Life Underground: Encounters with People Below the Streets of New York

by Terry Williams

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 took 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 revisited his contacts repeatedly in the years that followed.

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, New York

320 pages, Paperback

Published February 6, 2024

About the author

Not the same author as Terry Tempest Williams.

Reviews

[Brooklyn Attic Books]

I have to say I was a bit let down with this book. How odd that this man would spend countless hours with these people and barely disclose anything new in his book. There is so much "filler" in this book that deals with the study of homelessness in general that I often forgot what the main topic of this book is. If you want a really thrilling/more insightful account of the lives of the underground dwellers read The Mole People by Jennifer Toth.

Jennifer Toth was a young, white, female journalist grad student at Columbia University. It is IMPRESSIVE what she was able to accomplish in the early 90s. Going under various abandoned underground areas, and the people she spoke to wasn't just the same people from the same area. She got around to different areas, and met various groups.

Honestly, after so many books came out on the SAME group of people, I thought there would be some new revelations. I'm just not sure why this professor decided to write this book, it doesn't bring anything new, in fact, it spends the Prologue and the first two chapters BASHING Jennifer Toth. I really feel like he was upset that others wrote the book before him. And there are subsections that drone on about silly topics like the family formation and role of rats in NYC, and Cats and Ants even. The book is written as if a lecturer likes to hear himself speak, so he overexplains very simple topics such as the signs homeless people hold up to ask for money/food. There was so much unnecessary filler and such little actual information on the experiences underground, it became boring and redundant. The same 5 people seem to get interviewed A LOT. Yet, Jennifer Toth did it first.

[Jetaime · Rating 4 out of 5]

The concept of this book expanded my sense of what an ethnographer could be. It serves as a refreshing critique of the machine of capitalism. It challenges our status quo assumptions about poverty, misfortune, and how moral we are if we measure our morality by our treatment of marginalized people.

[Ronnie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the 3rd book I have read. Starting with the Mole People-Life in the underworld of London and now this. All these books deal with homelessness/ houselessness...povertyviles. All three writers have written deeply disturbing tales. Yes. There are mentally ill people. Drug abusers. Alcohol abusers. People who have run away from society. People who are outcasts. Disposables. Persons who are unskilled and have no meaningful jobs or places to stay. Economic upheavals. Political disasters. Migrants.....This last book Willians does a fine posit of making the past congeal with the present and for the future.In so many ways its metamorphosed to the parts of Mad Max and Water-world. What makes it nervewracking is introducing the ultimate Mad Hatter....Rudy Giuliani. where the author writes that he is slowly dying a tortuous political death. Sometimes reading this stuff makes one gasp for intellectual breath. Housing policies -health care policies - human care policies.....all end up unfortunately on the funeral pyre of abject failure especially if woodenly thought out....with no sense of how it will work out safely and humanely for men/womEN and children. It is the technological part of change that is the motherlode of enigma. The effect of is not malleable. It is the affect that is. That's what polticians and researcher forget .Who is the effected and who is the affected. Look at the mirror and in the mirror....

[Maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very real and enlightening account of lives lived under one of the most well known and richest areas in the United States. It challenges us to see clearly and reassess both biases and well-intended approaches through these personal lenses. I highly recommend this book.

[Mirella · Rating 4 out of 5]

I learned a lot through this book and found the stories of people underground to be interested. However, it did take me a while to get into the book and as someone else said the timeline of the stories is not super clear.

[Victoria · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is very good, but it’s hard to follow where in time things take place given that the author conducted interviews over decades and doesn’t always state which time periods he’s talking about.

[Abigail Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A few of his papers were assigned for my urban studies classes but this is the first full length book of his I’d read - very solid, will prob reread some of the papers now

[Olímpia · Rating 5 out of 5]

fascinant 🌟🌟🌟

[Sidik Fofana · Rating 5 out of 5]

SIX WORD REVIEW: The way soup kitchens judge you.