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Beneath the surface of Manhattan's Riverside Park run railroad tunnels, disused for decades, where over the years unhoused people took shelter. The sociologist Terry Williams ventured into the tunnel residents' world, seeking to understand life on the margins and out of sight.
List of contents
Prologue
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Descent
2. Genesis
3. Underground Ecology
4. Men Underground: Bernard, Kal, and Jason
5. Working Life
6. Food: Restaurants and Soup Kitchens
7. Women Underground: Tin Can Tina
8. Beatrice and Bobo
9. The Tagalong
10. The Rabbit Hole
11. Reflections on Life Under the Street
Endnote
Epilogue: Mediating the Underground: Bernard’s Exit
Appendix A: Income and Housing in New York City, 2002–2014
Appendix B: Behavior Mapping and Cartography
Appendix C: Interview Questions for Bernard, Princeton University, 2012
Appendix D: Bernard’s Dream and Postcard
Appendix E: Legacies of Harm: Policy and Policing
Appendix F: Where Are They Now?
Notes
Index
About the author
Terry Williams is a professor in the Department of Sociology at the New School for Social Research. His previous Columbia University Press books are The Con Men: Hustling in New York City (2015); Teenage Suicide Notes: An Ethnography of Self-Harm (2017); Le Boogie Woogie: Inside an After-Hours Club (2020); and The Soft City: Sex for Business and Pleasure in New York City (2022).
Summary
Aboveground, Manhattan’s Riverside Park provides open space for the densely populated Upper West Side. Beneath its surface run railroad tunnels, disused for decades, where over the years unhoused people have taken shelter. The sociologist Terry Williams ventured into the tunnel residents’ world, seeking to understand life on the margins and out of sight. He visited the tunnels between West Seventy-Second and West Ninety-Sixth Streets hundreds of times from 1991 to 1996, when authorities cleared them out to make way for Amtrak passenger service, and again between 2000 and 2020.
Life Underground explores this society below the surface and the varieties of experience among unhoused people. Bringing together anecdotal material, field observations, photographs, transcribed conversations with residents, and excerpts from personal journals, Williams provides a vivid ethnographic portrait of individual people, day-to-day activities, and the social world of the underground and their engagement with the world above, which they call “topside.” He shows how marginalized people strive to make a place for themselves amid neglect and isolation as they struggle for dignity. Featuring Williams’s distinctive ethnographic eye and deep empathy for those on the margins, Life Underground shines a unique light on a vanished subterranean community.
