Am I a moron for believing that “mole people” exist in New York City’s underground? The mole people, as documented in an eponymous 1993 book by Jennifer Toth, are homeless people who live in subway tunnels, sucking down electricity and other resources for free a la Ellison’s Invisible Man. Is Toth lying? Hallucinating? What documentation is there?
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The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City details Toth’s early-90s encounters with several dozen of what she estimated at the time to be 5,000 homeless people living beneath the streets of New York, mostly in subway and railroad tunnels. Particularly large populations inhabit (or inhabited, anyway) the multilevel labyrinths beneath Grand Central and Penn stations. Many tunnel people are solitary loonies not unlike the guys you see living aboveground in cardboard boxes in any large American city. In a few cases, though–this is where it gets truly weird–sizable communities have coalesced, some allegedly numbering 200 people or more, complete with “mayors,” elaborate social structures, even electricity. Toth describes one enclave deep under Grand Central with showers using hot water from a leaky steam pipe, cooking and laundry facilities, and an exercise room. The community has a teacher, a nurse, and scampering children. “Runners” return frequently to the surface to scavenge food and such, but others–the real “mole people”–routinely go for a week or more without seeing the light of day.
Sounds almost homey, eh? Like hell. According to Toth, most of the people living in the tunnels are alcoholic, addicted to drugs, or mentally ill. They’re terrorized by roving gangs, ravaged by illness, hassled by cops, and preyed upon by each other. The majority live like animals. In one memorable passage,
Is it all BS? Even allowing for the possibility that some of Toth’s informants jerked her around a bit, I don’t think so. Plenty of TV reports, newspaper features, and books by other authors have told substantially similar stories, in some cases involving the same people. Filmmaker Mark Singer lived with his subjects to shoot the 2000 documentary Dark Days, which won an audience prize at Sundance. Are the tunnel people still down there? Probably, although clampdowns and cleanup efforts have no doubt forced some relocations. How does stuff like this happen in our day and age? The cynic will say: Nobody ever said drugs were a shortcut to success. But anyone who’s felt the occasional tremor beneath his own feet knows–the abyss is closer than you think.
