TERRY WILLIAMS OPENS HIS BOOK with a primal scene:
My lifelong fascination with the alienated … the lost and forgotten, wherever they may be—probably started when I was a kid in Mississippi. One fall day, while playing outside, I saw two strange-looking white men with dirty faces and torn trousers walking in our backyard. We watched silently as our mother handed the men a paper bag and some apples; the men then withdrew into the woods. I asked her who they were, and she said “hobos,” a term I’d never heard before.
These wandering souls disappeared into the woods but remained sedimented in Williams’s psyche, serving as a powerful but ambivalent symbol. His father, he recalls, dismissed them as “tramps,” but, as Williams is quick to point out, others have detected in their “ascetic lives,” born of a willful renunciation of the subordination attached to conventional work, “opportunities for spiritual richness.” Williams counts himself among the latter. As an epigraph, he chooses a sentence from Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919): “What we need in America is a new class of individuals, who at any physical cost to themselves and others agree to quit working, to loaf, to refuse to be hurried or try to get on in the world.”
Life Underground (Columbia University Press) is a book about homelessness in New York and a book about a particular group of homeless people—those living in the disused railroad tunnels beneath Riverside Park in the 1980s and ’90s—but, by a kind of transitive property, it is mostly a book about work and about ostracism rooted in one’s relationship to work. The people who populate Williams’s account are doubly, triply, uncountably estranged from the “topside”—their phrase, he notes, for the land “known aboveground as the Upper West Side.” The private language indicates a larger truth. In choosing the underground, in rejecting the hand of the landlord, the employer, and the state, these individuals have crossed some social Rubicon, some kind of threshold of apartness. They are outlaws, even though the law they have broken—work or die—is not written explicitly in any statute. Life Underground, a collection of reportage, field notes, and reflections on the social condition of those Williams spent decades befriending (the book, published this year, is based on fieldwork conducted mainly from 1991, the year of the author’s “first descent,” to 1996, when the tunnels were mostly cleared), reveals the ways in which this apartness, this exile, conceals a condition that is shared with everyone who cannot muster the ingenuity to live without selling their time and talents in return for money. It is this at first paradoxical quality—so unlike the rest of us and so exactly like the rest of us—that drives the peculiar mix of derision and envy that topsiders feel when confronted with a problem that won’t—can’t—go away.
THE UNDERGROUND IS ONE OF THOSE classic arenas where the material and the psychic meet to disport with one another. The metaphors threaten to write themselves. In one telling, the underground is a conceptual fix for rendering invisible what we wish would go away, for curbing the influence of what we need to be dead so that we can go on living in the ways to which we’ve become accustomed. It is the place where we put objects, systems, feelings, and people that we rely on but cannot admit into everyday awareness. Thus, for Williams, the underground is “the city’s unconscious,” that seeming excess that is split off and disavowed. But what gets banished to the underground makes its presence felt in ways we have to will ourselves not to grasp. The underground is the medium for the structuring currents that make urban society and the personalities that animate it possible at scale. Water mains, sewers, gas lines, train tunnels, power cables, steam pipes, fiber-optic lines, and the warrens, foxholes, and passageways that support their maintenance lie used, half used, and disused in strata that, if visible, would reveal some new way of telling the history of the city. It is a truism—one of those that also happens to be true—that our vision is ruled by who and what we carefully exclude from its ambit.
There is no shortage of the dispossessed in New York; it is, rather, their disorganization that constitutes the linchpin of elite power.
The tunnel dwellers chose these spaces precisely because they are unseen and unseeable. “Up top I have to deal with society,” says Kal, who during the period chronicled in Williams’s study walked Broadway each day, collecting cans, from 96th Street to the World Trade Center. Society, for people like Kal, meant the shelter system—“one unremitting degradation ceremonial,” in the words of scholar and advocate Kim Hopper—where those seeking shelter were derided, robbed, and beaten by residents and guards alike. It meant soup kitchens, where needing food meant being treated, another informant confides, like an “inmate.” It meant “welfare”—opaque, inefficient, deliberately humiliating—whose main objective is to force its recipients into grueling, low-wage work. It meant the park bench and the underpass, where the cold bit their faces and strangers ripped the shoes from their feet as they slept. It meant—and means—all these things plus the anguish borne of perpetual, knife’s-edge insecurity and of enduring such struggles in full view amid the hostile disgust of strangers who seem to want nothing more than for homeless people to simply disappear. From this perspective, the acts of the marauding teens who lit eight sleeping victims on fire during the first months of 1992, or their latter-day counterparts who grin as they strangle helpless men on the floors of subway cars, dovetail with those of the political elites, beginning in earnest during the Koch administration, who normalized such acts through a campaign of relentless dehumanization that to this day has not substantially abated.
The price the tunnel dwellers paid to escape this, to manage their suffering and exclusion on their own terms, was to live in spaces not built for human habitation. The old New York Central tracks, covered in the 1930s as part of the West Side Improvement project, which created Riverside Park and the Henry Hudson Parkway, had fallen out of use by the late 1970s, a victim of the collapse of New York’s manufacturing and shipping industries. The tunnels became part of an expanding landscape of deserted infrastructure, devalued and thus unpoliced, that periodically emerges in the slapdash remaking of urban space in accordance with the shifting logics of profit. These spaces mushroomed across the city at a moment when the same economic forces (along with gentrification, which became the city’s strategy for weathering them) were creating street homelessness on a scale unseen since the Great Depression. An enterprising fraction of this growing class slid into these now-wrong places—wrong in the double sense that they were neither designed to support domestic life nor conducive to those fantasies of progress where capitalism and social virtue lie twinned on a temporal axis that points reliably in one direction. This is the historical moment that created an encampment movement documented most vividly in the work of the late photographer Margaret Morton, in her books The Tunnel: The Underground Homeless of New York City (1995), Fragile Dwelling (2000), and Glass Factory (2004). (And there are other tunnel chroniclers—the Dutch photojournalist Teun Voeten, whom Williams himself introduced to the underground, published a more casual account of his experiences that was translated into English in 2010.) Morton’s photographs depict a lost New York of improvised, unsanctioned, street-level housing solutions. Bushville, a village of casitas erected in the shadow of burnt-out tenements between Avenues C and D. The Hill, another shantytown that sprouted up on the Canal Street off-ramp from the Manhattan Bridge. And the tunnels themselves, both the tent cities and lean-tos near the entrances—including the sardonically named Cubano Arms, established by refugees at the 72nd Street portal and which Williams describes as “an early Frank Gehry–type house construction”—and the hermetic dwellings situated in the tunnel’s inner reaches, shielding their inhabitants from the stares of topside eyes.
“Not an architect, and not a New Yorker, but have fallen in love with NYRA.”
THE UNDERGROUND PRODUCES feelings that are both strange and familiar. A tree sprouts from a track bed, straining toward a grate through which the topside light trickles in. The word for these jarring appositions, where elements that remain separate in our conventional ordering of the world suddenly meet, is “uncanny,” whose German equivalent, unheimlich, translates to something like “unhomelike.” This construction, Freud noted in his famous essay on the subject, registers an ambivalence in the way it preserves a connection between what is familiar and what is strange, what is threatening, what cannot be brought home and made reliable. This ambivalence, this sense of unsettledness, is rooted in our suspicion that what seems ineradicably different from us might in fact be like us, might even be a part of us.
The people in the underground seem different. This sense—this wish, perhaps—is registered in the myths and legends that have historically attached to them. Translucent skin from lack of sunlight. Obscure ceremonies. Consumption of rats—and maybe of you. (Similar dehumanizations were at work in J. D. Vance’s campaign-trail accusations that Haitian migrants in Midwestern cities are stealing and eating their neighbors’ pets.) Eighties exploitation films like C.H.U.D. (1984)—in which underground dwellers who have been transformed into literal monsters creep out of the manholes of SoHo to drag down unwitting grandfathers, dog owners, and policemen’s wives—dramatized these fears in clumsily direct fashion. None of these stories were true, but their accessibility as cultural scripts powered the gothic sensationalism of popular accounts like Jennifer Toth’s 1993 book The Mole People, whose very title trafficked in this notion that the tunnel dwellers had accepted some ghastly metamorphosis into the not-quite-human. (Williams reports that the tunnel dwellers “grew to mistrust” Toth during the course of her research.) And yet it remains true that the conditions under which placemaking—that effort to invest mere location, mere space, with symbolic richness and an infrastructure that can support meaningful life—is condemned to unfold in the underground lends its rhythms of life and the mindsets they foster an otherness that runs the risk of obscuring what the tunnel dwellers ultimately share with those who remain above.
It becomes clear, listening to these stories, that the real sin of the hobo, the vagrant, the tramp, is to have violated a class boundary, to have had the gall to want to live like someone who doesn’t have to work. The punishments for this have been severe.
Stepping into the underground means stepping outside of the world as it is conventionally established. The underground is dark, where the topside is bright. The darkness, according to one resident, “consecrates” their secession from aboveground life into another world. As anyone who has entered such spaces can attest, the unfamiliar environment nurtures senses that lie dormant at grade. In the darkness, Williams sees phantoms, his brain anxiously filling the gaps where his eyes no longer suffice. The underground is quiet where the topside is loud. I can recall similar experiences of my own, where in the stillness, hearing reemerges—water dripping, the sound of one’s own breath. As far as placemaking goes, these places seem like terra nullius; the absence of symbolic connections, the result of both their abandonment and the fact that they were not designed to be inhabited, means one works to create them, work that is reflected in the informal cartographies reproduced as maps in Williams’s book. “I own the tracks because I know the tracks,” a tunnel dweller tells Morton. “I could walk in the dark backwards if I had to ’cause I know every rock.” His comment suggests not just a different relationship to the material world but a different relationship to ownership. You have a right to a place—a right to be there and an interest in how others exercise that right—not because you have purchased it but because you know it, you use it, and you need it. Your connection to this place is mediated and guaranteed by a framework broader than mere money. In a society where space itself is a commodity, these alternative frameworks could only emerge in the context of abandonment, from a situation where formal property rights, the ones belonging to Conrail and Amtrak, relaxed as value drained out of the land. When the potential for development reemerged, as it did when Amtrak decided to reroute its Empire Connection service into Penn Station, or when Donald Trump succeeded in plastering his Riverside South megaproject over the outmoded industrial landscape where the Amalgamated Lithographers Union had once dreamed of erecting “Litho City,” a middle-income development with provisions for two hundred artists’ studios.
Old New York Central Railroad 72nd Street Pavilion Ben Nadler
The underground encourages attention and contemplation, attitudes that feel increasingly impermissible aboveground. Bernard, an autodidact whose claim to the title Lord of the Tunnel is generally recognized as legitimate, keeps copies of Kierkegaard and Kafka in his bunker library alongside that enduring symbol of full-fledged New Yorker–dom, Robert Caro’s The Power Broker (1974). Writing in 1937, André Breton asked why certain places serve as “observatories of the inner sky,” revealing unknown parts of us to ourselves. Places like this work to loosen the unconscious, serving as ideal screens for its projections. For Breton it was the ruined gothic castle, perched uncannily out of its time, that served as an outlet for the repressed and a vehicle for reservations about the hubris of a so-called Age of Reason. The tunnels, themselves ruins of the industrial civilization that ensued, activate something similar in Williams, who can’t shake what he calls “the strong sense of a haunted past.”
It is this scrambled relationship to time, itself a product of their refusal to perpetually rehammer their personalities into the current shape of the world of work, that most sets off the tunnel dwellers from those who continue to give it a go topside. Through a choice structured in equal parts by desire and necessity, they occupy a different temporal register, one focused simultaneously on the immediate moment and the distant, discarded past. In a life governed by acute scarcity, their decisions are necessarily experimental, improvisational, tied to visceral needs and feelings. They routinely achieve a state many crave but cannot grasp—that of living intensely in the present. Meanwhile, their exile into these deserted spaces, temporarily immune to the whirlwind remaking that forever besieges a city whose only real religion is real estate speculation, situates them as the last residents of a ruined past. The signs of this are all around. They live in a mode that evokes earlier eras of urban living, governed by different relationships to technology, nonhuman life, community building, and survival. A gas lamp becomes a prized possession, worthy of showing off to visitors. Cats are honored companions—they keep rats at bay—but retain their autonomy, avoiding the fate of their aboveground counterparts, dragooned into increasingly human-dominated relationships conditioned mainly by the accelerating loneliness of their owners. The communities the tunnel dwellers manage to sustain are ones that revolve around collaboration for survival. Gathering water, food, and firewood. Roasting meats on a communal spit. Sitting with other people.
FEW WILL DENY that we are living through a crisis of meaninglessness. It is increasingly difficult to endure the constant, screaming demands for your attention or the injunction that your interior life must revolve tirelessly around the fantasy of some probably unattainable future. Much of this is rooted in the persistent, gnawing questions that most of us must confront on most days. How can I optimize myself? What could I be doing that I’m not? How can I best become what the rich, who control the money I need to survive, seem to want me to be? This permanent anxiety amounts to a virtual prohibition on reflection and on all the other things that can make life worth living.
Those who Williams encounters underground have addressed these problems in their own way, using the resources they have. In a basic sense, they have chosen to drop out. But this choice and its consequences are structured mercilessly by class, race, and personal misfortune. An informant of Morton’s, describing his childhood, casually relates that “my mother woke me up with a butcher’s knife to my throat because she wanted money to go out because she was [drinking gesture].” Another describes growing up at the intersection where imperial war meets class war, explaining that a judge informed him it was either Vietnam or jail. “So I went in the army, and it was just like going to jail.” He was shot four times, he says. Bernard’s self-reported backstory reveals a life spent as a hustler and bon vivant, whose trade was to live without working, to buck the fates assigned by race and class. (Bernard eventually left the tunnels, living in a series of Harlem apartments before his death in 2017.) An informant in Morton’s The Tunnel named Bob, whose life story corresponds precisely enough to Kal’s that they may be the same person, tells her that he has traveled the world. “I’m a very free-spirited kind of person.” Freedom has many faces—for Bob, it has meant not only world travel but heroic, life-disintegrating amphetamine consumption. His mother, he recalls, told him he should never have been born.
This is the painful freedom of the alienated, of those who were not supposed to have a chance at it. It becomes clear, listening to these stories, that the real sin of the hobo, the vagrant, the tramp, is to have violated a class boundary, to have had the gall to want to live like someone who doesn’t have to work. The punishments for this have been severe. “Social value in our society is based primarily on property or labor,” Bernard says, “and if you have neither to offer you are fucked.”
Allowing homeless communities to persist, let alone supporting or encouraging them, means risking their becoming political communities, ones with something to lose and therefore to defend.
The United States is, formally, a democracy rooted in equality of political status. Formal property qualifications for voting were abolished for white men by the 1850s, and by the latter half of the twentieth century, most citizens were entitled to formal inclusion. But in a class society, those who cannot or will not participate in the system of ownership, with its founding ethic of scarcity and exclusion, operate from a position of civic disability. Disenfranchisement—subordination, the squashing of independent will, the foreclosure of collective power—can be achieved in many ways. The tunnel dwellers are people who are not supposed to have tried to seize autonomy, in this life. They were supposed to serve up their bodies, their energies, so that others could travel the world. In the event they could not manage this—that the market for their labor collapsed, as it did in New York during the era of deindustrialization, or that they found themselves disabled, mentally or physically, by the effects of this wearying subordination—they were supposed to comply with the state’s program to manage them, to go quietly to the shelter or the prison. The people who lived in the tunnel (Williams estimates that in the early ’90s, there were around 113 of them) chose, at great cost to their comfort and their health, to reject this bargain. For them, the price of autonomy was to live a bad form of the anarchist dream—independence without community or resources, a life of fleeting highs in a tar pit of discomfort and privation.
The injunction to respect the wisdom, desires, and autonomy of homeless people sets Williams’s book apart from accounts that oscillate reliably between pity and contempt, which are ultimately two versions of the same position. The effect of Williams’s exposition is always to reduce the distance between them and us, whoever “we” are. Who are we? People whose basic choice in life is to work (die slow), starve (die fast), or turn outlaw (die fighting). Call us whatever you want; I’m fine with the old name, which is proletarian. Williams, whose other books, gathered together under the heading “Studies in Transgression,” include accounts of street gangs, drug crews, project youth, con men, and sex club denizens, has spent his career articulating the positions, choices, and strategies of the most spectacularly alienated, those whose ostracism has become self-reinforcing, those who have less stake in the system than anyone—those who Marx and Engels long ago dubbed, with a touch of unheimlich-ness, the lumpenproletariat. In refusing fear and pity and turning our attention instead to their power, their half-born initiative, Williams prompts us to consider whether the combination of mawkish sentimentality and aggressive disgust we project onto these people, the insult we add to their injury, wafts up murkily from the fact that they are more like us than we are prepared to admit, that they have made choices many of us would secretly like to make.
The price of autonomy was to live a bad form of the anarchist dream—independence without community or resources, a life of fleeting highs in a tar pit of discomfort and privation.
In an endnote to Life Underground, Williams offers a hypothetical: “Rather than viewing the unhoused as a potential danger to the public order, city governments and advocacy groups should recognize the resources and ingenuity that indigent individuals bring to their life situations.” Another way of putting this is to say: What if instead of telling homeless people what is best for them—in other words, trying to convince them that what we want is actually what they want (for them to shut up, to get off the street, to stop confronting us with the evidence of what our economic system does to people)—we took the desires and capacities of homeless people seriously? What if we recognized that what homeless people do is indicative of what they want, accomplished in compromised fashion under fantastically arduous conditions? What if we saw encampments for the achievements they are: fabrics of autonomy, privacy, community, stability, safety, and reciprocity, roughly sewn by and from the detritus of contemporary urban life? What if instead of dispersing encampments, dismantling homeless communities, and shuffling their inhabitants into the “atomizing” purview of state-managed shelter, rehabilitation, and employment, we “encouraged and maintained” such communities?
Leave aside for a moment the city’s post–fiscal crisis dependence on skyrocketing real estate values, which makes the idea of ceding an inch of space to people without money mostly unthinkable. There are other reasons why such an approach is unthinkable. Allowing such communities to persist, let alone supporting or encouraging them, means risking their becoming political communities, ones with something to lose and therefore to defend. Moreover, such communities may hold very different priorities around what work, housing, and even urban life itself are supposed to be for, revealing a different way of life than the one promoted by developers and homeowners, whose well-being is, more than ever, tied up in the appreciation of property values. There is no shortage of the dispossessed in New York; it is, rather, their disorganization that constitutes the linchpin of elite power. Visible, organized, and activated communities of once-homeless people who have created a place for themselves in the city not through the good graces of the wealthy and the state but through their own collective initiative are a political threat too menacing to contemplate. This calculation helps explain the relentless campaign of demonization waged against homeless people and their squatter cousins in New York during the ’80s and ’90s, one that left them enervated and isolated from potential allies and one whose ideological fruits—the notion that homeless people are effectively outside the body politic, that they may even constitute something like a different species—continue to shape municipal common sense in the Eric Adams era. No room for them, it seems, at the Table of Success.
It was not always this way. In a field note from 1991, Williams encounters a crew of workers who are helping to seal off access to the tunnels. From the perspective of 2024, I was surprised to read the comment of the lead engineer, who expressed a kind of militant sympathy for the people he was helping to expel. “These people are homeless,” he tells Williams, “so we should not allow the state to get away with the idea that these people are not human like the rest of us.” The expectation that the state has a responsibility to provide adequate shelter for all people, and that it is legitimate to make such demands on the state, reflects a set of assumptions that has been largely washed away in the intervening years. With the benefit of distance, emerging historical appraisals of late twentieth–century New York (such as Benjamin Holtzman’s 2021 study, The Long Crisis) provide plenty of evidence that the fusion of abhorrence and resignation that characterizes our current emotional and political barometer around homelessness is not innate. It had to be made—inculcated, from the top down, through a conscious policy of coercion and neglect. But that means that it can also be unmade, that another common sense is possible. A first step toward it would be to foment organizations that help homeless people gather and act politically on their own behalf, a project for which groups like the National Union of the Homeless and Picture the Homeless form important precedents.
It’s not clear from this book whether Williams, whose attitude of thoughtful compassion provokes its own kind of uncanniness when juxtaposed against the howling cruelty of mainstream class politics in New York, realizes that his modest proposal—to treat homeless people as if they were human beings—would require or provoke something like a revolutionary political crisis. Until that happens, the last word will continue to belong to people like the man sitting, “palm out,” at the entrance to the 72nd Street subway station who, tiring of Williams’s questions, berates him:
What the fuck you talking about? Everybody in America begs. You begging now. Begging for info-motherfucking-mation. Get the fuck outta my face. On my radio I hear the begging all the time. On the TV they beg, big corporations beg, the city begs too. They beg you to pay your fucking taxes. I never paid no fucking taxes. Yeah, I beg, whatof it? Don’t ask me no fucking questions about this underground. I’m sick of motherfuckers asking me questions about this fucking place. We all in Hell down here.… They want to bulldoze over us and if they did nobody would give a flying fuck.
These words were spoken in the early 1990s. As I write this, the Adams administration has bulldozed an encampment on Randall’s Island erected by migrants expelled from the city-run shelter there. The reality is that a lot of people care—just not anyone whose voice matters.