Life Underground

Riverside Park gives the crowded Upper West Side of Manhattan a stretch of open green space. Underneath it run railroad tunnels that sat unused for decades, and over those years unhoused people made them their shelter. The sociologist Terry Williams went into this hidden world to understand what life is like on the margins, out of public view.

Between 1991 and 1996 he visited the tunnels, which stretch from West Seventy-Second to West Ninety-Sixth Streets, hundreds of times. The visits ended when authorities cleared the tunnels to make way for Amtrak passenger service. Williams stayed in touch with his contacts in the years that followed and returned to them repeatedly.

Life Underground draws on anecdotes, field observations, photographs, transcribed conversations with residents, and passages from personal journals. Through them it portrays individual people, their daily routines, the social world they built below ground, and their dealings with the world above, which they call "topside." The book also shows the range of experience among unhoused people and how they tried to carve out a place for themselves, and keep their dignity, despite neglect and isolation. Written with an ethnographer's eye and real empathy, it records a subterranean community that no longer exists.