Jennifer Toth - The Mole People

on track workers, 75

on tunnels, 20, 27

Willie, 100, 224–25, 226–27, 249

Wilson. See Blade

women underground, 213–27

Brenda, 213–19

Cathy and Joe, 225–26

Dericka, 223

Fran and Shorty, 225

Gwen, 221–23

Michelle, 219–20

Sheila and Willie, 224–25, 226–27

Zack, 192

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Toth, Jennifer

The mole people: life in the tunnels beneath New York City / Jennifer Toth.

p. cm.

Includes index

ISBN 1-55652-190-1; pbk ISBN 1-55652-241-X

1. Underground homeless persons-New York (N.Y.) 1. Title.

HV4506.N6T68 1993

305.5′696-dc20

93-23912

CIP

Photographs © 1993 by Margaret Morton unless otherwise credited.

Illustrations on pages ii and 254 © Chris Pape.

© 1993 by Jennifer Toth

All rights reserved

First edition

Published by Chicago Review Press, Incorporated

814 North Franklin Street

Chicago, Illinois 60610

ISBN 978-1-55652-241-3

Printed in the United States of America

20 19

Both of these studies were internal and unpublished. Individuals provided them to me.

J.C.’s community is described in chapter 20.

Graffiti writers have their own jargon, part of, but different from, other examples of hip-hop culture. “To bomb” is to accomplish a lot in a short time. A “burner” is superior work, so are pieces that are “nasty,” “the death,” “vicious,” “bad,” “dirty,” or “snap.” “Down by law” means having high status.

Captured in a photo by Henry Chalfant, who recorded much of New York’s graffiti with his camera.

The runaways brought me into their group as a peer rather than as an adult. They were perhaps the most trusting and open community I met in the tunnels. There were no status lines to break through. They saw that I was like them, only they were on their way to doing what they wanted to do, and I was half a step ahead in doing it. I never had the “adult authority” to take them anywhere.

In 1991, seventy-nine homeless persons died on or near the tracks, according to New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority. Most were struck by trains or electrocuted when they rolled in their sleep onto the third rail. That same year, forty-nine fires were reported in tunnels, most of them set for cooking or for warmth, but some lit by a spark from the third rail falling on the cardboard houses or other flammable debris that the homeless bring to tunnel camps.

While many of his attributes and qualities are centuries old, their synthesis into the underground man is a modern development. He is essentially a reaction to forces of the past century. Hemingway’s Jake Barnes, Kafka’s clerks, Hesse’s Steppenwolf were underground men, as were Sartre’s lonely existentialist, Camus’s absurd man, Ellison’s invisible man, and Koestler’s Rubashove, betrayed by the communist gods of his own creation. Despite their radical differences, all of them possessed pronounced features of the underground man.

The Guardian Angels patrol the streets and subways in red berets and tough attitudes. Most members are between twenty and twenty-three years old and volunteer ten to fifteen hours a week to help protect commuters in the more dangerous areas of New York. They were organized in 1979 by Curtis Silwa, one of a group of young men picking up trash in the Bronx and recycling it and, in the process, intervening to help people from being mugged. After some heroic responses to crime, Silwa organized the thirteen-member Guardian Angels. Though commuters seemed to appreciate their help, the city government was skeptical of their intentions. Some city politicians went so far as to dismiss them as thugs. Today, they are a nonprofit volunteer organization with five thousand members around the world with branches in forty-five U.S. and ten foreign cities, including London, Liverpool, Sydney, Berlin, and Milan. They are still strong and generally respected despite a few scandals in which Silwa himself came forth and admitted that the Angels staged some rescues.