THERE are many paths into New York’s little known netherworld. One of them is a metal door sandwiched between a grimy Midtown apartment building and a nondescript bodega.
Thousands of people walk by every day, never even noticing it. While millions of straphangers walk up and down the city’s clearly marked subway entrances, only a handful know of the dangerous, harsh – yet surprisingly peaceful – world that lies on the other side of this particular door.
Call it a tale of two cities – and both are constantly changing.
PHOTOS: NYC’S Underground Dwellers
One of million-dollar apartments, traffic, bright lights and constant noise – and another of dank tunnels, miles of garbage-strewn train tracks and rumbling trains that shatter the crypt-like silence.
“The trains are a beautiful, sweet sound in my morning,” says a 49-year-old man who gives his name as John Travolta.
Travolta, originally from the Dominican Republic, claims to have lived in these dark, rat-infested spaces beneath Manhattan for the past 20 years.
The homeless people who live down here are called Mole People. They do not, as many believe, exist in a separate, organized underground society. It’s more of a solitary existence and loose-knit community of secretive, hard-luck individuals.
Like most of the ground here, the floor of Travolta’s “home” consists of baseball-size chunks of railway gravel, packed earth and – strangely enough – thousands of old shoes, which appear to be the most common type of refuse in the underground.
His “sweet”-sounding alarm clock is the roar of a massive commuter train that speeds by just inches from his filthy bedroll each morning beneath Midtown’s West Side, where Amtrak trains roll into and out of Penn Station.
The rumbling train is also Travolta’s timepiece – he knows the rail schedule intimately and doesn’t own a watch. “After the 11:45 [p.m.], I can sleep soundly until 7:15,” he says.
“The majority of street homeless people are people living with serious mental illnesses with co-occurring physical problems or disabilities,” says Patrick Markee, the senior policy analyst at the Coalition for the Homeless.
“For that reason, many of them don’t feel that city shelters fit their needs, since most are warehouse facilities with about a hundred cots in a room. For them, that kind of setting doesn’t feel safe and doesn’t fit the needs of people with untreated mental illness.”
“When we talk to folks on the street, a lot of them say they are afraid to go in the shelters,” says Markee.
In the tunnels, their world is one of malt liquor, tight spaces, schizophrenic neighbors, hunger and spells of heat and cold. Travolta and the others eat fairly well, living on a regimented schedule of restaurant leftovers, dumped each night at different times around the neighborhood above his foreboding home.
Like the rest of New York, Travolta’s world is changing: Soon, new tunnels – along with bigger underground spaces – will link his territory to other dark places.
Over the next decade, a collection of government agencies, ranging from the MTA to the federal government, plan to spend billions on at least eight projects to modernize New York’s under-city.
The MTA has already started to extend the 7 train, build tunnels to increase the capacity of the Long Island Rail Road and finally finish the Second Avenue Subway. Other subterranean projects include increasing access to Penn Station for New Jersey Transit trains, water mains and an underground transit center under Fulton Street and the rebuilding of the underground World Trade Center site.
But the Mole People seem unaware of the growth of the deep underground.
If nothing else, it might mean new places for them to inhabit, though most hope to leave their underground dwellings by “next year” – even if they’ve been saying the same thing for decades.
“Sure I’m crazy,” says Travolta. “You’ve got to be crazy to live down here, but this is where I find my peace and privacy.”
Lately, he says, the underground residents have been more focused on fending off a raccoon that emerges from an area beneath new construction.
Travolta, his friend Jorge and others say they prefer this dark place to shelters which are “inhabited by animals and crazy people.” Down here, “I find peace,” says Jorge, also 49, who says he’s lived under New York for 14 years since illegally emigrating from Cuba.
“Outside, people throw things at me or try to hurt me. Here, I’m left alone.”
Jorge says he spent this winter’s severe cold wrapped in blankets and garbage deep underground.
“I was so cold, didn’t get up for at least three days,” he says.
City officials take a dim view of the homeless living underground – entering the tunnels is dangerous and illegal.
“There are multiple options available to vulnerable New Yorkers in need,” says the Heather Janik, an official with New York’s Department of Homeless Services. “New Yorkers may enter the municipal shelter system, or if they are chronically homeless, they may work with our outreach teams to be connected with a Safe Haven program. We urge those in need to come into shelters where the city may work with and assist them.”
Still, like so many of the homeless who make their way through New York’s underworld, Jorge and Travolta’s world is shifting.
More frequent police sweeps round up many of the Mole People who live here, they say, while the various entrances and exits to this rarely seen part of New York City are locked by maintenance crews. “It doesn’t matter,” says Jorge. “We know all the doors.”