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Some info about a 1993 book that details “the mole people” of NYC.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/040109.html
Looks like someone has even made a movie:
Not quite accurate.
That is a place where alot of homeless people panhandle but where they live is this entrance to the F train stop in Brooklyn (the one right past 9th and Smith) and in the Amtrack tunnels near where I live. They refer to themselves as “Mole People” and there are enterances in the parks in upper Manhattan.
Supposedly it is the homeless folks who have their “shit” together who live in the old Amtrack tunnels and they don’t just let anyone move in there. Many are illegals who have low paying jobs and can’t afford anyplace else. So they band together down there and set up shop for protection as well as a place to stay.
There was a book written about them a while back, but part of me thinks the author made up his facts, but people do live down there.
And any of you have a place to crash if you come to NYC.
(with me, not the mole people)
Yes folks, in almost every major city and a few Minor ones, you have Mole people, squatters and Phantoms, New York city has a city within a city in the Subways, utility conduits and all sorts or weird places.
Here are a few I can relate from my days as DC’s finest.
Condo canyon:
It runs UNDER the freeway from where the Watergate is all the way out to Geogetown bridge. You gain access by climbing up a rope ladder and then crawl on all fours, about 100 people still living there in 1998. Had partitioned “rooms” set up, furniture, bars, stores and even high jacked electricity.
We used to hunt for suspects, fugitives there all the time. First guy I caught in there was wayyyyy back in 1982, called him the “freeway rapist”
guy struck near the Parkway and freeway during early morning rush hour & always disappared, some body snitched him out as well as his fantastic hideout.Some of the monuments have had “phantoms” hiding in them off and on for years, they escape through old conbduits to the outside if they hear someone. Lots of these tunnels were sealed up due to terrorist threats recently. One of the most famous “Phantoms” was in the Kennedy center, circa 1985, guy lived in there for years, crawling around the conduits, came down to eat in the gormet kitchen
Just some advice, dont go crawling around in these places. The folks in these areas and Hobo jungles are potentially dangerous, often on the run from the law, might take you for the cops and kill you.
Spamhog
“but where they live is this entrance to the F train stop in Brooklyn (the one right past 9th and Smith) and in the Amtrack tunnels near where I live.”
Do you mean to say that you live in the Amtrack tunnels? How did you ever get all that computer equipment down there? Maybe I’ll come visit this summer. Sounds more interesting than Colombia.
@Expatriated wrote:
Do you mean to say that you live in the Amtrack tunnels? How did you ever get all that computer equipment down there? Maybe I’ll come visit this summer. Sounds more interesting than Colombia.
I wish..I’d be rich if I had my job and didn’t have to pay rent. But rickets and scurvvy is kinda a turn off to the women these days.
I live near the parks where the entrances are…past the George Washington Bridge.
Spamhog is correct too. I personally never want to go down into these places. Some vicious people live down there. One thing about alot of the derilects in NYC is that they are some of the most misogynist bastards you will ever see. When they are in a bad mood many of them get off on terrorising women on the subway. The last “fight” I was in was when I thrashed a smelly guy on the A train after he started grabbing at a high school girl when he didn’t get any money from panhandlling the car I was in.
People like these guys are why I have my doubts about the authors claims.
In northern Manhattan there is a nature preserve where I go to pick berries in the summer (just me and a few Russians realise that you can eat wild raspberries here) and there was this friendly hermit whio lived there called the “caveman”. He was from some place in Equador, had no family, and was illiterate and lived by doing odd jobs and picking cans and bottles. Nice guy…that is why I like to use the term homeless and derelect to describe the different groups.
A few years ago, Ninj from Infiltration told me he had always wanted to go down there – I think it’s like Valhalla for urban spelunkers or something. He’s been in practically every other sort of forbidden place you can imagine:
My favourite was always Degrassi Junior High.
Cali
Spamhog is right about not wanting to head down there on a whim. A few years ago, I did a story for some local alt.weekly about Lower Wacker, which was Chicago’s subterranean city. The city was cleaning it out for construction and catching a lot of hell for it because it’s become almost legendary as some sort of “oasis for the downtrodden.”
I ditched the laptop, notebook and tape recorder and just went in (not surprisingly, I didn’t have to adopt much of a disguise to fit in…) It is a community down there, of sorts, but it’s a violent one. The first thing that happens to most new arrivals is they get stripped, since they usually have better clothes than the old-timers. I don’t know about fugitives or what not, but I could tell that a lot of ’em were people who were kicked out of asylums, are functional enough to tie their own shoes but not much else.
There are other places that are a lot cooler to explore – the old coal-running tunnels under the river, the dead stockyards, some areas of the subway. Practically every city has things like that, some better than others.
Best,
Odd days with the underground press
By Caroline Overington
February 21, 2004Print this article
Email to a friendThere are some jobs that you could do only in New York.
Randy Kennedy had one of them: he is a New York Times reporter and, until recently, his beat was the subway.
Imagine the obstacles. Kennedy had to conduct interviews in one of the worst possible places. The subway is loud and chaotic, everybody is in a hurry and New Yorkers are deeply suspicious of any stranger who tries to talk to them on trains.
Kennedy persevered and, over the years, his column became an institution. His topics included the man who dances with a mannequin for money; the man who can play two trombones at once; the bag of debris on the tracks that moved, because it was full of rats.
He has spent the night aboard a train, riding from 8pm until dawn, travelling through the darkest hours with 10 other people who had no better place to go. He has walked the tracks, looking for people who live in the crevices between the stations and the trains. He has compiled lists of the strange things people carry with them (such as a 2.7-metre whaling harpoon). And he has checked out the urban myth that New York pigeons catch trains to the beach, because they are too fat or lazy to fly. Apparently it is true. Kennedy watched a pigeon waiting on a platform for a train, then followed it through the open doors, and rode with it to the next stop.
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Kennedy never carried any obvious media equipment, such as a camera or a microphone. He approached people with just a notepad and pen, “and just start talking to them, which really doesn’t come that naturally to me. And I could see, when I said: ‘I’m from The New York Times’, they would be looking at me, thinking: is this guy really a reporter, or is he just crazy?”
Kennedy often wrote about subway etiquette. He got many ideas from his readers, who were always happy to complain about their fellow travellers.
Chief beefs: people who sit with their legs wide apart, people who talk on mobile phones, and people who block the doorways.
He has also interrupted people reading on trains, to ask them what they are reading. He has woken people who were napping, to ask them about their dreams. And once, “although I was sworn never to reveal where or when”, he climbed into a cab, and drove a train.
Last October, Kennedy announced that he would not be writing the column any more, because he needed a change. His inbox was immediately flooded with emails from fans, beseeching him to reconsider.
Kennedy’s column was only three years old, but the tradition was grand. There has been a subway column in one New York newspaper or another for about 20 years. In response to complaints, Kennedy urged the Times to keep the column going, even while he moved to another part of the paper, but the editors instead hired a reporter to do a “transport” round, which is not quite the same.
Many of Kennedy’s columns will be republished this year in a book called Subwayland: Adventures In The World Beneath New York, to coincide with the centenary of the New York subway.
Kennedy still rides trains every day, but only as a civilian. He still likes to watch people, and he has regrets about giving up his round. He never found the man who wears the horse costume. He never got to swim with the bass through the old trains that are submerged off the coast of Delaware.
But there are upsides, too.
“When I see the guy getting on the subway with a Christmas tree, or a hat made entirely of plastic bags, I don’t have to talk to him.”
JJY
Click on the globe logo in the top left and peruse the main content of PBs.
If you find all of that stuff dull, you’re beyond help.The forum may seem dull compared to the likes of the BFC, but isn’t that only because its much younger?
I wasn’t around the BFC when it was as new a site as PBs is, so I can’t speak knowledgably, but I’d be surprised if it became the success it is overnight.
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