didn’t understand. This is where I want to be for now. Maybe not forever, but for now.”
Freight and passenger trains once raced along this tunnel, which stretches underground more than four miles from 72nd Street to 122nd Street. Early on, local kids would crawl through grates to ride the trains for kicks, hiding from patrolmen who carried shotguns filled with salt pellets to sting rather than kill. When Bernard came to this spot, which is roughly under 96th Street, the tracks had been abandoned for years, and a ragtag collection of homeless people found shelter along its length.
The best feature of this tunnel was the fresh water. The “Tears of Allah,” as Bernard named them, pulsed from a broken pipe twenty feet overhead and fell in one seamless curtain to the floor. The pipe went unrepaired for five years, during which time it provided an oasis for the tunnel dwellers.
Not long after he came, an incident occurred that made Bernard a legend among the underground and attracted the community that now surrounds him.
Hector, a thief and addict recently discharged from Riker’s Island, moved into the northern entrance of the tunnel and with other men began extorting a “tariff” from homeless who passed. They beat those who refused or could not pay; sometimes they even beat those who paid. They challenged Bernard, who became incensed.
“You? You demand money from me?” he bellowed angrily as others peered out from their camps and coves.
“Do you know who I am?” he shouted, his voice echoing down the walls. “I am Bernard, Lord of the Tunnels!”
Hector and his friends, nonplused, allowed Bernard to pass without charge. From then on, Bernard was known as the Lord of the Tunnels.
“When I went to ‘We Can’ [a redemption center where discarded cans and bottles are turned in for cash], people would say to me, ‘Yo, Lord of the Tunnels,’ or point to me and whisper to each other like ‘That’s the Lord of the Tunnels.’” At first Bernard didn’t like the title, but he has come to accept it as “them showing me respect.”
Hector’s bullying continued, but perhaps taking Bernard’s cue, several of the tunnel dwellers “showed him disrespect.” One night, to end the growing resistance, Hector and his friends attacked a camp about ten blocks north of Bernard’s bunker, burning cardboard box homes and the primitive bedding and scattering pots and pans. They beat and raped a homeless woman named Sheila, whose husband Willie had been absent for some weeks, while most of the tunnel dwellers cowered on overhead pipes and in cubbyholes.
Bernard heard Sheila’s screams even though he was outside of the tunnels at the time. He found her bleeding and nearly unconscious. Furious, he rallied about twenty-five homeless men and bats, pipes, and burning planks, and descended on Hector and his gang, surrounding them while one man went to get the police.
“It was a wild scene down there,” says Chris Pape, a graffiti artist who happened to be watching through a grate. “All these people running around underground, yelling and waving these torches underground in the dark. It was surreal. That’s about the only word for it.” The organized strike against Hector was particularly surprising because the homeless in the Riverside Park tunnel are a passive group who go out of their way to avoid attention. They usually hide from visitors, says Pape, who paints murals in tunnels.
The police were reluctant to come with Bernard’s messenger, Stash. The first patrolmen he found didn’t believe him, he says, and the second pair went with him to the tunnel’s entrance but refused to enter, fearing some kind of trap. Sheila finally went out to them, told her story and persuaded them to enter and arrest Hector and some of his men. Many of the tunnel dwellers went every day to Hector’s trial, panhandling money for the subway fare, to testify against him. Hector went back to jail.
“After that,” Bernard complains, “my haven of harmony became a haven of headaches.” More people began to settle in the tunnel and look to Bernard for protection as well as food and advice. Although he professes “disdain for humanity,” including other homeless, he is always willing to share what he has. “Who am I to deny someone in need?” he asks.
Several tunnel dwellers credit Bernard with saving their lives. One is Leon who came to the tunnel “stone drunk,” in his words, on a bitter February night. “Bernard saw me laying up there in the street and wakes me up. ‘Man,’ he says, ‘you can’t stay here. You’ll freeze to death.’ ‘Okay,’ I says, ‘then just let me die.’ He says, ‘Fuck,’ and dragged me out of the draft, carried me two blocks over his shoulder, cursing all the way. Turns out I got frostbite bad that night. If Bernard hadn’t helped me—and he gave me a blanket, too—I’d be dead and that ain’t no lie.”
Bernard pines for the days when he was alone, but he also remembers how dangerous such a life could be. One icy day, he slipped while carrying firewood down the steep stairs at the tunnel’s entrance and fell about twenty feet to the tunnel’s floor, breaking his hip. He crawled to his camp and attempted to heal himself by resting, but he ran out of wood for his fire and food for himself, and he caught a bad cold. “I couldn’t even make my way out of the bunker, let alone the tunnel for help. I thought my time had come,” he says now, “and I thought, well, if this is it, it’s no big deal.”
Another homeless man who lived farther up the tunnel came to his aid. The two had passed often but never spoken. Even now Bernard doesn’t know his name. The man was aware that he hadn’t seen Bernard for days, suspecting he had left, and came in hopes of scavenging anything useful that might be left behind. Rather than stealing, which he could easily have done in view of Bernard’s weakness, he nursed Bernard back to health. Bernard never saw him again, but he tries to repay that care to others.
TODAY AMTRAK USES THE RAILROAD TRACKS AGAIN, BUT THE HOME-less continue to squat here. Most of them live in two areas: One consists of the bunkerlike concrete workstations like Bernard’s, which occupants furnish and even decorate with carpeting and artwork, either graffitied murals or posters. The other campsite is at the southern end of the tunnel and less secure, where homeless like Seville live in more fragile quarters, usually makeshift tents and packing-crate homes. Between the two camps, and in fact along the entire length of the tunnel, are the most reclusive of the homeless, usually mentally ill, who sleep individually in small cubbyholes that have been hollowed out naturally or by man high up on the sheer walls of the tunnels. Some can be reached only by climbing metal rungs embedded in the walls.
Bernard’s camp is the hub for these tunnel dwellers. His campfire lies directly under a grate that opens to the surface and carries out most of the smoke. Six chairs surround the fire. Food is shared, but many people also have their own private cache. Chores such as cooking and collecting firewood are also shared. One of the most burdensome chores, which came when the “Tears of Allah” dried up, is carrying five-gallon buckets of water to camp from a gas station more than a mile away. Most of the group eat at the same time, and there is always coffee on the grill for anyone stopping by. Anyone can use the grill anytime, but they are responsible for making sure the fire is out and the ashes completely gray when they leave.