A new book wants you to know NYC’s underground community was more than ‘mole people’

A new book from sociologist Terry Williams details the lives of people who lived in tunnels underneath New York City.

Williams has studied the city and its subcultures for more than 40 years, publishing books on subjects including street hustlers, after-hours clubs and building superintendents in Harlem.

To research “Life Underground: Encounters with People Below the Streets of New York,” he made hundreds of visits to the residents of “tunnels, hidden passageways, abandoned railroads, shelters and dungeons” across the city, from 1991 through 2020.

He said that people still live underground in New York City, though their population has shrunk in the ensuing years.

Williams said he began by studying three people living underneath Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal.

“My graduate students and I were sitting in the information booth there, and at around 12 midnight, people started to disappear,” said Williams, who is now a professor at the New School. “I started to follow people to see where they were going, and they were actually going five levels underneath Grand Central Terminal.”

But he soon learned of a much larger community of more than 100 people living in an abandoned railway tunnel on the Upper West Side that was created when Robert Moses built Riverside Park in the 1930s.

Besides conducting his own interviews, he also gave residents tape recorders and journals to record their own experiences. He came to see the underground as a metaphor for the way we close our minds to unpleasant realities, including poverty, homelessness and mental illness.

“I wanted to know who they were,” Williams said. “I wanted to know what brought them to this particular place in their life.”

The book is…