“Mole people” is in fact a pejorative name for tunnel people. Coined by the homeless themselves, they whispered that some people had been down so deep, and for so long, that they could not stand sunlight any more and could produce only a weird squeaking instead of talking. The term was first used in a sensational headline from New York Newsday, and became common after Jennifer Toth’s book The Mole People.
Among experts, mole people are a subset of tunnel people who live several stories underground or dwell in the inhospitable labyrinth of subway tunnels. Due to disease, alcohol, and drug addiction, most are in a desperate state.
P.C. lights his pipe with a wooden match and blows out big blue clouds of smoke. He prefers the term “tunnel people.” Nobody knows exactly how many there are. Estimates range from a few hundred to many thousands. There are also big fluctuations by season. In the summer, most subway tunnels are even hotter and more humid than outside. In wintertime, when it is getting cold, many homeless people leave the parks and streets and go down into the relatively warm subway system.
According to P.C., the number has fallen drastically over the years. He deduces this from the occurrence of track fires, both the fires made by the homeless to warm themselves and the accidental fires that start when the homeless leave stuff behind that is ignited by contact with the third rail. There used to be a few of them every day. Over the last year, there were only nine or ten. Since the early ′90s, when the tunnel population peaked, the authorities have been using a two-track approach to tackle the problem: the Transit Police evict tunnel people because they are trespassing and constitute a danger to themselves and MTA passengers. At the same time, outreach workers patiently try to convince the homeless to leave the tunnels and help them find services such as shelters and rehab.
Some organizations, like the Bowery Residents Committee and Housing Works, have special teams that focus on tunnel people. The Transit Authority has its own program, MTA/Connections. The New York City Police Department has also its own homeless outreach unit.
“It’s a sad world down there,” P.C. says. “In 1994, we had three fatal accidents in one day. A stray dog, a maintenance worker who was hit by a train, and a homeless person who got electrocuted.” The incident with the dog became headline news in the tabloids. According to the New York Post, the dog was walking along the tracks and refused to move out of the way of the subway train that had slowed down to a crawl. The driver had hooted his horn a few times, but to no avail. Finally, he hit the throttle, rode over the dog, and left it in pieces.
P.C. continues. “Two hundred people called the MTA to protest the dog being killed. We got an avalanche of mail, we got problems with the Animal Protection Agency and Animal Rights Groups. We got twelve reactions regarding the killed maintenance worker. And nobody was interested in the homeless.”
P.C. gives me a green and orange fluorescent vest. I can join one of his cleaning crews tonight. I meet them at midnight. With their yellow helmets, white mouth masks, latex gloves, orange ear protectors and the big spray can of disinfectant on their backs, they look like Ghostbusters. The few passengers that are still around at this hour look at us rather concerned. The crew works all through the night and normally cleans two or three stations.
Through shutters in the street, they enter the emergency exits and clean all the mess they find on their way down. The hygienic precautionary measures are necessary, since they stumble upon infected needles and excrement. They also always work with a police escort.
“If we would work on our own, we could be attacked by mole people,” says Skinny, the most talkative of the whole crew. “Us they see as the enemy. Understandably, because we throw away the last possessions they still have in this world.”
Skinny works two jobs: during the day he works as an outreach worker at a rehab in Brooklyn, at night as a cleaner for P.C. Sometimes he meets his clients, crack and heroin addicts, in the tunnels. “We see the lowest of the low. Pieces of misery,” Skinny says.
“Two-legged rats, we call ’em,” remarks the youngest of the crew. He wears heavy golden chains around his neck and four huge rings on each hand. It must be difficult to put on his latex gloves. “Shut up, Gold Finger,” Skinny says. He doesn’t think it’s funny. “One time we were cleaning a huge pile of garbage. The garbage started to move and a man crawled out under it. We told him he could not stay there. ‘I am too sick to leave,’ he stuttered. He was taken to a hospital. A week later we heard he had died from AIDS.” Skinny sighs. “Some people come down here to die in peace. And we, we clean them up.” Every year, they find a few dead bodies.
After a few transfers, we arrive at Delancey Street station on the Lower East Side. We wait for the police at a shutter in the street. Nearby is an emergency exit they call “The Club” because it is close to a disco. “They were dealing heroin in the open,” Skinny says. “The dealer had put all his stuff very neatly on a cardboard box. You could even rent needles.”
The police arrive and the shutter is opened with a special key. With guns drawn, the cops go down first and return a few minutes later. All clear down there, they tell us and the crew starts working. The staircase leading down to the subway has an unbearably heavy stench of urine. Routinely, the crews spray the disinfectant into every corner and throw away old newspapers, blankets and cardboard, filling the garbage bags they have brought along. When I come up, there is bad news. The cops have found out that I need additional permission from the NYPD. “I’m sorry, kid, but you gotta go,” a cop says. Too bad, but I have to leave Skinny, Gold Finger, and their buddies.
The labyrinth under Grand Central is seven stories deep, and has hundreds of stairways, alleys, and kilometers of tunnels that are said not to be in use. The total surface is as big as twelve football fields. At night, scores of homeless descended from the waiting rooms and platforms to their netherworld. During the day they hung around among the crowds of passengers commuting from the suburbs to their offices mid-town. At the moment, there are only a handful of homeless who remain. This is in great part thanks to the five-year efforts of police Sergeant Bryan Henry.
Sergeant Henry is a big black man with penetrating yet warm brown eyes that command authority. When Metro North started an outreach program to handle the homeless problem in the early ′90s, Henry volunteered right away. On his own and armed only with a big flashlight, he went down into the dark caves every day. He managed to clean up the whole area with a mixture of arguments, understanding and, if necessary, force. A lot of tunnel people entered help programs thanks to Henry’s intervention.
“I studied Eastern philosophy. My karma lacks compassion. I try to compensate for that through my work,” Henry explains his tireless efforts. “It’s pretty simple. For the same token, I could have been one of these people myself. I try never to forget that.”
Henry tells me stories about the old situation. “Up in the station here, we had a whole colony of homeless,” he says. “In the end, it became more comfortable than a shelter. At night, the police were patrolling in between the benches where people slept. In the morning, you had three homeless organizations handing out coffee, sandwiches and donuts. Room service and police protection. Everybody had his friends, the prostitutes had their clients on their doorsteps. Pickpockets and con artists got a wave of new, fresh victims every day. Dealers and liquor stores around the corner. A self-sufficient community came into being and with its well organized infrastructure attracted even more homeless like a magnet. But the commuters felt unsafe and started to take their cars. Slowly, we broke down that whole network. You sometimes see people coming back, but they never stay long. There is nothing to do, their friends aren’t there any more, the action has gone. They realize the party is over.”[64]
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Another organization that was responsible for the clean up of Grand Central Station and its immediate surroundings was the Grand Central Partnership, a Business Improvement District. Their approach was controversiaclass="underline" The Partnership recruited homeless people from a local shelter and paid them 1 dollar an hour for repair and cleaning jobs. Some of them even forcefully removed fellow homeless people from the areas around ATMs. Grand Central Partnership called this ‘an outreach and job training program;’ the Coalition called it exploitation and started a lawsuit: