Students of Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man and
Richard Wright's similar short story "The Man Who Lived
Underground" were once assured that living underground was a
metaphor. A great literature, not all of it fiction, exists about
life underground: in the sewers of Paris, in the catacombs of Rome,
in the subways of London during the Blitz, and under cities of the
future. The common thread is that there is refuge underground, a
last resort for both the hunted and the unwanted. So, in fact and
metaphor, is the underground for the real people who really do live
under New York City.
Margaret Morton's The Tunnel is a remarkable and
startling visit in photographs and interviews with the people who
live under New York City's west side. There are other underground
communities in New York City, and Morton contributed photographs to
Jennifer Toth's more wide-ranging The Mole People
(Chicago Review Press, 1993), but the tunnel and the people who
live in it have peculiarities that justify giving them a separate
account.
Unlike other underground places in New York City, the west side
tunnel was not built as tunnel. The railroad tracks in the tunnel
were originally on the surface. To make a tunnel of it, a great
structure had to be built and covered over with landfill, producing
an extension of Riverside park, which provides a more acceptable
view for the fashionable apartments along the Hudson river.
An aspect of the tunnel Morton's camera fails to portray is its
grandeur—or at least that of the southern portions I
explored. Some arches supporting the park reach upwards eighty feet
or more, and in places the tunnel is wider than a football field.
Light from storm drains in the park filters through the smoke from
the campfires in the tunnels and reveals many colorfully
spray-painted murals. In all, the effect is that of a grand, censed
cathedral. To miss this is to miss a poignant irony of scale. It is
hard to understand that the same sort of beings that raised so
great a structure now live in the pathetic shacks and cold niches
within it.
Morton's black-and-white photographs have much the quality of
Dorothea Lange's pictures of the people of the Dust Bowl. Like
Lange's they reveal much misery, but also sometimes capture a
strangely familiarity and homeyness. Accommodations in the tunnel
range from an exposed mattress next to a pile of scavenged
possessions, to plywood shacks, to a one-room house left behind by
the workers, to a variety of niches and cliff dwellings high on the
walls.
Homeless people lived in this area before it was covered over in
the Thirties, but the present community can be traced back only
twenty years. In that twenty years many furnishings have been
brought into the tunnel, some of them carried for great distances
because of the limited number of entrances. For the dressers and
shelving, the more established digs are as tidy as some others are
indescribably squalid.
The attitudes of the people who live in the tunnel vary, too.
Most of those Morton has recorded have given up on the surface
world and believe it has given up on them. Some offer practical
advice on making the best of life in tunnels. Although they have
ceased, for a time, to struggle to improve their situations in
society, they try to make themselves more comfortable in the
tunnel. Some of these people do make it out of the tunnel, although
they also sometimes return when all else fails.
To these people, the great size of the tunnel seems to offer
freedom and possibility, although this comes at the price of
freezing winds from the river which are not a problem for those who
live in the more modest spaces under Grand Central station. But to
others the great space seems intimidating, and they perceive only
their smallness and inconsequentiality within it.
Thieves may steal any stash of food or clothing, the authorities
may drive the people out of the tunnels, and young people come to
harass the residents and to burn out the tunnel dwellings. Some
residents see no point in making a slight improvement today if it
may be wiped out tomorrow, and those who feel this way are the most
miserable of all.
Life underground is, after all, a metaphor.
