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| Closed - City Hall - NYC |
I have always been fascinated by the underground. Maybe that's one of the big things about D&D that appealed to me right away.
I love public transit, especially trains.
Previously, I have posted about cool old stores and diners in NYC:
People can be seen down there, but the mole people and its complex society is probably a myth.
SOME LINKS
https://ny.curbed.com/maps/nyc-subway-secret-tunnels
https://untappedcities.com/2015/12/16/7-nyc-tunnels-where-subway-trains-go-to-sleep/
https://untappedcities.com/2019/04/10/top-10-secrets-of-the-nyc-subway/
https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-thousands-of-people-live-underground-in-the-subway-tunnels-known-as-Mole-people
Probably not.
Different variations of this story have been floating around for years. Fueled mainly by a few widely publicized—but very different—firsthand accounts, each with varying degrees of truthfulness.
This much is definitely true:
For many years, there was a small community of people who lived in the Amtrak train tunnels near Riverside Park on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. (Known as the Freedom Tunnel by graffiti artists.) These are the underground tunnels that bring Amtrak passenger trains to and from Penn Station. They are not part of the New York subway system.
The presence of humans—and their makeshift shantytowns—in the Amtrak tunnels was first documented in a 1990 New York Times article by John Tierny. His article was the first to use the term “Mole People” in the context of New York City. And even though the article makes no mention of the subways, per se, it obviously captured people’s imaginations, and is most likely where a lot of the later, more outlandish, urban legends originated.
In 1996, a Dutch anthropologist named Teun Voeten befriended some of the Amtrak tunnel dwellers and lived among them for several months. He published his diaries as the book Tunnel People. The Amtrak tunnel was also the subject of a great documentary film called Dark Days, released by Marc Singer in 2000. In the film, we meet several of the tunnel people and see the relatively elaborate homes they carved out for themselves. Again, to be clear, these were not the subway tunnels. These were slightly more spacious tunnels, with much easier access to the outside.
In the late ‘90s, Amtrak finally cracked down and drove everyone out of its tunnels. But, as shown in Singer’s film, an agreement was reached to help relocate the former tunnel dwellers into low-income apartments.
Now the maybe not-so-true part:
Prior to all that, in 1993, a woman named Jennifer Toth had published a book called The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City. In it, she wrote about the people in the Amtrak tunnels. But in addition (she claimed), there were also extensive communities living deep within Grand Central Station, the New York City sewers, and various sections of the MTA subway system. She claimed to have witnessed large, complex societies living deep beneath the streets, with their own systems of politics, utilities, and elaborate secret passageways. There were also suggestions of cannibalism, webbed feet, and a band of (literal) underground contract killers.
As you can imagine, Toth’s book was a huge hit. But soon after, criticism started coming out, suggesting that many of Toth’s claims about the non-Amtrak tunnel dwellers might have been fabricated. Or, at the very least, were impossible to verify.
A 2004 article by Cecil Adams of the Straight Dope does a good job of debunking many of the wilder elements of Toth’s book.
It also references another earlier article, “Fantasy in the Mole People” by Joseph Brennan. Brennan, a hardcore railfan, systematically pointed out all the inconsistencies in Toth’s geographical description of the tunnels. For example, Toth describes Grand Central Station has having several more underground levels than actually exist, and at one point claims to have traveled from the commuter train tunnels of Grand Central to a neighboring MTA subway line—a connection that, officially anyway, never existed.
As both Adams and Brennan point out, many of Toth’s accounts in The Mole People seem implausibly detailed, are impossible to verify, and tend to come off as overly embellished. Adams also interviewed one of Toth’s former tunnel-dwelling sources, who said, “I’m not saying the book is not true, I just never experienced the things [she] said she saw.”
So, the short answer:
Yes, two decades ago, a group of people did live full-time in tunnels that did run under part of New York City. But those tunnels are uninhabited now. And they weren’t technically subway tunnels.
And yes, it’s possible that people are living somewhere in the New York subway tunnels—or in other underground areas. But their existence has never been accurately verified. And if they are there, they most likely would not number in the thousands.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2404.27 - 10:10
- Days ago = 3221 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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