vagabondia - book - 1993 - The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City

The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City
Jennifer Toth
Chicago Review Press
1993
267 pages


Hello out there in Interville!  I purchased The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City, from Seekers Books, located on the corner of Bloor st. West and Borden st. in the Annex neighborhood of Toronto.

The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels beneath New York City, is the best known work by journalist Jennifer Toth.  The text is intended as a journalistic account of the homeless people who live in makeshift communities in the underground infrastructure of New York City.  Toth creates an uneven view of the people who live there without clearly delineating them as a unique population within the larger group that is the city’s homeless.  The various chapters of her book are defined by encounters with particular individuals.  Chapter two, for example, is called “Seville’s Story”, wherein Toth discussed the situation of a particular man, while other chapters cover more broad aspects of the underground population.  Another example, chapter 22, “Women”, is broken up into short stories separated under headings of the first names of a number of women with whom Toth spoke.  

Aspects of the text are interesting, especially those parts where Toth describes the methods used by the underground dwellers for acquiring resources, or the living arrangements of particular individuals.  Much of the book appears as brief and superficial newspaper pieces about particular encounters with tunnel inhabitants.  This style of writing is especially emphasized when she introduces an individual a second time in the text, as she does with officer Bryan Henry, who appears early in the text and again towards its end.  Otherwise much of the book describes a number of encounters with the underground homeless without adding any new insights into the experience of being homeless, or of the unique nature of underground living.

Furthermore, a number of aspects of tunnel life that a reader may infer exist are merely alluded to, and never witnessed by Toth. There seems to be an issue with these kinds of texts where an author attempts to enter into a marginal social world.  The author appears to become a privileged outsider.  Toth is given access to components of the tunnel communities but is also shielded from their harsher aspects.  Violence, for example, is repeatedly referred to, by the discovery of a body, mentioned early in the book, and in conversation with a number of the tunnel dwellers.  Toth, however, never witnesses anything.  Something similar appears to be at play in Ted Conover’s Rolling Nowhere, however Conover dedicated himself to living the hobo lifestyle for a matter of months, and he witnessed violence, he just was never afflicted by it. (sidenote: Conover and Toth’s books both contain descriptions of violence by youths on the vulnerable poor).  Towards the end of the text, Toth is threatened by a tunnel dweller she thought she had befriended because he believed that she witnessed a murder he committed.  This situation, although quite serious for Toth at the time, approached an absurd horizon, as it created the implication that there’s a continuum of brutal behavior beneath these streets and her only encounter with it was a misunderstanding.

Toth’s book is an interesting introduction to this subject matter, however the potentially most interesting aspects seem to lie beyond its boundaries.  Many of the tunnel dwellers speak of having been aware of the underground communities before they actually entered it - that people were aware that beneath the surface there were hidden eyes - but she never speaks to members of the above ground population for thoughts on the people that lurk within their city infrastructure.  Furthermore, as a privileged outsider, Toth speaks with people who are, undoubtedly, the most extroverted members of a secretive population.  One individual named J.C. in the text says that a number of the people will only speak with social workers, however, Toth never speaks with social workers about the tunnel dwellers except to source statistics.   Nor does Toth ever discuss the tunnel dwellers as a part of an overall analysis of homelessness in the city.  

The effect created by these lacks is that the tunnel dwellers are almost formed into zoo animals by the text.  They are observed briefly as curiosities, but not entirely taken seriously as meaning anything to the larger social environment.  Perhaps a partial strategy for reporting on an underground population is that a reader may be lead to interpret the tunnel dwellers as mutually distinct from the aboveground population, and not place demands on the text to connect the two realms.  Many of the personal stories of Mole People, told to Toth, describe a desire to leave society.  While those individuals may be sincere in the desires they express, and their social status certainly must change when they move into the tunnels (even if they were socially marginal in the first place), they are still a part of society.

Despite these criticisms, The Mole People is still an interesting text that shines a light onto a marginal population that is beyond the beyond as far as the public’s ability to perceive it is concerned.  I’m aware that Joseph Brennan, a NYC subway enthusiast, has written a lengthy piece on how inaccurate Toth’s descriptions of the underground locations are.  I don’t really think that that is a particularly relevant aspect of her text.  Exact locations of tunnel spots are not important, and what is important about the text is that it describes a group of people’s will to repurpose the subterranean urban infrastructure for the sake of survival and even community.