Fantasy in The Mole People

by Joseph Brennan.
Comments to: brennan@columbia.edu
Copyright 1996. All rights reserved.

I didn't read Jennifer Toth's book The Mole People when it came out in 1993. Despite my interest in subway tunnels, the focus of her book, the homeless people who live in them, was not a topic I was eager to read more about. That these people are living pathetic lives in a filthy and unsafe environment seems obvious. That social and legal factors now prevent enforced care for those suffering from primary or drug-induced psychiatric disorders, as if they could judge for themselves whether to take such care, is both the saddest and most maddening fact in contemporary life in New York. I suppose I just didn't want to mix a hard dose of human misery with a subject that is a hobby for me.

But several people who have read my Abandoned Subway Stations web page have asked me by email about tunnels other than stations, sometimes specifically about ones that do not exist. Finally, one correspondent, in quoting a really astonishing description from The Mole People of an imaginary underground line, pointed me to the source where the misinformation was coming from. So I read it.

Here's the problem in a nutshell: every fact in this book that I can verify independently is wrong. I'm referring to her descriptions of the tunnels. I know this is not the main point of the book. That is of course the lives of the people who live underground.

"I hope to dismiss the myth of animal-like underground dwellers", writes Jennifer Toth on p.x. But the book is full of myth. While she admits to disguising the names of most of the people (p.5), as is standard in investigative reporting, nowhere does she admit also disguising the nature and location of the underground areas. I don't know what to make of her inaccurate descriptions. Is she protecting them? Is she gullible enough to believe everything people tell her? Is she trying to make the book more exciting? Is she just making some of it up?

Whatever the reason, the tunnel descriptions are terribly bad. When I started reading the book and taking notes, I had the idea of writing a short list of errata that made it past her fact-checking. But by the time I found her describing her own visits to places that do not exist, I realized this is something worse than a little sloppiness.

The first and last chapters are puzzling. The first is the interior monologue of someone finding shelter in a tunnel, very well written, as is the entire book, but not attributed to any particular informant, and therefore somewhat surprising as the opening chapter of a nonfiction expose. The last chapter is the story of Blade looking for her, including the remarkable notion that Mole People all over town are passing her warnings. Is this real or invented? We are simply asked to believe.

The sections about life in the Riverside Park tunnel are supported in general by other accounts, and interestingly the descriptions of this one tunnel are also the most accurate, although they are still exaggerated (as to its length for example). The descriptions of Grand Central are not at all accurate as to tunnels, and are given as reports from other people or as generalizations of no stated source. Toth shows little willingness to question the accounts of Mole People even when she has the basis of their fantasies to mind, as in the case of the Beach Pneumatic tunnel, and the same blind faith probably affects other material. Most seriously, some other locations she claims to have been in personally don't resemble any real location at all: Grand Central subway station, an IRT tunnel near 125th Street, a tunnel near Penn Station, a walk from the movies.

Judging by the accuracy of descriptions, I will even speculate that Jennifer Toth's visits to the Mole People were limited to several trips to the Riverside Park tunnel and down the cut toward Penn Station, and one trip with police to the subway near Broadway--Lafayette Street. All other locations are unrecognizable from her descriptions, except that often elements of the Riverside Park tunnel creep in-- overhead grates, concrete walls and rooms, a high climb to the top-- as if she believes these would be typical of other places.

I hope my comments here don't seem like nitpicking. The overall tone of the book though seems designed to make Toth's account into a series of exciting and mysterious adventures rather than sad visits to dirty holes in the ground. Since she fictionalizes the setting as much as she does, then other facts she claims also should be subject to a re-examination. There are too many exaggerations and inventions in the tunnel descriptions to make it believable that the rest is absolutely straight reporting.

Detailed Commentary on Tunnel Descriptions

I took a note of just about all descriptions of tunnels. Below are quotations, meant to be as short as possible, together with comments on the real locations. The numbers are page references are to the 1993 edition from Chicago Review Press.

13

Track 100 is the large loop track on the suburban level, the lower of the two track levels. It has no platform and is located quite a ways east of track 101, the first track with a platform, and close to the Lexington Avenue subway, to which it does not connect. The space under it is the baggage and trucking subway that runs at right angles to the tracks at the line of 45th St. (The word "subway" is used here to mean an underpass and "trucking" to mean handtrucks.) This passage is about 10 feet high and more than 25 feet wide. It is shown in diagrams in many books, such as Middleton's Grand Central (Golden West Books, 1977). The reference to track 100 seems to be just a way of referring to the far east end of this passage. Since there is no longer any baggage or express (package) service at Grand Central, parts of these subways are not used much by staff and can provide places to hide at least for a while.

19

It's not clear whether this refers to literally the spaces that are under some platforms, spaces that would be under 3 feet in height but would hide a person sleeping, or to the type of passageway just mentioned, but it seems to be the latter.

They don't. This might describe tracks entering Grand Central, but as tracks leave, they do just the opposite of this: they come together, until they are down to only four tracks at 57th Street.

20

Both these comments might be defended in metaphorical terms, but since they are ambiguous, let me mention that the tunnels are definitely not much "deeper" nor are they "all connected". One of the characteristics of even the subway tunnels is that they are not all connected to each other.

There is no such compartment. This may be a misstated reference to the Grand Central baggage subway already mentioned.

20-21

The context would put this location below the level of the baggage subway, but there is no such level except at a few small locations. Note that this location was described to Toth, and is not one she visited. The informant goes on to say there are even lower levels where the people "have webbed feet", so it could be dismissed as fantasy, except that Sgt Henry of the "Metropolitan Transit Police" (sic) also mentions "The Condos" as a place he cleaned out. While it probably did exist, this is not a plausible description of it.

22

This is exaggerated. The open cut on the west side, once the West Side freight line and now Amtrak's Empire Connection, is much closer to a 20 foot drop. Assuming a train is up to 15 feet high, allowing a foot or so for clearance, and about 3 feet for the thickness of the bridges, 20 feet is fair. The reader can check this easily. Toth uses the number 30 repeatedly.

The description of a foot getting caught in the points of a switch as it moves is possible, although it rarely happens. Railroad staff are always taught not to step between points. I would guess this story is more likely to be based on such a warning than on a real event. The informant seems to have heard the railroad term "interlocking" but does not use it properly (or else Toth does not).

30,34

These both refer to the same location, but there is not enough information to identify where it is. If we can take this literally, there would be an entrance of a type not specified, and then a relatively long passage of a hundred feet before a drop that has no stairs or ladder. While this cannot be ruled out, the length of the passage and a drop with no steps are at best unusual. One wonders why there would be ladder rungs on only the lower half of a 2-level shaft.

This is very reminiscent of the Riverside Park tunnel, as to the concrete wall and shack, and high climb to the top.

37

Paris does have a large network of tunnels. They go back many centuries, and have been documented in maps, articles and books. I have seen a French "coffee table book" with wonderful color photographs taken in the tunnels. Contrast this though with the absence of such documented evidence for New York.

38

The phrases "interconnected lattice" and "often unused" and "seven levels" are all wrong.

As I stated earlier, the subway and railroad tunnels are not all that interconnected, and often one needs to go to the surface to cross between closely adjacent underground areas. It's remarkable how unconnected they are-- unexpected perhaps to someone who has not investigated them.

There are rather few unused sections of tunnel, and they are short. Toth seems to have no appreciation of how much work and expense it takes to construct a tunnel, nor how much public record is created. Tunnels are not built willy-nilly and abandoned. There is no shortage of documentation in the form of corporate charters, franchises, contracts, bond and stock offerings, and news reports of construction. For more recent construction there will be rounds of studies, public hearings, annual reports, contract bids, and other public record. But perhaps this is boring.

The "seven levels" will appear again. The only sense in which it is true is as a rough measure of depth, equivalent to seven stories of a building or some 70 to 100 feet. But Toth appears to be saying seven floor levels or even seven track levels, neither of which exists at any location in New York's subway or railroad tunnels. This might reflect her misunderstanding of a source.

41

There cannot be many locations in the subway where passing trains are only a "slight tremor", so the contention that "most of the homeless" live in such places is unbelievable. One such location where news reports have placed an encampment, the stub tunnels from the express track running east from Second Avenue (Houston Street), is never mentioned in the book. But many more places are just the ventilation rooms hard by the tracks, or even the catwalks.

The "frescoed waiting rooms" do not exist. This cannot be a report of something she saw although it might be something someone told her. Her stating something like this as a fact is all the more remarkable because its inspiration, the story of the experimental Beach subway of 1870, is mentioned only four pages on.

43

There are no natural passages. The subway system connects to a few building entrances at basement level, and by public passages at stations to PATH and railroad stations, but is that all she means by "man-made passages"?

The context here is Grand Central Terminal, which has two levels and to a limited extent passageways at two lower levels below them.

45

There's nothing mysterious about the vaults. Many older commercial buildings were constructed with basement levels extending out under the sidewalk, to increase the usable space. At some point the city began charging for the use of space under public sidewalks, and some building owners responded by sealing up the vaults at the building line to escape the charges. The existence of many vaults has been forgotten over time. However, I doubt their discovery takes many people by surprise. It's something to watch for when digging or when placing a heavy load on the sidewalk near any old building downtown. The vaults of course amount to nor more than small enclosed spaces with no connection to each other.

Obviously neither of these constitutes a "transportation system", and both of these date more than 30 years later than the Beach subway of 1870, which Toth mentions just before this sentence.

The trolley terminal is the open space visible from the Essex Street station of the J-M-Z trains, when no Brooklyn-bound train is in the station. It was used as a terminal for Brooklyn trolleys that came over the Williamsburgh bridge from 1908 to 1948. It's under Delancey Street too; Essex Street is the cross street.

The Waldorf-Astoria access isn't by way of a tunnel. (start revision Feb 2002) The hotel is one of many buildings built directly over the Grand Central terminal train yard. It's near a corner of the upper level train yard. There are sidings below it. Tracks and trains can be seen through gratings in the sidewalk on the 49 St side. Emergency access from the railroad to the street is by stairway on the 49 St and 50 St sides of the hotel, and also by elevator on the 49 St side. I have not been able to verify the Roosevelt story. (end revision Feb 2002)

45-46

It was the only one ever constructed. It's sheer puffery to suggest there are "several" others. By the way, I'd feel silly myself calling 100 yards of tunnel a "subway line", but Toth isn't the first to do so.

The station was not found when the line was visited in 1912, nor was the existence of the Beach tunnel unknown. See my article on the Beach subway for more detail. A few minutes with the New York Times Index and microfilm would have set her straight. The inaccurate reports about the station are based on popular subway books like Stan Fischler's Uptown Downtown. While the Beach line is a footnote in the history of New York transportation, it has been given lavish space in these books.

This story is important because it is of course the basis of the fantasies reported on p.41 and 234-235, and Toth should have recognized this. No living person could have seen the Beach station of 1870. I conclude that some of the Mole People must have been subway fans earlier on, and have read books and magazines about transit and railroading. The relation between subway riding for fun, socialization problems, and becoming one of the Mole People could have been developed had Toth recognized it. But she never identifies any of them as having an interest in trains per se.

This cannot be something she saw. There are no "waiting rooms" available. This is not a good description of platforms adjacent to tracks, and none of the abandoned stations actually have mezzanine levels or anything else one might call a waiting room.

46

Having visited City Hall station on two tours in the 1980's and 1990's, I have great doubts that it had been used by the homeless. Certainly there was no evidence; if they did use it, they took all their belonging and garbage away with them. I can't be sure.

47

In the real world, Grand Central has 2 levels of track and funnels into exactly 1 rail artery of 4 tracks. It's very hard to believe that a person who was in these tunnels could describe them this way.

"Going north, east and west" sounds like it might have been taken from an old brochure about the mainline railroad network that was once reached from Grand Central. The New Haven goes east to New England, the New York Central main line went west at Albany, and connecting railroads continued north. But even explaining it away like this, there were not 26 routes from Grand Central.

Does this mean its basement? There are no tunnels. It might mean the lower level of 42d St station (8th Ave), but that's not under the bus terminal.

In the line from Broadway--Lafayette Street station to Second Avenue station are a few ventilation chambers (access to grates in the sidewalk) and emergency exits. East of Second Avenue station (F train) the express track tunnels continue for over one trainlength to a dead end where an extension had been planned but never built, and this space has been gated off to keep people out but may have still been open when Toth was there. People are known also to live in spaces in the Chrystie Street tunnel, the route from Broadway--Lafayette down to Grand Street.

53

There is no tunnel along the Bowery, but the homeless were known to congregate in two tunnels crossing it, in Houston Street (F train) and Delancey Street (J-M-Z trains). This might refer to the one-block Second Avenue subway tunnel section located immediately east of the Bowery in private property and under the Manhattan Bridge plaza-- near enough to being "under the Bowery", and two blocks long if one accounts for the width of the plaza.

54

I can believe the police officer told her this!

66

There just aren't any natural caves in the metamorphic rock of Manhattan. I wonder if someone used the phrase "cavernous space" with Toth at some time. This is the same "Condos" location described earlier, p.20-21, and in fact it seems to be the same interview used twice, although the population was 200 there, 300 here. The number 30 reappears. As I mentioned earlier, the "Condos" probably refers to a real place even if this is not a good description of it.

73

This tunnel was originally an open cut, which has since been built over in places. It is mostly covered now from 53d St to 60th St, and at a few other blocks in the stretch south to the end at 34th St. The "several such places" refer to those blocks where the cut is still open, but at those points "what to look for" is nothing more secret than the side of the bridge, concrete walls along the sidewalk at the building line, usually with some view down to the tracks. I'm told that in the covered section up near 58th St, there are a couple of sidings running into space under adjacent buildings, and that there are people living in them.

The cut was opened in 1937, and it is used exclusively for Amtrak passenger trains.

74

The chapter refers to the Riverside Park tunnel, which is in use and not abandoned.

99

Fifty blocks is quite clearly 2.5 miles and not "more than four". Anyone with a map of Manhattan can see that, or anyone who knows Manhattan streets are very nearly 20 to the mile.

By the time the line in Riverside Park became a tunnel, it was for freight only. After some years of total disuse, Amtrak acquired it and began running the first passenger service through it.

If I may digress, it seems worth mentioning what an unusual tunnel this line is. The Hudson River Railroad was built in 1850 on this exact alignment along the shore of the river, at the bottom of a steep slope. Later, Riverside Park was built on the land side, between the railroad and a new street, Riverside Drive. In 1935-1937, the park was extended both over the railroad and out into new land on the river side of the tracks. A steel and concrete structure was built over the railroad in place. The tracks were not relocated. The roof was landscaped to meet the steep hillside on the land side of the railroad, so it now appears to be in a tunnel, or in fact is in a tunnel, although it could also be described as a long building with earth piled along its sides. Although one of the problems of the old park was that the tracks cut off the river from the park, the new project included a highway, the Henry Hudson Parkway, that has much the same effect.

The tunnel is wide enough for four tracks, and fairly tall, making it an almost hangar-like space. What made it attractive to the Mole People is that in recent decades the wide floor has been used for one track, then none at all, and even now only two. Plenty of floor space remains for people and shacks, and in addition there were small brick and concrete structures installed by the railroad here and there for materials and utilities including the electrical power once used on the line. Ventilation is provided by roof grates most of the way and by open arches on the water side at a few points. An excellent and safe view of it can be had from the sidewalk where 79th Street passes simultaneously over the tracks and under the highway.

156

This time the "seven stories" is perhaps a measure of depth, and it is not clear in this chapter whether the reference is to the subway or main station, which are unconnected except by public corridors at the first level below the surface. Toth seems not to realize the subway and main station are different spaces. The lowest subway level is the Flushing line station (7 train), which is about 75 feet below the surface. However, see p.161 below.

159

The name is "Burma Road", a World War II reference, although what it refers to exactly is no longer clear to most of us. The same Metro North police officer Toth interviewed was quoted in a newspaper article in October 1996. Burma Road is the passageway under track 100, the same one mentioned at p. 13.

160

The Park Avenue tunnel (Metro North) is the only one in Manhattan ever operated by steam, and no trains stopped to take coal in it. So this one is pretty mysterious. There's nothing else to go on. It's an informant talking.

161

There are definitely no present or past track levels in Grand Central other than the two levels in the station. This statement is impossible.

170

There is no tunnel system under Central Park, although subway lines do cut across the southeast and northwest corners.

183-184

If this is an IRT subway tunnel as stated, there are two possibilities, the Lenox Ave (2-3 trains) or Lexington Ave (4-5-6 trains) lines. One wonders why they would walk for miles in danger along the edge of the track, rather than simply take a train. Mentions of "a few levels" and "turns gently" make me think of the IRT Lexington, 3 levels deep at 125th Street and with slight curves where the tracks interconnect outside the station. I can't reconcile the combination of grates showing daylight and being more than one level down, although the scene is somewhat reminiscent of the tall Riverside Park tunnel.

192

What a load of nonsense. Grand Central Terminal is not in any place below subway tracks, and it goes down two levels of tracks and with passages at two levels below that. "No complete blueprint"? Detailed diagrams can be found in several published books, and photographs of the excavations can be found in published books and articles as well. No tunnels in the terminal were begun and abandoned. The terminal was constructed in one project completed in 1913, and not accreted piece by piece over many years as this may imply.

No such tunnel was ever constructed or even proposed at any time. The idea is absurd from an historical perspective, and so is the idea that such a tunnel would be disused now if it did exist.

The notion of entrances in the park is reminiscent of scenes in the TV series Beauty and the Beast.

192-193

After the long passage about the terminal, now we find ourselves instead at locations in the adjacent subway station cluster. This description does not correspond to anything in that subway area, and I have been in there. There is an inclined passage, built about 1910 to carry electrical cables, that runs from the original subway's curve (in the entry passageway to the "tower", off the corrider near the shuttle station) down to the Flushing line just west of its Grand Central station. But obviously that lower level can be easily reached by a public escalator, so it would be silly to go as described here.

This one is bad, because Toth claims to have made this trip herself, rather than reporting it from an informant. But she cannot have done anything like this.

195

Fair enough, if Toth is honoring this request, but then what was all that we just read?

203

This makes intriguing reading, but where in the world could this be? There is no abandoned tunnel at 34th Street within a block of Penn Station. Could this be the old pedestrian passage under the south sidewalk of 33d Street between 7th Avenue and 6th Avenue? But as we read on, she refers to tracks, making this once again a firsthand report of a visit to a place that does not exist.

The description might fit one of the disused freight sidings under a building on the West Side open cut (p.73), and then it is possible to consider a wire across disused tracks (p.205-206) for example, and to avoid calling this chapter imaginary. But that would not be what she's described, "a block from Penn Station" and a tunnel reached directly from a building on 34th Street. Likewise, there is a "rubble-strewn lot", more or less, in the form of a parking lot next to the open section of station yard west of 10th Avenue, and while it is a block from Penn Station, it's not on 34th Street and the tracks in that area are quite active.

205-206

Brick-walled tunnels are quite unusual. The wire across tracks makes no sense if the tracks are in service, and there are no abandoned rail tunnels at 34th Street within a block or so of Penn Station. This place does not exist.

There is no such place in a rail tunnel. Perhaps this is a building basement, but we have been told it is a rail tunnel.

216

In this sequence, Toth and an informant travel from a movie theater to Central Park by way of a tunnel that has grates through which she can detect moonlight. It's not easy to distinguish moonlight even at street level in Manhattan. The idea that a long tunnel just happens to go the right way adds to my disbelief in this passage.

234-235

She actually seems undecided about the birdlike people (see the book for more)! Toth's assertion that caves are "likely" contradicts the simple fact that no natural cave has ever been discovered in Manhattan. (The "Indian caves" in northern Manhattan are just rock overhangs.)

The schist does not just "almost reach the surface", but is well exposed at many locations in Central Park as well as in other parks and in excavations. It is near the surface at many points in Manhattan. It makes possible the tall buildings and is the base rock of the heights of upper Manhattan.

The closest I can come to this one is the discovery of peat and well-preserved tree trunks and stumps near Franklin Street station in 1914 or 1915, called the remains of a cedar swamp as reported in one of the annual Engineer's reports to the Public Service Commission. No cave is involved. I wonder how this story reached her ears.

The same report is also on p.41, and both these stories are obviously fantasized based on the Beach subway story on p.45-46.

The subway and rail system tunnels are all less than a century old, and there are no large segments "abandoned and forgotten". Here Toth finally considers, but then rejects, the idea that even one of these stories might be fiction.