Life Underground

Encounters with People Below the Streets of New York

Terry Williams

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English

Columbia University Press
06 February 2024

Poverty & unemployment; Alternative lifestyles; Sociology; Human geography

Series: The Cosmopolitan Life

"Aboveground, Manhattan's Riverside Park provides open space for the densely populated Upper West Side. Beneath its surface run railroad tunnels, disused for decades, where over the years unhoused people took shelter. The sociologist Terry Williams ventured into the tunnel residents' world, seeking to understand life on the margins and out of sight. He visited the tunnels between West Seventy-Second and West Ninety-Sixth Streets hundreds of times from 1991 to 1996, when authorities cleared them out to make way for Amtrak passenger service, and revisited his contacts repeatedly in the years that followed.

Life Underground explores this society below the surface and the varieties of experience among unhoused people. Bringing together anecdotal material, field observations, photographs, transcribed conversations with residents, and excerpts from personal journals, Williams provides a vivid ethnographic portrait of individual people, day-to-day activities, and the social world of the underground and their engagement with the world above, which they call ""topside."" He shows how marginalized people strive to make a place for themselves amid neglect and isolation as they struggle for dignity. Featuring Williams's distinctive ethnographic eye and deep empathy for those on the margins, Life Underground shines a unique light on a vanished subterranean community."

By: Terry Williams
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 140mm,
ISBN: 9780231177931
ISBN 10: 0231177933
Series: The Cosmopolitan Life
Pages: 320
Publication Date: 06 February 2024
Audience: College/higher education , Further / Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Prologue Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Descent 2. Genesis 3. Underground Ecology 4. Men Underground: Bernard, Kal, and Jason 5. Working Life 6. Food: Restaurants and Soup Kitchens 7. Women Underground: Tin Can Tina 8. Beatrice and Bobo 9. The Tagalong 10. The Rabbit Hole 11. Reflections on Life Under the Street Endnote Epilogue: Mediating the Underground: Bernard’s Exit Appendix A: Income and Housing in New York City, 2002–2014 Appendix B: Behavior Mapping and Cartography Appendix C: Interview Questions for Bernard, Princeton University, 2012 Appendix D: Bernard’s Dream and Postcard Appendix E: Legacies of Harm: Policy and Policing Appendix F: Where Are They Now? Notes Index

Terry Williams is a professor in the Department of Sociology at the New School for Social Research. His previous Columbia University Press books are The Con Men: Hustling in New York City (2015); Teenage Suicide Notes: An Ethnography of Self-Harm (2017); Le Boogie Woogie: Inside an After-Hours Club (2020); and The Soft City: Sex for Business and Pleasure in New York City (2022).

Reviews for Life Underground: Encounters with People Below the Streets of New York

Life Underground provides a unique documentation of the lives of homeless people living in underground tunnels and other spaces beneath the streets of New York City. No other work studies in so much detail the lives of people who might be considered the worst off of the city's worst off. -- Thomas J. Main, author of <i>Homelessness in New York City: Policymaking from Koch to de Blasio</i>