Terry Williams, "Life Underground: Encounters with People Below the Streets of New York" (Columbia UP, 2024)

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network
Episode: Terry Williams, "Life Underground: Encounters with People Below the Streets of New York" (Columbia UP, 2024)
Date: January 26, 2026
Host: Stephen Pimpair
Guest: Terry Williams, ethnographer and author

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Overview

In this episode, host Stephen Pimpair interviews ethnographer Terry Williams about his latest book, Life Underground: Encounters with People Below the Streets of New York. Based on over 20 years of immersive research, Williams explores the hidden communities living beneath New York City’s streets, focusing primarily on the people inhabiting the tunnels under Riverside Park as well as their social structures, survival strategies, and the broader systemic and personal issues underlying homelessness.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Introduction to the Project and Author (02:07-06:20)

• Terry Williams introduces himself as an ethnographer from the New School for Social Research.
  • Emphasizes his focus on hidden urban populations and transgressive spaces.
  • His Cosmopolitan Life Series includes five books on New York’s subcultures, with Life Underground being the final entry.

Notable Quote:

"All of these books are basically ways to capture, I would say, most of the world that people know little about... trying to account for hidden populations for the most part."
— Terry Williams (03:49)

• Williams describes meeting "the Lord of the Tunnel," Bernard Monty Isaac, and recounts his method: long-term immersion, participant observation, interviews, dream journals, and photography.
  • Tracked and documented 113 people, ultimately focusing on 8 for in-depth profiles over 20 years.

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2. The Built Environment and Life Below the Streets (06:20-09:42)

• Williams discusses how the underground spaces beneath Grand Central and Riverside Park were originally constructed (e.g., Track 61), and how disused railway infrastructure became living space.
  • Residents adapted and utilized “bunkers,” alcoves, tents, and makeshift shelters.
  • Navigating deep darkness and uncertainty: "You don't know what you are stepping on. You don't know who can come from different spaces..." (08:17)
  • Challenges: procuring food, water, and maintaining dignity while being physically and socially marginalized.

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3. Community Structure and Survival Strategies (09:42-13:55)

• Underground communities were organized around remnants of old railway infrastructure and improvised shelters.
  • "Bunkers" built by original track workers were repurposed.
  • Unique shelters such as the “Cubano Arms” built by Cuban migrants.
  • Social relations included solidarity but also fluidity, as many came and went.
  • Residents frequently went above ground for food, work, and social ties.
  • Emphasized the "working homeless" who reclaimed bottles/cans, did odd jobs, and ran cons to survive.

Notable Insight:

"But this connection between margin and mainstream was also important... there was a working homeless population there as well."
— Terry Williams (12:40)

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4. The Social Function of Can Collecting (14:06-15:26)

• Collecting cans and bottles served as both survival mechanism and public service.
  • After the advent of the bottle law, street litter was substantially reduced by those "working homeless."
  • Williams highlights the need to recognize their contribution:

"...avoiding stereotyping and seeing this population as, sometimes, migratory, but... providing a kind of working homeless population... we need to give credit to them for doing that."
— Terry Williams (14:25)

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5. Why Underground? Shelters, Dignity, and Trauma (15:26-17:58)

• Many prefer underground life over traditional shelters, viewing the latter as more dangerous and lacking dignity.
  • Common misconceptions: shelters are not always free; they come with surveillance and costs.
  • Homelessness is rooted not merely in economic crisis, but in trauma—loss of loved ones, jobs, addiction.
  • Homelessness is described as a "condition," not just a crisis:

"For the most part, everyone that I talk to has suffered a certain amount of trauma... to a person, a person has lost something. So this idea of loss plays a role in the story."
— Terry Williams (16:50)

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6. Geography, Institutional Support, and Social Networks (18:28-20:30)

• Geography matters: where one lives impacts the outcome of personal crises.
  • Lack of support networks above ground leads people below.
  • Long-term family support can make a difference, but exhaustion and inability to help often results in further isolation.
  • Example: Jason, whose family gave repeated but eventually exhausted efforts to help him escape addiction and homelessness.

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7. Changing Public Perception and Criminalization (20:30-23:01)

• Williams traces the historical shift from seeing homeless people as “deserving poor” (e.g., bag ladies, white women in the 1970s) to “undeserving poor” (increasingly black and minority men).
  • The latter group is much more likely to be criminalized and stigmatized today.
  • Race is a key factor in societal attitudes.
  • Quotes historical reference points, including the impact of racialized perceptions:

Notable Quote:

“We started to see the poor who were menacing. We started to see them as the underclass. And the underclass, of course, became criminalized. ...They became poor and black. ...That's where the criminalizing of this population exists. And that's where we are now.”
— Terry Williams (20:59-22:57)

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8. Internalization and Possible Solutions (23:55-26:28)

• Williams talks about the self-perception of underground residents, noting their philosophical resilience and agency, specifically through the example of Bernard Isaac.
  • Policy interventions, such as vouchers introduced by HUD Secretary Cisneros in 1996, helped many people move above ground.
  • Access to affordable housing and strong social support organizations are key to solutions.
  • Notes city resources like Main Chance and support organizations, calling for increased investment and attention.

Notable Suggestion:

"...We can do more with this population if we establish these kind of entities [support organizations]."
— Terry Williams (25:50)

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Memorable Moments and Quotes

• On research methods and duration:

“So all of that, of course, led to a 20 year adventure. ...I end up with eight people that I maintain a relationship with and I wrote about in this book.”
— Terry Williams (05:08)

• On moral transformation in society:

"We lionized for a time...the hobos...They were not considered to be disposable. ...Something happened, of course, between then and now where we now would see this population as disposable and, of course, seen as criminals."
— Terry Williams (12:40)

• On mutual aid and system change:

"At the very least, something that we have to realize is that people can only do well when there is some kind of support network. ...How long and how much that help...made the difference."
— Terry Williams (19:18)

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Important Timestamps

• 02:28 — Williams introduces himself and the Cosmopolitan Life Series
• 05:08 — Description of Bernard Monty Isaac and the 20-year study
• 06:47 — Explaining underground geography and the initial forays into tunnels
• 10:14 — Forms of underground shelters and community structure
• 12:40 — Working homeless and social ties above ground
• 14:25 — Value of can collectors to the city
• 15:43 — Dangers and indignities of homeless shelters
• 16:50 — Trauma and personal loss as root causes
• 20:59 — Historical change: from deserving to undeserving poor, race, and criminalization
• 25:50 — The need for policy and organizational solutions

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Tone and Language

Williams speaks with empathy, respect, and sociological precision, frequently grounding his observations in real stories and historical context. Pimpair’s questioning is thoughtful, inviting both anecdotal detail and systemic analysis from his guest.

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Conclusion

Terry Williams' Life Underground offers a deeply humanizing and complex portrait of New York’s subterranean communities, challenging dominant narratives about homelessness. By uncovering hidden lives and overlooked labor, Williams reveals both the resilience of underground residents and the structural failings that drive people below the city’s surface. This conversation on the New Books Network is an essential listen (or read) for anyone seeking a nuanced understanding of urban poverty, homelessness, and the ways in which society views and treats its most marginalized citizens.

Transcript

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[Marshall Po]

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[Stephen Pimpair]

Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Stephen Pimpair, host of the Public Policy Channel, and we are joined today by Terry Williams, who is the author of Life Encounters with People Below the Streets of New York. New out from our friends at Columbia University Press. Terry, welcome. Thank you for joining us today.

[Terry Williams]

Thank you very much, Stephen, for inviting me.

[Stephen Pimpair]

So I wonder if we might begin by having you tell folks a little bit about who you are and what you do and what brought you to this particular project.

[Terry Williams]

Well, my name is Terry Williams. I'm at the New School for Social Research for a number of years now I'm considered an ethnographer, which means I look at, or try and look at the city in a way that captures underground hidden objects and that includes people and that includes events. And the series that I happen to be discussing today is called the Cosmopolitan Life Series, Studies in Transgression. And I wrote five books in that series. This is the last of the five. And it included Teenage Suicide Notes, the Soft City, which look at sex and business in New York City. Another book called Lay Boogie Woogie, which is Inside and After Hours Club, the Con Men, which is another volume on hustling in New York. All of these books are basically ways to capture, I would say, most of the world that people know little about, in the sense that I was trying to account for hidden populations for the most part. And this particular volume does that as well. There were two people who wrote books about this. I had introduced them to the characters, as it were in the book. But the main story, of course, is how is homelessness produced. And in order to capture that or to understand that, I felt the best way to do it was to follow people as long as possible. Not to do a short three weeks, three months, even a year or two study, but to study as long as I could, a population. I met a man who was called the Lord of the Tunnel. And his name was Bernard Monty Isaac. He was 37 years old. I thought the best way to capture that world is to not just interview him, but to. To provide other kinds of data, as it were, to tell his story. So I gave him and others journals to write in. They said that they had vivid dreams underground. I gave them tape recorders to record those dreams. Photographs, of course, as well. So all of that, of course, led to a 20 year adventure. Following Bernard and following other people. I had actually counted 113 people living from 72nd street to 125th Street. I had my counter with me, my clicker. And every time I would see someone, I walked through the tunnel. It's about a mile and a half long. And every time I would see someone, I would click in. I didn't actually meet all those folk, but I did get to meet quite a number of people underground. Of course, during the. I would say that the 20 year period, most people either died or disappeared. So I end up with eight people that I maintain a relationship with and I wrote about in this book. That's a long story, but that's part of it.

[Stephen Pimpair]

It's a great, it's a great story. So maybe let's Start by telling folks just a little bit about what was the space like? What was the living space like? How were people sort of organizing themselves in physical space? And then we'll maybe talk about how it is that they spent their day.

[Interviewer/Host]

And how they gathered things for how they gathered money and food and those things.

[Stephen Pimpair]

But what should we know about the space? Where were they living?

[Terry Williams]

Well, one of the ways in which this story should be told, and Stephen, I should start there because I think it's important for the readers, for listeners. I wanted to learn as much as I could about this population. So I started at Grand Central Station. Now, Grand Central Station was actually turned into what is called Grand Central terminal. And in 100, I would say, 1903, 1904, there's a man named William Wilgas. William Wilkes was the chief engineer in looking at how you could turn this into a terminal. And so he constructed these electrified tracks under five or six levels underneath the station, the Grand Central Station. And there's a place there called Track 61. I wanted to go to Track 61 and find people so I could interview there. Of course, it was very difficult because you're traversing about 20 some odd different electrified tracks to get there. I met a few people. I did interview some people there, but others told me about this place under Riverside Park. And so I went from there to Riverside Park. Imagine, just for a moment, that you are going into a space that is entirely dark. And you're walking into a space that's dark for several blocks long. You don't exactly know what you are stepping on. You don't know who can. Who can come from different spaces. I understand that underground there is what are called alcoves. Alcoves are. Are actually ladders that are above the tracks and. And people can see you, but you can't see them or. But you can also hear them. So if you can imagine this kind of darkness and this. This sense of. Of lost space, and that's what you encounter when you go underground. And that's what I encountered the first time I went. I don't know whether that describes as well as I could. So that's part of it. And then once you're there, you have to figure out a way to do the following. How do I eat? How do I get water? How do I traverse this particular space and then carry on a life that is. With a certain amount of dignity? And so I wanted to capture that, and I think I did. But it did take these many years to do it.

[Stephen Pimpair]

So tell us a little Bit about. I guess I'm interested in the extent to which you. There are a number of folks who didn't think of themselves as homeless.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Stephen Pimpair]

Because they had sort of. They had a place where they could go on a regular basis for a while anyway, relatively undisturbed. So can you. What was there a community there? Was it a neighborhood? What kind of social relations among people.

[Interviewer/Host]

Who were living there did you encounter.

[Terry Williams]

Now, there were a number of locations, you can call them location underground, where people actually could live. A lot of the early workers, Conrad workers, the workers who were working on the tracks, they had built what are called bunkers. And These are maybe 20 foot by 20ft long. And they were places where people had. They had, for example, a telephone booth or area where you could actually do. And then you had other. You had one that was just for like a latrine and then you had another one. And so some of these were still in. In operation. So people took those places and start to live there. And then others simply took tents. There was a man I wrote about called blue tent. He had a blue tent and he simply lived in that particular structure. There was a lot of rats in that area and he lived in that. In that structure. There were others who had lean tos. And I said it was one structure at what I call Cubano Arms, which is a place where a few people from Cuba had moved from the Mariana boat rack. I don't remember that population boat lift. Yeah. And they had like a Frank Gehry type construction. It was carpolian, it was canvas, it was cardboard, but it was a lean to. And so those were also structures that you saw underground as well. But this connection between margin and mainstream was also important because people actually who would live underground for a time would also go above ground to get food, go to soup kitchens, go up to ask for, make money. Because there was a working homeless population there as well. They would go up and for example, search for books, get books from supers, sell those books or make arrangements to sell them for other. Sell them to other people. There were people who, of course, who did various kinds of cons above ground. So I talk about this margin and mainstream connection and how people were surviving. But it was important to look at this as a working population. We've forgotten that this idea of who we call the homeless was really a part of a world that we lionized for a time. You know, when you think about gutry and you think about even Dylan and others who wrote about what is called the hobos, they were not considered to be disposable. At that point in time, people saw them as part of the urban lore. And so something happened, of course, between then and now where we now would see this population as disposable and of course, seen as criminals. So this criminalizing the poor is now part of the. Part of what we hear in the same population. So anyway, I was writing all about those elements.

[Stephen Pimpair]

So I want to go back to sort of what you think sort of is the reason for that transition. But talking about sort of work, one of the things that I think is particularly interesting is you talk about another.

[Interviewer/Host]

Way that some folks earn a living is by collecting cans and reclaiming the deposit.

[Stephen Pimpair]

But you talk about sort of the social function that. That fills for the rest of the city as well. Can you talk a little bit about the ways in which all of us who live here in New York actually benefit from folks who are collecting cans?

[Terry Williams]

Well, one of the things that we see all the time is the tremendous detritus that's on the street. Cans. Prior to the law, the bottle law, cans and bottles were everywhere. And of course, it really littered the streets. With this new law, of course, people started using cans and picking up cans and actually cleaning up the city. That's part of what we're seeing going on here. I see that just a way that we can avoid the kind of stereotyping and seeing this population as a sometimes migratory, but a population that for the most part, is providing a kind of working homeless population, if you will. And we need to sort of give credit to them for doing that.

[Stephen Pimpair]

Some of that's maybe a good segue to ask, why is it that folks don't have what we would identify as a more traditional permanent residence, and why do they choose to live in this space underground rather than elsewhere?

[Terry Williams]

People feel that shelters, for example, are more dangerous than the spaces they live underground. They also find it difficult to see any kind of. I guess you could say any kind of respect associated or dignity associated with shelters. Shelters are also expensive. People think that shelters are free, but they aren't. People have to pay to live in these shelters for the most part. And it's also difficult for anyone to live in these spaces with the kind of surveillance that exists in the city. Surveillance is part of the phenomenon that we are also not including in our understanding about this. And so I think it's. It's something that we need to just take a closer look at.

[Stephen Pimpair]

So that's why they were living in.

[Interviewer/Host]

This underground space as opposed to other places.

[Stephen Pimpair]

Why were they homeless? Or why were they without traditional shelter in the first place?

[Terry Williams]

I make this point that homelessness is not just a crisis, but a condition. What condition is that? For the most part, everyone that I talk to has suffered a certain amount of trauma. And that trauma is everything from loss of a loved one, loss of a job, some kind of toxicomania issue, that is to say, drug misuse issue. All of these reasons or some that account for the reason people are homeless. And so part of that story is about that as well, that this idea that the homeless is part of a condition that's set up by these kind of traumas, individual traumas, and to a person, a person has lost something. So this idea of loss plays a role in the story.

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[Stephen Pimpair]

There's a fairly recent book you may.

[Interviewer/Host]

Well know, called Homelessness is a Housing.

[Stephen Pimpair]

Problem that looks sort of geographically at.

[Interviewer/Host]

Rates of homelessness across the United States.

[Stephen Pimpair]

And one of the arguments that they make is that geography is hugely important here, right? We all, for the most part, encounter.

[Interviewer/Host]

Crises over the course of our lives. Those could be, as you say, some kind of trauma. Those could be emotional economic crises, loss of a job, loss of a partner, loss of a parent.

[Stephen Pimpair]

And where you are and the kinds of institutional supports that are available to.

[Interviewer/Host]

You may make the difference as to.

[Stephen Pimpair]

Whether you're able to emerge out the.

[Interviewer/Host]

End of that crisis or not, or wind up with sort of unstable housing.

[Terry Williams]

At the very least, something that we have to realize is that people can only do well when there is some kind of support network. And a lot of people underground did not have that. But at the same time, they did have some, at some point, connections to people above ground. How long and how much that help or assistance came into their lives made the difference. If people decided to continuously assist people, then they got better. But for the most part, for example, Jason, who had a drug problem, his family was so sick and tired of what had happened with him, they were so sick and tired of giving him help after help after help that they decided they weren't going to do it anymore. And I kept Seeing this happen in different parts of this population, those who simply gave up, but they still, excuse me, they still provided some help at some point in time. They just didn't do it as long as one could normally assume that they should.

[Stephen Pimpair]

So you mentioned earlier that you thought.

[Interviewer/Host]

There was sort of this relatively recent transition and that we have moved into a space where we are less empathetic, less sympathetic, less concerned about the well being of unhoused people and more likely to identify, identify it as a crime problem, say, rather than a human services problem.

[Stephen Pimpair]

Why do you think, why do you think that is? And maybe how do we get out the other end of that?

[Terry Williams]

Well, I might not be able to answer the second part of that question, but the first part I think is historically available to us. And that is we had what was once called a deserving and undeserving poor in this country. And that undeserving, that deserving poor were those that we cared about. And we saw them as kind of hobos, as heroes to a certain extent. But we also got to a point where we start to see the poor who were menacing. We started to see them as the underclass. And the underclass, of course, became criminalized. And we started to care less and less about that population. In fact, we started to see all of those in that population. Remember, they became increasingly, and if you've been around New York for a long time, you know, they increasingly became poor and black. They became poor and minority. And so when we saw deserving poor, deserving poor were, for example, when I first saw this population in the 1970s, they were called bag ladies. And the bag ladies were simply 90% white, white, white women who walk around with bags. They had these shopping carts and all their good, all their items that they carry with them. And they were still considered to deserving poor. And that population increasingly became more black, black male. You saw less and less of the deserving poor to the undeserving poor. And that's where we stand, where.

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[Terry Williams]

Criminalizing of this population exists. And that's where we are now.

[Stephen Pimpair]

So as is often the case, part.

[Interviewer/Host]

Of the answer here is we are in the United States. So race is almost always part of the explanation for any social phenomenon you are trying to make sense of.

[Terry Williams]

Yeah, indeed.

[Stephen Pimpair]

As a footnote, I don't know whether, you know, it's speaking about what we.

[Interviewer/Host]

Used to call bag ladies.

[Stephen Pimpair]

There's actually a movie that Lucille Ball.

[Interviewer/Host]

Made playing just such one of those women. I can't pull the name of it out of my head. But was very much a sympathetic portrait.

[Terry Williams]

I missed that last point. You.

[Stephen Pimpair]

Oh, sorry. I was saying that Lucille Ball made a movie in which she actually portrayed.

[Interviewer/Host]

One of the women who you were talking about in that period.

[Stephen Pimpair]

Very sympathetic portrayal.

[Interviewer/Host]

Very sympathetic portrayal.

[Stephen Pimpair]

And they are often hard to come.

[Interviewer/Host]

By when you look at, say, movies about unhoused black men in particular, for reasons that I think we could probably understand.

[Marshall Po]

So.

[Stephen Pimpair]

So having spent decades sort of getting to know these folks and who they are and what is there a way to summarize, recognizing that all people are different, sort of how they think about their own state and their own condition and their own lives. What have you learned about the ways in which they internalize or do not.

[Interviewer/Host]

These attitudes that often the rest of the world has them?

[Terry Williams]

One of the things that I should mention is one of the characters, of course, is Bernard Isaac, Very articulate man, almost considered philosopher underground, because we often talked about Plato and all. All these other characters that. That were of interest to us. But people have to have to realize that there are a few things that we should keep in mind. One is that in 1996, Cisneros, who was the HUD secretary at the time, set up something called voucher system. And the vouchers were given to all the homeless people underground, which Bernard, of course, took and gave people these vouchers. And people actually found homes after they got those vouchers. This is something that we should think about doing again. I know there's a new conversation emerging, but that was really important. We know the housing, that affordable housing is something that we need to think about and do as well. And so I think there are a number of locations where people have access to shelter, to food, and is these kind of organizations that are important to maintain and to establish. We recently found out that the city has over $3 billion in surplus places, like Grand Central Neighborhood, for example, which has a place called Main Chance. And they have other parts of that organization. These are entities that should be supported, and we can do more with this population if we establish these kind of entities. I don't know whether, Stephen, that's enough to answer your questions, but I appreciate you asking and I'm happy to have a conversation with you today.

[Stephen Pimpair]

Thank you, Terry. You are listening to the New Books Network, and we have been speaking with Terry Williams, who is the author of Life Encounters with People Below the Streets of New York from Columbia University Press.

[Interviewer/Host]

Terry, thank you so much for joining us today. Much appreciated.

[Stephen Pimpair]

Appreciate it.

[Terry Williams]

Thank you.

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