The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York C… (2024)

oh, jennifer toth, you annoy the sh*t out of me.

how can you take a fascinating topic: the homeless of new york city; a study in ingenuity and survival skills and people living in highly-organized communities off the grid underground and somehow make the story all about you?? you!! some sheltered white girl who uses (and defines -DEFINES!)the word "dissed" like a new toy, traipsing underground like some little red riding hood into the big scary tunnels and chirping about these "almost attractive" people and somehow writing (and getting published) a sorority girl's take on what are actual life or death concerns for a whole lot of people?? can we get a real journalist in here? someone who is not going to talk about themselves the whole time when there are real people with real stories that should maybe be more spotlit?

jesus christ, it would be like someone writing a book review and using all the space to talk about what happened to them at thanksg- oh. ohhhhhh wait. nonono i take this all back. what a marvelous writer.what an incisive - oh, i give up.

come to my blog!

"Tribes" of people living in the subway, railroad, and sewage tunnels of New York City. Their stories are both heart breaking and uplifting...revealing truths about society as a whole that many of us may wish remained hidden. This would be a very good book for anyone involved in trying to address the problem of homelessness.

Extremely interesting subject matter, terrible author. I feel like this was written by Hannah from HBO's "Girls." Most of it feels like a book about HER experiences in the tunnels, not the tunnel dwellers themselves. She definitely doesn't let you forget that most people don't get the access that she had.

The real live people Toth describes are almost clownified by the way she describes them. Their interesting and sometimes tragic pasts are often only briefly mentioned. Toth seems to love pointing out all the little weird things that the tunnel dwellers do. She does focus a lot on their interesting community dynamics, but even then she does a sloppy job.

Was super excited to read this and dropped it less than halfway through extremely disappointed.

This was an interesting read, but voyeuristic.

An engrossing, enlightening, often heartbreaking, and sometimes questionable account of the homeless individuals in New York City who live below ground in the simultaneously safe and dangerous abandoned train and subway tunnels throughout the 1980s and into the early '90s, all from the viewpoint of a young, college-educated, white woman and therefore 'outsider' to the trials and tribulations of those derogatorily known as, the mole people.

I picked up The Mole People as research for an upcoming book, as it covers a unique moment in New York history—that of the early '90s—and more specifically, what life was like underground during the '90s. Jennifer Toth moved to New York City for school and a career in journalism, and after being told by a young girl about "the mole people," she, against the wishes of many, takes to investigating the stories and urban legends of the people who live in the tunnels of the city. She says, in her pursuit to learn the truth and share the stories of the individuals underground, she became too invested, became part of the narrative, and lost her ability to remain as unbiased as a journalist hopes to be, and this is reflected in her dialogue with these individuals and the emotion in her storytelling. I see some readers disappointed in how this book is presented, but she makes no attempt to hide her choices, and reflects on what she did and what could have been done differently, toward the end. I appreciated the honesty, self-doubt, and really, it's all quite astounding when the reader steps back to remind themselves, this is a non-native New Yorker, who isn't accustomed to the unique manner of life in this city, going deep, deep into abandoned tunnels with no protection but a hope and a prayer, during one of the most dangerous decades the city had ever seen.

Her research into how the underground works brings her to meeting a number of different personalities both above and below. She speaks with transit police, uniformed officers, non-profit homeless outreach programs, soup kitchens, churches and synagogues, as well as graffiti artists (including one who speaks about one of the city's most famed artists, the late Sane Smith), and the various societal structures of the tunnel communities, which include: mayors, runners, nurses, and cooks. The communities, Ms. Toth learns, vary from a rigid hierarchy, to loners, to a gaggle of underage runaways who champion each other. Each visit underground, Ms. Toth attempts to highlight these individuals as the humans they are, juxtaposing the book's title by delving into their personalities, struggles, families, reasons that brought them to the tunnels, and sometimes their reasons for staying, proving time and again that homeless can't be treated as 'other' by folks above ground. She includes these individuals' thoughts on why outreach programs are problematic (again, remember this is a dated account and is relevant to what the city was doing around '91-93) and what they hope to see, if society really does want to help them and understand what led to their current situations.

It's a fascinating book. Sometimes the content feels unbelievable, and Ms. Toth includes her own sentiments when both authority and homeless seem to inflate stories, but it paints a vivid and astounding picture of a moment lost to time.

I'm having a hard time rating this book, even weeks after finishing it. I don't even know what it is that has me so conflicted: it's well-researched and required great personal risks by the author (Jennifer Toth was only 24 when she wrote it, and climbing around the tunnels under New York, talking to criminals, murderers, drug addicts and the insane). But some of the chapters, particularly one devoted to the literary tradition of the underground, felt absurdly academic in the middle of all the realism.

In other places, despite Toth's constant efforts to not romanticize tunnel life, she did seem to want too much to mythologize it. Maybe this is commendable, as it seemed to come out of her intense identification with her subjects, but many times it felt as though she was trying too hard.

Overall, though, an interesting look at lives you would have never heard about otherwise.

c'était très bizarre et je n'ai en rien la prétention de savoir comment ce livre aurait dû être écrit étant donné que je ne sais pas ce que c'est que de vivre sans abri en revanche je crois que ce livre-ci ne parvient clairement pas à rendre justice, et ne sait que "parler à la place de" sans jamais "parler avec". je crois aussi que l'autrice à 24 ans n'avait ni la maturité ni le compas politique requis pour écrire un livre pareil. i see the good intentions but gosh A WHOLE CHAPTER ABOUT THE UNDERGROUND IN THE ARTS?????? NEVER HAVE I SEEN SOMETHING SO TONEDEAF WE ARE TALKING ABOUT PEOPLE DYING HERE!!!! SURE JOURNALISM SCHOOL TOLD YOU YOU SHOULD ALWAYS PROVIDE CONTEXT BUT GIRL READ THE ROOM HOW IS A WHOLE ASS DIGRESSION ABOUT HOW EGYPTIANS HAD TUNNELS TOO RELEVANT TO THE FACT THAT WHOLE COUNTRIES ARE LETTING PEOPLE DIE IN THE DARK AND FILTH OF THEIR OWN BOWELS

*****4.5*****
I asked my dad what he would rate this out of five stars, and he also said 4.5. I asked him why. I said there was nothing I disliked about it, but there were some things missing. He said he wished Toth had included more of her own emotions, and I agreed. I also wish that Toth had spent a little more time developing everyone's stories and that she'd included more history. I found the history of the underground, in particular, to be very fascinating. When a reader wishes a book were longer, that says a lot about the quality of the book and its impact on the reader.

Overall, I love this book. It was recommended to me by a student I had in English 102 last spring. She listed it as the last book she'd read and really enjoyed. She had to read it for Sociology, but, even though it was required reading, she recommended it highly. The title drew me in, but so did the concept. People who live underground in New York?! What?! The book is so different than I anticipated. I thought, because of the title, that the book would be about the oddity of the underground communities, and that's part of the book because it's inescapable, but that's not what the book is about. The book gives life to those people derogatorily termed "the mole people" because they're considered subhuman by people who live aboveground and don't understand the way of life of tunnel dwellers. Toth takes great care to make sure we see the tunnel homeless as people because that's what they are, no matter how drastically living underground has changed them.

The book is very emotional. I didn't want to read it to my dad because I couldn't keep the tears out of my voice, and he makes fun of me for that just like he laughed at me when I unsuccessfully tried to hide my tears during Anne Hathaway's emotional song in Les Misérables, a movie I didn't want to see but that I told him I'd watch enough of to see Hathaway's part then ended up watching the entire thing. When I told him I had to hold back tears, he said, "I know. I saw you." It's hard for me to not to feel emotional for and about people who struggle as much as Fantine and the mole people. The saddest parts were the chapter about children and the numerous deaths Toth had to recount. I grew connected to some of these people through Toth's stories, and reading about the bad ends some of them faced really was difficult. I can't even imagine what she had to go through in hearing of and writing about them herself.

What's also sad about this whole thing is that Toth says in the beginning of the book that she wouldn't do it again if she could. That means the whole process wasn't worth it, and I find that hard to believe. Why did she do it, then? Why publish the book? I think it was worth it and that if Toth considered the true implications of saying she wouldn't do it again if she could, she'd have a different answer. It was difficult, and the way her research ended was tragic, but if she hadn't done what she did, we wouldn't have the stories. Humanity is all about stories, and it has been since the very beginning. If we don't have stories telling us what it means to be human and teaching us how to live as humanly and humanely as possible, what do we have? What guidance would we be left with? Stories "tell us the pity of life and the secret of how to bear it," to paraphrase Ovid. The pity of life is that people live the way the tunnel people do, that they're forced into it or choose it because of circ*mstance. However, the secret of how to bear it is to stay human, to help each other and support each other, to keep ourselves above the darkness and the pitfalls of living apart from mainstream society. The secret is that people like Toth reveal the truth and make us see people differently. I used the first chapter of this book in my Honors English 101 class, and my students said it gave them a different perspective on the homeless. The pity is there are homeless who need help, and the secret is we can help them bear it.

I love this book, and I highly recommend it. It's outdated now, but the truths inside it aren't.

That the subject matter of this book was interesting outside of anything the author said was the only thing that saved it I think. She did a pretty poor job of enlightening the aboveground world to the plight of the underground homeless in new york city. Mostly she strung together superficial sketches of characters in these supposedly vast and complex communities. She seemed to be shooting for ethnography but ended up sounding more like a 12-year old girl keeping a diary: "Today I went into the tunnels with Blade so he could show me where he kills people for crack. Whooo it was dark and was I sure scared!" Also, she spent the whole foreword couching her decision to call the book "the Mole People" because it has so many negative connotations and the underground homeless find it dehumanizing and sesationalized. Then she goes on to dehumanize them and sensationalize them through the whole book so that they really do seem like creatures that crawl in the filth under the ground. Interesting though.

An interesting book which I finally found after hearing a review on NPR more than ten years ago. A bit depressing at times, since you are reading about homeless folks (though some in the book *are* living that way by choice) which means that there is an element of mental illness/violence/addiction/etc to some of their stories. Still a rather intriguing look at how people create societies when they are "removed" from mainstream culture and it's allowances.

Definitely an interesting topic---who knew that there were/are upwards of 6,000 tunnel dwellers living beneath my feet under the sidewalks of New York?---but a more skilled writer/editor would have done a better job.

The biggest problem is Toth fell short of effectively capturing THE most gripping quality of her subject. Her selected quotations and scene depictions were pretty weak, so I didn't FEEL I was in the tunnel, I didn't smell it or see (or not see, as the case may be) it through her words. (True, there was a scene or two at the beginning that was pretty rich in detail, but really just from a gross-out perspective.)

The book was loaded with repetition, so it read more as a series of sociological case studies rather than as a cohesive work. Details---whether on the characters or on Toth's walks to the tunnel entrances---were long and unwieldy, and a friend of mine put it best when she said the subject would have been more effectively handled as a 30-page newspaper expose rather than a unfocused book.

Also, while it could be an interesting subject in its own right, the entire chapter on humans living underground in the past was completely inappropriate. Egyptian slaves living underground thousands of years ago doesn't have anything to do with why these drug-addicted, mentally unstable homeless people have taken to the tunnels. My guess is Toth heard a professor (she was only 24, after all) say something about how a writer should always provide the back story, but she provided a back story for a totally different subject. I would have preferred to read about homelessness throughout the decades in NYC---that would have allowed her to hypothesize as to what exactly drove these people underground.

The few positive notes:

I do give Toth credit for taking on a project like this at a young age---it's certainly a story that was swept under the bed by the city, and Toth took some serious risks (as in, to her life) by choosing to tell it. I'm not sure if she's written anything else, but I'd be interested to see if she developed a nose for investigative journalism or if she just got lucky with her tip-off about Mole People...

I'm totally fascinated with quantity of THINGS beneath this city: Tunnels, pipes, cables, wires, bomb shelters, abandoned subway stations---some with chandeliers and fountains!!---bathrooms from the Revolutionary War, a SHIP...it's incredible! Would love to read more about that.

I've read this book countless times - it was written by a graduate student gathering information on her thesis wherein she becomes friendly, or at least conversational, with several of Manhattan's homeless. Sad, moving, disturbing, intriguing. A quick read, and I can't help but think of them when I'm in New York.

I had 20 pages left and I DNF’d.

This woman literally has some of the most fascinating human stories at her fingertips. These are stories about loss, community, and resilience and she somehow manages to make it 1) reductive 2) about herself. Very Carrie Bradshaw making the war in Northern Ireland about her. I took the liberty of reading the last page and she literally said she “escaped” the tunnels and it’s like, girl you never actually lived there!!! You were getting a masters at Columbia!!!

Each chapter is a little vignette of a person living below ground, but everything ends up being so glossed over that each story blends into the other. Sure, many people in this situation have similar stories, but the amount of times that the author makes the same points make each one feel totally reductive. The through lines about social services & police involvement are handled poorly and then totally dropped.

It’s just a shame this writer had to write this book. If you’re interested in the topic read articles online.

I've been fascinated by the "city under the city" of New York ever since I read an article about it. However, there are not only caves, abandoned train tunnels, and wine cellars beneath NYC--there are people, entire communities of them.

Although they are often dismissed and stereotyped as scary "mole people"--even by their fellow homeless and some of the agencies tasked with helping them, many have created lives with more resources than they would have aboveground. As everything from aggressive policing to hostile architecture make finding a place to sit, let alone sleep, very difficult for unsheltered people in many cities, the thought of going into a space that has a roof, warmer temperatures, and sometimes even running water makes more and more sense.

In this book, the author takes a blinders-off look at these underground communities, as well as those who interact with them in both positive and negative ways, and it is enlightening and thought-provoking.

I read a book some time ago about underground New York: the vast networks of cables, tunnels, sewers, caverns, old roads, (even complete old sailing ships) that have been found under the city's streets. Well, it turns out there's a whole population of people that live in these subterranean places. They are called "mole people," and young reporter Jennifer Toth got to know many of them during a year she spent seeking and interviewing them out.
In her introduction she says that, given the choice, she would never do the year's work again. "The sadness and tragedies are overwhelming." She received little assistance from the agencies officially charged with helping homeless people. And veteran tunnel dwellers don't like the agencies either. "They're as bad as city government. They have their agenda and we have ours. They need money to keep their jobs at their organizations. They make up the truth to support their platform so they get donations. We don't have a platform. We have the truth.... You tell them the tunnels rob you of life. No one should come down here.... You can't go back up"
No precise count of mole people is available. An imprecise census done in 1991 counter 6,031 in Grand Central and Penn Stations alone. Reasons for people going underground include drug abuse, mental illness, an( simply a desire to escape society It's not a pleasant world, In the deep railroad tunnels, often buried 15 stories underground, the rats run toward people, not away from them - each is a source of food for the other. The smell of urine and feces is overwhelming and it's not unusual for people to die quickly when they fail to get out of the way of a speeding subway train. Some of the communities have created quasi-governments, with mayors and other elected officials. Most are purely anarchical - many people go underground precisely because they can't abide the rules that society wants to place on them. Some live in holes behind concrete walls, others in relative splendor in old abandoned frescoed subway stations, one of which is rumored to even contain a running fountain and piano. But one Transit policeman who regularly patrols the area describes this world as the closest thing to Hell he's ever seen.
On the other hand it's dangerous to make assumptions and generalizations. Sometimes there is a real sense of community; certainly there is one of forgiveness ' for rarely is a man's past held against him. Occasionally, the tunnels become a temporary residence until enough resources can be accumulated to return back to the "normal" world. Bernard, a long-time tunnel resident advises ' "...there is no single truth about them. Emotions are more sincere. He's a good guy and if he wants to start over down here he can. That's the beauty of the tunnels."

Just a couple of quick notes about this book:

It was intriguing, written with the right balance of emotion and objectivity. I think everyone who lives in New York should read about the life that goes on beneath our streets. I wonder, since the book was written in 1993, whether it has changed much. I suspect it has. There are many descriptions of drug-addicted homeless people from the Upper West Side.

The author was brave, not only because she physically put herself in danger but because she descended into a whole other world and had to accurately portray it to our world. She risked not only being killed but being the stupid, young, white girl who got what she deserved for not knowing to stay away.

What this book is about:

Basically, there are or were "Mole People" although the reality is probably a little different from what you think. There were thousands estimated to be living in subway and train tunnels, sometimes as far as 7 stories below ground. The people's stories she chooses to tell are heartbreaking and simple and complex.
Many are drug addicts. Remember, this was the early nineties when heroin was back in form and crack was introduced.
Many also have jobs and families. Many make a family out of people they live with. They will defy your expectations as well as confirm your suspicions.

Toth also puts their lifestyle in the context of past underground dwellers, talks about conflicts with the police and homeless advocacy organizations and in general tries to give a bigger picture. But the times I was most drawn in was when she was describing the people she met.

I love when she encounters "Sam" the mayor of a small community who was a social-worker above ground and quotes Walt Whitman.

What I got from this book:

Living underground is freedom and abuse, safety and danger, lucidity and insanity.

When I read RELIQUARY, a novel in which a prehistoric monster was terrorizing the tunnels under New York City, I noticed in the author's notes that her reference to an entire underground society in the New York City tunnels was absolutely based on truth. She suggested that anyone interested might read this book, THE MOLE PEOPLE: Life in the Tunnels.

Jennifer Toth is a journalist and author who earned the trust and cooperation of street people and New York police alike to gain unimaginable access to the residents of various communities of tunnel dwellers. She explores the fascinating notion of what comprises community and what makes a family, making a good case that the unorthodox relationships she found were often surprisingly strong, loyal, and sometimes even wholesome. She shares extensive interviews with various leaders and players in these groups, balancing compassionate portraits with a social scientist's observation and analysis. Some sentences I highlighted:

"The surprising wonder of Bernard's tunnel is less that people can survive in such an environment than that they can work together and even care, sometimes intensely, for each other."

"There is no single truth about them. They tell many stories and there is truth in all their stories. You just have to find it."

"Very early on, I recognized that they gave me more than I could give them. They showed me warmth in their cold, often mean world, which gave me hope, not only for them, but for all things...Most of all, they showed me that, even in the worst conditions, people can care for each other over themselves."

The book bogs down occasionally in its great amount of detail, but it touched me deeply and provided a glimpse into a strange world that I found thought-provoking and haunting.

Well, there were certainly some problems with this book. Initially, it was billed as an ethnography of NY streetpeople, but just looking at reviews before I touched it raised red flags for me. It is certainly not an ethnography.

There are a few chapters which deal with the historical background of underground dwellings and people. It also tries to use an ethnographic formula in the structure of it's chapters. Portraits of the people blend with very lush and most likely fictive descriptions of the surroundings. It was just too prosey to be believeable.

There is also the problem of treating her informants like characters in a fiction book. Even when she loosely informs the reader that she could not take notes in the darkness, she still manages to "recall" the words people say and treat them like qoutes, when, even if they did happen, she can't do.

If you don't know much about ethnographies and want a good atmospheric read, go for it. But don't take this book as fact. I wish I could tell you what was true and what isn't. Maybe picking up a copy of Singer's documentary, Dark City, is more useful.

This book was really disappointing for me, because the subject matter is fascinating, but the writing was just shudderingly bad. I am still shocked that I couldn't finish it, because I was really, really amazed by what I was learning, but I just couldn't keep focused. I would love to see this book edited and re-released, in a more engaging, readable version.

For anyone who's ever lived in NYC, or even for those who haven't, this book is a fascinating exploration of a world that most of us never knew existed even though it was right under our feet (literally).

She didn't confirm anything she was told, she just happily believed that there is a race of mole people living under the city. It sounds like a Neil Gaiman plot.

A story about the people that live underground in the tunnels primarily below New York City. It was surprising to learn about a community of people that live underground, some that almost never come aboveground. An interesting point the author made was that most "above ground" homeless consider themselves a higher class of homeless than the "below ground" or "Mole People" homeless. In fact, the term "Mole People" is considered a derogatory term by the below ground homeless.

The author presented a lot of discussion on the social ties and structure of the homeless, and how different all of their communities are. Many are close-knit, and many are loosely tied, but they all have a social and political structure, with expections of behavior and contribution from their members. The author presented a definition of "homeless" from the International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences which states "a condition of detachment from society, characterized by absence or attenuation of affiliative bonds that link settled persons to a network of interconnected social structures", and it is clear how this definition doesn't really describe homeless people due to the complexity of the social structures and leadership in some homeless communities.

It was very difficult at times to learn of some of the living conditions and how difficult it is for many to leave that life once they have become part of that community. It was especially disheartening to learn of the problematic nature of homeless shelters (rape, beatings, etc) that happen. Many homeless feel they are better off outside a homeless shelter because of the dangers presented there (a vivid description of a murder over shoes at a shelter is discussed in the book). Many homeless go "below ground" because they feel safer where they can't be seen.

I know this site is called "goodreads" but I just had to put this on here just so I could warn hopeful readers NOT TO READ THIS BOOK. This is quite possibly - actually no - this is DEFINITELY the WORST book I have ever read, BY FAR. Whoever published it should seriously be ashamed. I was interested in reading something about the homeless population in NYC since I've been living here and I see them so often. So I picked this book up a few weeks ago. I could tell from the first couple pages that it wasn't very well written, but I thought I could get over that since I was more interested in the facts than the literary value of the book. But after about 70 pages I couldn't take it anymore. I felt like I was peer reviewing someone's crappy article for my high school newspaper. Not only is the writing absolutely horrendous, apparently the facts in the book are questionable as well. (I did some googling . .) Some of the things the "mole people" supposedly tell the author seem more like they came from her overactive imagination than from an actual interview with an actual homeless person.

Normally I feel sort of guilty giving a bad review, but I don't feel guilty about this one at all. In fact, I hate that I even gave Jennifer Toth a little bit of my money. I think she should give it back. And then be investigated for her lack of journalistic integrity. And then forced to sign a contract that she'll never write anything again, ever.

I will use Jennifer Toth's own final words from the epilogue: "I offer this work as research into this tragedy of our times, notes for the present and future, to prevent more souls from being lost to the tunnels, and perhaps to stir more hope in bringing them back home."

Written in 1993, one can only wonder how the underground subway population has grown in the last 18 years.

Jennifer Toth, while finishing her Master's degree in Journalism from Columbia, immersed herself in a world diametrically opposed to her background. With clarity and lack of bias she describes life in the underground tunnels. Juxtaposed against history and literary allusions and her own background, a world emerges that few of us living "top side" will ever see.

Sometimes the life led below almost seems attractive. No bosses, no supervisors, no commuting nightmares, no bills...until you realize that dinner that night is "track rabbits" (rats).

The book is balanced. It is not written from a haughty or lofty perch. It tells it like it is without stripping the residents of their dignity or humanity.

Although the author was not the best writer or journalist she had a lot of guts. And, you will not believe that people really live like that right beneath our feet. I wonder how prominent underground dwellers are since Guiliani's big clean up of the homeless "problem." A follow-up book would be helpful.

A work of non-fiction by this reporter who tries to interview these 'mole people' that live in the abandoned subways of New York. It's really interesting to find out this whole population of people we probably didn't know existed. Her life even gets put in danger; that's how little she understands these people. Anyway, it's an interesting read.

Truly mind-boggling accounts of an entire sub-society living in the abandoned subway tunnels of New York told by a woman who was allowed in to tell their story.

I would never have believed this had I not read this book. She profiles a number of individuals, it's broken up quite nicely.

I was both mortified and fascinated.

A look at the hard, disturbed lives of those who live in the network of tunnels below New York City. This is a pretty astonishing piece of journalism.

The Mole People, as a title, originally referred to a science-fiction film from 1956 – a B-movie feature about semi-human subterranean creatures with clawed hands and bulging eyes. Yet the term has also been applied, in more recent years, to a community of homeless people living in the vast network of tunnels underneath New York City – a community whose stories Jennifer Toth seeks to tell in her 1993 book The Mole People.

Toth, a Columbia University-educated British journalist, planned this book about Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City (the book’s subtitle) as an ethnographic study – one in which she would descend into this modern urban underworld, and observe and record first-hand the way the people of this community live. Yet such an approach to a community that lives on the margins of organized society has its potential risks, as Toth observes when she explains her research plans to the New York police:

“Officers bat about friendly insults and exchange serious compliments. They also volunteer, once they learn my purpose, the casualty list of officers who go into the tunnels: one beaten to death with his own nightstick by a tunnel dweller; another left with an eight-year-old mental capacity after a similar beating; and two officers killed with their own guns as they escorted tunnel people out of the Bowery tunnel.” (p. 51)

Toth’s courage in descending into this modern urban underworld is considerable, and is rewarded by compelling testimony from a variety of key informants who belie the popular stereotypes of homeless people. For example, Bernard Isaacs, known as the “Lord of the Tunnels” after he led a fight against thieves who were victimizing a community of homeless people beneath Riverside Park, is a University of Maryland graduate with a degree in journalism and philosophy who worked in the publishing field, and in modeling, before problems with alcohol and drugs led him toward homelessness. Offered money by his brother to return aboveground, Bernard demurred, saying, “This is where I want to be for now. Maybe not forever, but for now” (p. 99).

That theme of members of the underground homeless community regarding their way of life as a choice comes through at several points throughout The Mole People, as when a man known as “Ali M.,” the “mayor” of a community of homeless people living beneath Grand Central Station, raves angrily against the values of “topside people” but then calms down and says, “This is home….This is where my conscious self meets reality. This is where my mind has been all my life. Underground” (p. 200).

Some of the most affecting chapters of The Mole People deal with the particularly troubling situations of homeless women and runaways. In both of these communities, informants relay a litany of scarring stories that follow a grim and recurring pattern: abuse – physical, psychological, and sexual – drove them into an underground community where drug abuse is prevalent, and where the danger of the same kind of abuse, or of a violent death, is ever-present. Some of these unfortunate people seem almost ready to give up on life; others insist on holding on to hope, like a young runaway named Carlos who says, “Sometimes I get on this depression-suicide trip….But then I think there’s a person I’m gonna miss if I leave now. There’s a place I should see that I wouldn’t see. There’s too much I want to do before I go. There’s someone I want to meet” (p. 149).

Toth’s multifaceted look at the underground homeless community of New York City includes a chapter on “The Underground in History, Literature, and Culture.” This thoughtful invocation of “the subterranean environment in Western culture…as a mental landscape, a social environment, and an ideological map” (p. 169) engages topics like the use of the world “underworld” to refer to criminality, as well as the way in which, historically, many societies confined prisoners and slaves underground (North Korea reportedly maintains a network of prison caves to this day).

Toth also provides a thorough list of underground communities in literature – Dante’s Inferno (1320), Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862), Jules Verne’s A Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground (1864), H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit (1944), Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). Some of these "undergrounds" are literal, others metaphorical; but in all cases, we are reminded of that lasting archetype of underground life as being somehow fundamentally different.

Today, 25 years after the original publication of Toth's book, it occurs to me that, when we consider fictive depictions of underground life, we could move into the realm of popular culture and add horror movies like C.H.U.D. (Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers) (1984) and The Descent (2005), both of which present grotesque images of dangerous, semi-human beings living just below the surface of the earth. Toth’s informants, the underground homeless, have to deal with all of this accumulated cultural detritus, as well as coping with the general prejudice that the larger society holds against its homeless members.

In that connection, it is worth interrogating the “mole people” title of this book. As Toth explains in an author’s note at the beginning of the book, the term “mole people” is one that “is regarded as a pejorative term among homeless advocates, and more important to us all, it is insulting to some tunnel dwellers” (p. ix). Unsure about whether to call her book The Mole People, Toth spoke with Bernard Isaacs, the Riverside Park community leader and “Lord of the Tunnels” quoted above. Bernard Isaacs, Toth explains, has long objected to the “mole people” label “because he feels it is a label that portrays him as an animal, not as a person. Yet when I talked to Bernard about the title of this book, he agreed ‘The Mole People’ was the right choice” (p. ix).

The Mole People closes on a troubling note (unsurprisingly). Toth describes how “Nightmares from the tunnels have followed me” (p. 250). After telling the story of how an encounter with a homeless couple ended with a terrifying incident of sudden violence, Toth describes the emotional numbness that she initially felt when she emerged from the tunnels for the last time, and adds that “only now that I am out of the tunnels for good can I let myself be frightened” (p. 253).

Toth’s closing expression of hope that her book will help “to prevent more souls from being lost to the tunnels, and perhaps to stir more help in bringing them home” (p. 253), sadly, seems as far from realization now as it was when Toth wrote her book almost twenty years ago. Among the many issues presently being bandied about in the current fractious state of American politics, homelessness is hardly even a blip on the radar. Having taught The Mole People once, for a social-science writing class at Penn State, I returned to this book on a recent visit to New York City, when spring flooding aggravated by climate change had closed the subway and forced N.Y.C. commuters up onto the surface. What might be happening, I wondered, to the people living below those city streets?

The underground homeless people whose story is told here, and in Marc Singer’s film Dark Days (2000), no doubt continue with their lives in the tunnels. It is a strong indictment of “topside” society that there is so little concern regarding the lives of those who live marginalized lives beneath the surface -- who live "underground," whether literally or metaphorically. One can only hope that, in some more enlightened future time, citizens and legislators will return to Toth’s book, and will start focusing on the word “people” in the phrase “mole people.”

I remember vividly seeing this on the shelf at my college bookstore sometime in my freshman year, and I was fascinated by it; I never ended up taking the class it was for, of course (though I'm certain I should have) but the book's title, cover, and premise stuck with me. Now, almost a decade later I'm glad I finally made my way back to the book. Given that the book dates to 1993 and there have been other articles and works challenging some of its veracity, I definitely did not come to this expecting an accurate portrayal of its subject matter in any way. It all certainly feels true in its own way to me, but I make no judgments in that regard. But what the book does just incredibly well is get you to really think about people as people, really forcing you to confront a number of assumptions about class, community, and individuality that the subjects of Toth's account are reformulating and redefining in the way they seem to live their lives. That a book this old and with challenges to its accuracy can get you to rethink some of the fundamental ways you think about treating people, and understanding them, is significant. It points to Toth's talent as a writer, to be sure—there are some chapters in this book that are absolutely beautiful and heartbreaking. But it also points to a constant need for people to do this kind of mental work, to constantly be rethinking and challenging our own assumptions about our fellow man and about how we treat others with compassion, empathy, and just plain old kindness. We need stories like these ones to shake us out of our apathy and get us to look around at populations like the homeless that we likely see every day, challenging us to look at them in a new and radical way: simply as another human being. We can learn something from those around us all the time, no matter who they are or where they came from. And, most importantly, we need to learn lots of things from all the people around us all the time, no matter who they are or where they came from. Though this is an old book, I think it nicely drives home this crucial lesson.