There is, says Raleigh News & Observer staffer Toth, a city
below New York City: a fantastic underworld of men, women, and
children who are born, live, and die in the darkness beneath the
streets. In the early 90's, the author, then a Los Angeles Times
intern, spent a year exploring that nether world, preparing this
startling report. Toth first heard about "the mole people" from a
child who claimed that her classmate lived underground; further
research brought the author into contact with Sgt. Bryan Henry, a
Grand Central Station cop who introduced her to one "J.C." (most of
Toth's homeless use pseudonyms), the "self-described" spokesman for
an underground community of 200 - a large but not unprecedented
number for one of the dozens of camps, gangs, and roving bands that
Toth found in the tunnels. These tunnels - including gas and sewer
lines as well as abandoned subway tunnels and stations - honeycomb
the city's foundation, descending to seven levels and housing
perhaps 5,000 lost souls. To the uninitiated and, at first, to
Toth, the tunnels are terrifying: She walks them both guided and
alone, aware of forms flitting past, of rats and madmen. She visits
camps whose members stay below for weeks at a time; she watches a
"filthy and bearded" loner skewer and roast a "track rabbit" - a
rat; she talks to graffiti artists, women, teenagers, and a
kill-for-hire gang whose services cost $20. Pausing in her
chronicle, she surveys underground life in history and literature,
from Egyptian slaves living in mines to Ralph Ellison's Invisible
Man. Finally, Toth flees the city's depths, her life threatened by
a mole man who thinks her a police informer. The life expectancy of
the average mole person, stricken by drugs and disease, is under
five years. Toth's unusual sociological adventure story, then, is
as saddening as it is gripping. (Kirkus Reviews)
Thousands of people live in the subway, railroad, and sewage
tunnels that form the bowels of New York City and this book is
about them, the so-called mole people. They live alone and in
communities, in subway tunnels and below subway platforms and this
fascinating study presents how and why people move underground, who
they are, and what they have to say about their lives and the
"topside" world they've left behind.
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