 | The examples and perspective in this article deal primarily with the United States and do not represent a worldwide view of the subject.(July 2018) |
In the United States, the term mole people (also called tunnel people or tunnel dwellers) is sometimes used to describe homeless people living under large cities in abandoned subway, railroad, flood, sewage tunnels, and heating shafts. [1]
Dark Days , a 2000 documentary feature film by British filmmaker Marc Singer, follows a group of people living in an abandoned section of the New York City Subway, in the area called Freedom Tunnel. [2] [3] Anthropologist Teun Voeten's book Tunnel People is also about the inhabitants of the Freedom Tunnel, where Voeten lived for five months.
Jennifer Toth's 1993 book The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City, [4] written while she was an intern at the Los Angeles Times , was promoted as a true account of travels in the tunnels and interviews with tunnel dwellers. The book helped canonize the image of the mole people as an ordered society living literally under people's feet. However, few claims in her book have been verified, and it includes inaccurate geographical information, numerous factual errors, and an apparent reliance on largely unprovable statements. The strongest criticism came from New York City Subway historian Joseph Brennan, who declared, "Every fact in this book that I can verify independently is wrong." [5] Cecil Adams's The Straight Dope contacted Toth in 2004, [6] and noted the large amount of unverifiability in her stories, while declaring that the book's accounts seemed to be truthful. A later article, after contact with Brennan, was more skeptical of Toth's truthfulness. [7]
Other journalists have focused on the underground homeless in New York City as well. Photographer Margaret Morton made the photo book The Tunnel. [8] Filmmaker Marc Singer made the documentary Dark Days in the year 2000, and a similar documentary, Voices in the Tunnels , was released in 2008. In 2010, Teun Voeten published Tunnel People . [9]
Media accounts have reported "mole people" living underneath other cities as well. In the Las Vegas Valley, it is estimated a thousand homeless people find shelter in the storm drains underneath the city for protection from extreme temperatures that exceed 115 °F (46 °C) while dropping below 30 °F (−1 °C) in winter.[ citation needed ]
According to media reports, the people living in the tunnels underneath Las Vegas have managed to furnish their "rooms". In one ABC News report from 2009, [10] a couple, who had been living in the tunnels for five years, had furnished their home with a bed, bookcase and even a makeshift shower. The tunnels are prone to flooding, which can be extremely dangerous for the tunnel's residents. Most lose their belongings regularly, and there have been some reported deaths.
Many tunnel inhabitants have been turned away from the limited charities in Las Vegas. Matt O'Brien, a local author who spent nearly five years exploring life beneath the city to write the book Beneath the Neon , founded the Shine A Light Foundation to help the homeless people taking refuge in the tunnels. The charity helps tunnel residents by providing supplies, such as underwear, bottled water, and food.
According to the Clark County Regional Flood Control District, the valley has about 450 miles (720 km) of flood control channels and tunnels, and about 300 miles (480 km) of those are underground. [11]
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Subterranean London refers to a number of subterranean structures that lie beneath London. The city has been occupied by humans for two millennia. Over time, the capital has acquired a vast number of these structures and spaces, often as a result of war and conflict.
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Jennifer Ninel Toth is an American journalist and writer.
Dark Days is an American documentary film directed, produced, and photographed by the English documentarian Marc Singer that was completed and released in 2000. Shot during the mid-1990s, it follows a group of people who lived in the Freedom Tunnel section of the Amtrak system at the time. DJ Shadow created new music for the documentary and also let Singer use some of his preexisting songs.
Reliquary is the 1997 New York Times best-selling sequel to Relic, by American authors Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. The legacy of the blood-maddened Mbwun lives on in Reliquary, but the focus is shifted from the original museum setting to the tunnels beneath the streets of New York City. The book is the second in the Special Agent Pendergast series.
The Beach Pneumatic Transit was the first attempt to build an underground public transit system in New York City. It was developed by Alfred Ely Beach in 1869 as a demonstration subway line running on pneumatic power. The line had one stop in the basement of the Rogers Peet Building, near the old City Hall station, and a one-car shuttle running between the building and a dead end approximately 300 feet (91 m) away. It was not a regular mode of transportation and lasted from 1870 until 1873.
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The Freedom Tunnel is a railroad tunnel carrying the West Side Line under Riverside Park in Manhattan, New York City. Used by Amtrak trains to and from Pennsylvania Station, it got its name because the graffiti artist Chris "Freedom" Pape used the tunnel walls to create some of his most notable artwork. The name may also be a reference to the former shantytowns built within the tunnel by homeless populations seeking shelter and freedom to live rent-free and unsupervised by law enforcement. The tunnel runs approximately 2.6 miles (4.2 km), from 72nd Street to 124th Street.
References to the New York City Subway in popular culture are prevalent, as it is a common element in many New Yorkers' lives.
Chris Pape is an American painter and graffiti artist. He started tagging subway tunnels and subway cars in 1974 as "Gen II" before adopting the tag "Freedom". Pape is best known for his numerous paintings in the eponymous Freedom Tunnel, an Amtrak tunnel running underneath Manhattan's Riverside Park. Prominent paintings in the Freedom Tunnel attributed to Pape include his "self-portrait", featuring a male torso with a spray-can head, and "There's No Way Like the American Way", a parody of Coca-Cola advertising and tribute to the evicted homeless of the tunnel. Another theme of Freedom's work is black and silver recreations of classical art, including a reinterpretation of the Venus de Milo and a full train car recreation of the iconic hands from Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel. Chris Pape also was one of the first documentarians to cover the mole people, homeless living underground in the Freedom Tunnel.
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Subterranean New York City relates to the area beneath the surface level of New York City; the natural features, man-made structures, spaces, objects, and cultural creation and experience. Like other subterranea, the underground world of New York City has been the basis of TV series, documentaries, artwork, and books.
Tunnel People.
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