![]() ![]() "Everybody's here: black, white, Chinese, Latino, old, young, on drugs, straight. But Singer's journey, vertical rather than horizontal, soon stopped being about finding an alternative world, and more about exploring the connections between overground and underground New York. Young, restless Americans have often taken to the road, or to hopping freight trains, in search of adventures, a whiff of otherness. Then they thought I was fucking crazy – you couldn't get any lower than this." You feel like you're being followed." He was treated with suspicion at first. Those areas are so dark, and the air is thicker and heavier. You'll get a cluster of 30 homes, then a stretch of nothing. Here, amid the smell, the rats and the poor sanitation, they had carved out another existence – some for decades.Īt first, Singer found the tunnels ghostly. Grief and demons dogged them: Dee, a woman in her 50s, retreated into the darkness after an apartment fire killed her two children Ralph was tormented by the knowledge that his five-year-old daughter had been raped and mutilated while he was serving a prison sentence. Their residents were mostly men – runaways from abusive parents, divorcees, crack addicts. These houses were ramshackle constructions built out of scrap metal, bits of plastic, and furniture rescued from skips. But in the tunnels, you can build yourself a house." "Living on the street is very physical: if it rains you get wet, and you only have as much as you can carry. I wanted to be homeless so badly." But the subterranean city Singer found when he entered an abandoned section of the subway, linking Penn Station in midtown to Harlem on the west side, was far from lawless. You'll be killed.' But I was 21, and that was right up my alley. "New Yorkers say things like, 'They'll eat you down there. "There's a lot of mythology around the tunnels," agrees Singer. Reading this on mobile? Click here to view video
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