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Philip M E Garboden, Review of “Life Underground: Encounters with People Below the Streets of New York”, Social Forces, Volume 103, Issue 3, March 2025, Page e19, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soae160
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Terry Williams’ book Life Underground: Encounters with People Below the Streets of New York is a fascinating ethnographic account of perhaps the most marginal members of our society: those who live in abandoned subway tunnels. There’s much to like about this book, but Williams should be most applauded for presenting the lives he encountered respectfully, humanely, and without mystique. There’s no magic here, no complex community of “mole people” subsisting off rats and human flesh, no disappearing and reappearing in darkened tunnels like Batman or perhaps Jack the Ripper, no committing atrocious crimes or living large off the waste products of late capitalism. Nearly everything about these individuals is shockingly normal, at least in the context of the chronically unsheltered homeless. The vast majority suffer from addiction, mental health problems, or both. Their water comes from leaky pipes, their electricity is jerry-rigged from the transit infrastructure, and they eat what all chronically homeless people eat: food from dumpsters, soup kitchens, and grocery stores. They make money mostly from collecting cans, selling books, and panhandling.
