Mole People Debate

[Ignatz_from_Jersey]

Having worked in NYC often as a vendor to ConEd, I can tell you unequivocably, that there are many “mole people” living under the streets of NYC. The accounts made in Toth’s book are not only true, but actually not even detailed enough.

One only has to know the right ConEd service personnel who have to occasionally go underworld to disconnect haphazardly performed electrical connections (they are ordered to do this by their superiors who know all-too-well that there are communities down there). I have joined those utility workers on more than one of those forays and witnessed first hand scenes as described in Toth’s book. Yes, there are people in leadership roles acting as mayors. There are complete living quarters with cable TV, bedrooms, showers, etc. Though not nearly as nice as you would see up top, they are definitely there and, to those people, this is their existence.

Bringing video teams down there to document their world would be dangerous at best and could be deadly. They do not want to be “discovered”. They do not want to be bothered. There homesteading is tolerable to ConEd, the city political machine, and the transit police (who are all well aware of their existence). What little utility load they drain is a mere drop in the bucket to the waste of Times Square and the 8 million people top side.

The tunnels they live in are often known to, but not used by current transit means. There are some that do not show up on any current transit maps. Access to these tunnels is interesting in itself, because I accessed them directly via a set of double steel doors off of 42nd Street. You wouldn’t know those doors from any other business access, but once you walk through the doors, you enter a maze of stairs and ladders which take to you their world. This is where a majority of the heavy furniture and goods enter their world.

So, don’t fool yourself. these are generally peaceful solitary people with a multitude of reasons why they are living where they are and they do not want to be exposed. For this reason , I highly suggest that you do not invade their world since they are armed and, en masse, they will defend their domain, such as it is.

ETA: Link to column http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2488/are-there-really-mole-people-living-under-the-streets-of-new-york-city and an update to that column: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2498/em-the-mole-people-em-revisited

[Czarcasm]

Any cites, other than second hand stories from unnamed ConEd personnel?

[gonzomax]

http://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/13/nyregion/in-tunnel-mole-people-fight-to-save-home.html Here is a NYT article on mole people being rousted by the police to extend the subway.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

@Ignatz_from_Jersey

There homesteading is tolerable to ConEd, the city political machine, and the transit police (who are all well aware of their existence).

In other words, hundreds, if not thousands, of people are aware of the communities and could comment on them. But every single one of them has chosen not to for decades.

That people would try to live in the tunnels is not itself implausible, of course. It’s well documented over the years. Toth probably got her inspiration from the underground source known as The New York Times.

The occasional shaft of light descends from a grate 25 feet overhead, and rats scurry across the dirt floor, but otherwise the wide railroad tunnel beneath Riverside Park is a dark and peaceful place. It suits the needs of its inhabitants, who number perhaps 100 and sometimes call themselves the Mole People.

These men and women may be the most stable homeless settlement in New York City, although some of the old-timers would not describe it that way. After 15 years in the tunnel, they do not consider themselves homeless. They have plywood shanties and cinder-block bunkers with rugs, beds, night stands, kerosene lamps, wood and gas stoves, paintings on the walls, pets in the yard.

That article, from 1990, was an account of that particular group being evicted. Other groups could exist in other places, obviously.

But I can’t find a mention of them. Once Brennan’s debunking of Toth’s book appears the sightings seem to have stopped, officially.

If the groups are so large and so easily findable, you can find people to put their existence on the record. Let’s see that.

[Fenris]

C’mon. This isn’t news.

There was a documentary about it as early as 1951.

An alien drove the mole-people back down into the bowels of the Earth at the time, but it certainly seems reasonable to to me that they’d breed and return in force a generation or two later.

I don’t know why the other posters are having trouble with this concept. I mean, it’s right there, on film.

[StusBlues]

I’ll add to the naysayers by enthusiastically recommending Marc Singer’s documentary Dark Days. There are absolutely a lot of homeless people living in the NYC Subway tunnels, and, like in most homeless societies, these folks have their own social mores–they do in fact take pride in adding on to their “houses” with additional cardboard and other ticky-tack. They haven’t rejected society in favor of the underground world, though. They’re taking shelter in the subway tunnels instead of the streets–until they get kicked out. There’s not a lot of mystery down there, just further examples of how people in desperate situations manage to get by.

[StusBlues]

I should correct myself by noting that Dark Days is now ten years old. It’s entirely possible that NYC law enforcement or whomever have been keeping the tunnels much more clear in the past decade.

[friedo]

@StusBlues

I’ll add to the naysayers by enthusiastically recommending Marc Singer’s documentary Dark Days. There are absolutely a lot of homeless people living in the NYC Subway tunnels, and, like in most homeless societies, these folks have their own social mores–they do in fact take pride in adding on to their “houses” with additional cardboard and other ticky-tack. They haven’t rejected society in favor of the underground world, though. They’re taking shelter in the subway tunnels instead of the streets–until they get kicked out. There’s not a lot of mystery down there, just further examples of how people in desperate situations manage to get by.

There are small numbers of homeless people living in train tunnels. (And to be specific, Dark Days covers people living in the Amtrak tunnels near Penn Station, not subway tunnels.)

That said, nearly everything in Toth’s book is a complete fabrication. She speaks of tunnels and access shafts that can not possibly exist. She recounts journeys that can not possibly have taken place between areas of the underground infrastructure that do not connect, and in some cases are not anywhere near one another. She talks about hundreds of people living in a fictional expanse beneath the inhabited levels of Grand Central Terminal. It’s bullshit. The infrastructure of GCT is well known. She talks about tunnels being “seven levels deep.” Such tunnels do not exist.

Half the book comes from tall tales told by “informants” and she is rarely clear about which parts she investigated herself and which she is simply repeating. (The part about a family of blind people with webbed feet living under GCT (in places that are known not to exist) is a popular UL repeated as fact, for example.

Of course, Joseph Brennan does a very thorough job of debunking every factual inaccuracy and plain bullshit in the book.

[BMalion]

If I could live in the tunnels in the manner of Lex Luthor, I’d considor doing so.

[TriPolar]

@Fenris

C’mon. This isn’t news.

There was a documentary about it as early as 1951.

An alien drove the mole-people back down into the bowels of the Earth at the time, but it certainly seems reasonable to to me that they’d breed and return in force a generation or two later.

I don’t know why the other posters are having trouble with this concept. I mean, it’s right there, on film.

That would be my take on the subject. But some people just don’t get it. They still scoff at drugged out babies riding alligators in the NYC sewers too.

[StusBlues]

@friedo

There are small numbers of homeless people living in train tunnels. (And to be specific, Dark Days covers people living in the Amtrak tunnels near Penn Station, not subway tunnels.)

That said, nearly everything in Toth’s book is a complete fabrication.

snippage

Thank you for the correction–I’ve never lived in a city with a major train system, so the subtleties elude me.

That said, your post is essentially a recapitulation of the master’s voice in the second column linked in the OP. Cecil triumphs again!