Customer Reviews

The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City

5 star:		(54)
4 star:		(33)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(12)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

My birthday gift was "The Mole People - Life in the Tunnels beneath New York City." Both subterranean landscapes and alternative societies have always fascinated me, and this book contains both. New York City has some of the largest and most inhabited underground spaces of any city in the United States, and the homeless population is more visible there than some other cities. The book changed how I thought about the homeless. I avoided contact with them because they can be unpredictable. I pretended I didn't see them, thinking soup kitchens and shelters would help them. Although the book reinforces that homelessness is often a choice, it taught me that the homeless are not much different from me.

It's amazing how much space there is belowground. So many abandoned tunnels for trains, gas lines, and water. One can still wire electricity, and some abandoned subway stations still have working bathrooms. Cubbies built to house maintenance workers now house the homeless. One community got water from a broken pipe where they showered and washed their clothes. Another even had a microwave. One wonders if any of them have Internet access.

I found it interesting that many tunnel-dwellers did not want to return to the surface, or to a normal life. They are the ultimate outsiders, and they have idealist views of their own lifestyle, while believing the surface is not for them. They are invisible, outcasts, on the surface world. Life is not better there. Underground they have a family and a purpose. Men who couldn't find work and provide for the family on the surface world can be productive members of "society" beneath the ground. It amazed me how much they helped one another, forming communities where each person had their role. Of course, there were the loners and the drug addicts and the alcoholics, but others went down for ideological reasons.

Close to the surface, many people still held normal jobs above ground, and one child still attended school. With rents so high, people resort to this - you can't work minimum wage and have an apartment in Manhattan. Close to the surface, there is less community and more of a transient population. The police have a higher presence, an outreach program that sometimes helps and sometimes hinders the homeless. Many inhabitants report being beaten by the officers, while the officers say that they endanger themselves daily trying to help these people.

So often, the inhabitants would say that they believed life was better for them underground. One self-styled mayor told Jennifer that undergrounders were superior people to whom the human spirit was more valuable than material comforts. The leaders of these communities were usually quite educated, sometimes with degrees. This particular man had a library that he had brought down over the years. A schoolteacher and a nurse lived in his community, both trained in the aboveground world, but choosing to live and work belowground. Appointed runners fetched supplies from the surface.

Another common phrase is "these people need me. I'm needed down here." In the anonymous surface world, many people are not successful and end up alone and nameless. Below, they can be someone. In some ways, it is a utopia. Free from a society where they don't fit in, they no longer pay taxes or follow rules and they can live a more authentic life, where survival is a day-to day struggle, but they can feel as if they are really contributing.

Most of the interviewees were living under ground actively. I wonder if those who have left tell a different story. An exotic dancer often has an idealized view of her role, but after she has left the profession, her opinions are more jaded. Maybe people idealize their own lives,in order to mentally survive hardship. Yet, I was impressed by their ethics. As an atheist myself, I too believe we must find our moral compass on the inside. The more idealistic communities talked about the "human
morality" and "human religion", ethics like honesty and compassion. Without rules and laws, these people generally act out of their own hearts to care for their neighbors. They care for people that most of us would turn away from in disgust - crack addicts, AIDS-infected people, and the mentally unstable.

Of course, there are crazy and drug-addled people. The writer encountered one man called the Dark Angel that everyone, from the police to the tunnel-dwellers feared. He lived alone in the tunnel, and few would come near him. He believed that he was evil's incarnation on earth. There are bands of roving teenagers, and gang-members who plan their assassinations and
drug deals beneath the ground. It's a haven for those who do not want to be seen, some of whom are bad people. Rarely was the writer without a guide for her own safety.

Even ensconced in the surface world of professional jobs and rat-free air-conditioned apartments, we can see why these people chose to leave all that for a life underground, without laws and structure. They survive better than one would expect. It allows people to start over, or even to start for the first time. For some people, it is the best option they have, and reading about the rapes and thefts at surface-world shelters, one understands why they would flee to deeper and deeper bowels of the earth.

Jennifer Toth did a brave thing, and her compassion and courage impressed me. She entered their world, nearly unbiased, and she kept in touch with her subjects. Her book, though scholarly, is not the least bit boring. She writes with a personal style and a first-person perspective, and her landscapes are hard to forget. She communicates that the mole people are more human than their name implies, sometimes more human than those of us
above.

Anyone with an interest in homelessness should read this, especially if you enjoyed Lee Stringer's autobiographical "Grand Central Winter". Toth explores the areas that Stringer didn't, literally and figuratively, delving deep into the bowels of NYC, and into our collective conscience to uncover the Mole People.

Whether you believe in the existence of the Mole People or not, (and if they do not exist, I find it difficult to understand why a sizeable police team has been assigned to deal with them) this is a fascinating book; quite difficult to put down, which is high praise for a work of non-fiction on such a grim subject. Toth writes in a vivid, but honest and open way about her tunnel experiences; her youth lends clarity and simplicity to what could, from the pen of an older writer, have become a messy opinion laden tirade against society's ills. Here, the stories are fresh and vigorous, tinged with sympathy, humour, sadness, but above all, evidence of the author's enormous respect for her subjects. Toth gives no answers. The pasts of the people she introduces to us are hazy at best, and while sweeping generalisations can be made about why they chose to live underground, Toth herself is never so arrogant as to try to offer solutions or even possible causes for their problems. She challenges widely held ideas about how much of a problem the underground homeless are without either condoning or criticising any single individual or agency. She is always balanced, whether dealing with policemen or the homeless man whose stories about himself seem to change as often as the weather, absolutely non-judgemental, which in a book of this type, is refreshing.

The stories she tells are almost all unbelievable. Either because the her subjects and their apparent hopelessness and retreat from our society is so sad, or because of the resilience and enterprise shown by them in creating homes complete with more mod. cons. than you'd imagine. Toth shows us all manner of people to reflect our own society - the cultured, the simple, the educated, the mad, the sane, the clean, the dirty, the hopeful, the hopeless, the philosophers, the religious, the regular Joes, the jobless, the employed, the old, the frighteningly young. The only distinction which is hard to make is that between good and bad character; in the tunnels, you may not necessarily be the person you were on the outside. Underground, there are fully functioning communities, with councils, health care and education systems in place. There are rules and laws that upturn our 'topside' ideas of law and order; there are also healthy amounts of loving, caring, sharing and charity shown towards each other by the members of underground communities.

Toth writes well. The only fault I can really find with "The Mole People" is that the chapter dealing with the history of the underground sticks out like a sore thumb in the middle of the book, spoiling the flow. It would have been better as the start or end of the book. However, it is in itself an interesting, well written and important chapter, too good to be banished to an appendices. Lest we think that the Mole People live in some alternative Utopia, Toth shows us the appalling and gruesome, even, at points, terrifyingly dangerous aspect of life underground. Things that don't bear thinking about in our clean and ordered world, but which Toth willingly encountered, at great risk to herself, in order to bring these strange, surprising, horrific and beautiful stories to light. But those are Toth's stories to tell - to read about them, buy this amazing, well written and attitude changing book.

I read this for a bookclub and was very disappointed. I was eager to hear true stories of homeless life in New York, but what I got was barely readable fantasy. It seems to me that Ms. Toth wrote a successful article on this topic for the L.A. Times and then decided to 'cash in' and make it into a full-blown book. Only problem is that she didn't do any research, fact checking, or even actually visit many of the places she claims to have visited. The whole production feels so slapped together, for example chapters on subway graffiti (interesting, but not really related at all to the subway dwellers), fictional accounts of living underground (HG Wells....) etc. Many stories are repeated several times throughout the book, presented as if we had never herad about them before when we had read the same exact thing a few pages ago! Who edited this? This work can at best be called irresponsible journalism. READ AT YOUR OWN RISK!

While there is no way to verify as such the stories in this book, it is simple enough to show that a number of the places she describes do not exist. As the most glaring, she makes repeated references to the seven levels of Grand Central Station, when there are only two.

Rather than repeat them, a good summary can be found at
http://www.columbia.edu/~brennan/abandoned/mole-people.html

In "The Mole People" Jennifer Toth tells the story of the New York City homeless who have taken up residence in the subway tunnels and sub-basements of Manhatten. In clear, eloquent prose, Toth introduces the reader to the genuinely surreal existence of people who live out much of their lives in dark, man-made catacombs. With both the eye of a scientist and the compassion of a concerned human being, Toth examines what has driven these people underground, and how it is they exist in such an environment.

This book is astonishing in that something that reads like a bizzare work of fiction is in fact true. It is hard to believe that people could or would live in subway tunnels. but Toth's reporting is compelling. My one complaint is that she didn't do much to research the architetural aspects of sub-surface NYC. I suspect she would have done much to silence her critics if she had mapped her travels and compared them to available blue-prints.

As a newspaperwoman, Jennifer Toth wrote an article describing life in the tunnels beneath New York City. She met "mole people" (tunnel dwellers) while researching the article. After her article appeared on the newspaper's front page Ms. Toth spent a year exploring the tunnels and interviewing tunnel dwellers. This book describes her experiences and is an excellent example of investigative journalism.

As Ms. Toth's contact network grew she met a variety of tunnel dwellers. Examples include J.C., a member of a 200-person tunnel community where the children are held in common (initially he refuses to guide Ms. Toth unless she will "promise to remain underground for a week and to wear my hair in braids." -- she refuses); Sam, an ex-social worker who leads another 200-person tunnel community (no one may leave without his permission); and Blade, a tunnel dweller who first befriends and guides Ms. Toth but ultimately attempts to control and enter her private life.

Life underground is neither romantic nor pretty. Ms. Toth's recollections and interviews illustrate the reality of life underground: chemical dependency, danger, disease, and poverty. Her recollections and interviews also illustrate tunnel dweller's greatest weapons: discomfort and fear. Her book is an excellent description of NYC tunnel life, the suffering of all homeless people, and the societal challenge that the homeless represent.

While the author's experiences with the homeless may or may not be genuine, her experiences with the tunnels themselves are inaccurate, half-right or downright false.

This book suffers from many glaring factual inaccuracies. It's a shame, because Toth's writing is often fascinating and compelling - but it's impossible to take her book seriously when there are so many incorrect, even absurd claims.

Some of the other reviewers here have defended Toth by noting that she was simply repeating the stories of the homeless people without vouching for their accuracy. Although at times Toth does make it clear that she is merely relating information given to her by the underground homeless and that she has not verified it, many of the factually incorrect claims are presented as "background information" that the reader is apparently supposed to take at face value. Toth makes many specific, demonstratably false claims about the tunnel system under New York that appear to be the result of some sort of historical/factual research on her part, not simply second-hand information from the homeless. If Toth was simply passing on information from the homeless when she makes these claims, she certainly didn't make it clear in her book.

Many of the stories from the underground homeless that are recounted in Toth's book are so factually inaccurate, implausible, or inconsistent that one can't help but wonder if any of it is true. Perhaps there is accurate information in here, but how are we supposed to sort any of it out? It's especially frustrating since Toth doesn't appear to make any effort to check the facts related to her by her homeless sources, even when it should have been trivially easy. For example, one homeless person describes an incident in which he and a group of other homeless secretly watched some angry police officers beat a homeless man named Peppin and throw him against the electrified third rail, nearly killing him. The person recounts how the officers agreed to say that they saw a group of thugs beating Peppin, and that the thugs threw Peppin against the third rail just before the police chased them off. This is indeed a shocking story, and it would by nice if Toth made any effort to verify it. It should have been simple for a reporter like Toth to research this by checking through old police reports (after all, she would have had the location and approximate date of the incident!), but she doesn't appear to follow it up in any way - leaving the reader with no clue as to whether or not it actually happened. This same source claims to have pled guilty in a $65,000 jewelry heist. Again, Toth apparently makes no effort to determine the truthfulness of this claim, even though it would have been trivially easy to check the court records.

I wish that I could say that I know more about the underground homeless of New York for having read "The Mole People," but Toth's book appears to be of virtually no informational value. Toth makes many factually incorrect statements that could have been easily fixed had she simply consulted freely-available maps of the subway system. She also makes many claims that aren't readily disproved, but how is anyone supposed to take them seriously in light of her many glaring errors? Her homeless sources appear to largely be drug addicts or mentally ill people who tell outlandish stories, which Toth fails to make even the most basic of efforts to fact-check. Although there is probably some useful information in "The Mole People," there's no way to distinguish reality from fantasy in such a poorly research book that hinges on such unreliable sources.

You can perhaps forgive Toth for being too credulous in listening to stories her tunnel-dwelling interviewees told her. You can perhaps forgive her for not getting every detail of her trips into the tunnel straight. It's harder to forgive her for repeating outright nonsense as if it were fact (tunnels under Central Park, lost sections of Grand Central) when they would have been easy to check.

What I cannot forgive, and what makes me dubious about much of the rest of the book, are the constant obvious errors where she cannot even be consistent with herself. She talks poetically about tracks embedded in cobblestone where elevated trains once ran (elevated means above the street, not embedded in it). She refers to places like "Bowery Street" that don't actually exist. She even provides a flagrantly inaccurate description of a grafitti artist's self portrait that's reproduced in the book. All you have to do is flip from page 120 to 123 for a clear demonstration of the book's shaky factual standing.

Is this book entirely fictional? No. But it's sloppy and credulous enough that you don't really know what to believe, and that's not forgivable in a supposed work of nonfiction.

"Mole people" is the term that is given to the homeless living under the subways of New York City. The author Jennifer Toth takes you down in to the sewers and exposes you to the life of the people who live in this environment. She talks to the homeless who live down in the tunnels and listens to their stories and what they have to say about life. This story makes you think a lot about what is happening in the world and how you should never take anything for granted. Even though this story was creepy and frightening you can't help but keep reading to see what happens next and whom Toth would interview next. I think this book should get a four out of five stars because the author does a very good job on getting you lots of information about the lives of the mole people and it is a very interesting and exciting read.