Life Underground - by Terry Williams

About the Book

Beneath the surface of Manhattan's Riverside Park run railroad tunnels, disused for decades, where over the years unhoused people took shelter. The sociologist Terry Williams ventured into the tunnel residents' world, seeking to understand life on the margins and out of sight.

Book Synopsis

Winner, 2024-2025 New York City Book Awards, New York Society Library

Aboveground, Manhattan's Riverside Park provides open space for the densely populated Upper West Side. Beneath its surface run railroad tunnels, disused for decades, where over the years unhoused people have taken shelter. The sociologist Terry Williams ventured into the tunnel residents' world, seeking to understand life on the margins and out of sight. He visited the tunnels between West Seventy-Second and West Ninety-Sixth Streets hundreds of times from 1991 to 1996, when authorities cleared them out to make way for Amtrak passenger service, and again between 2000 and 2020.

Life Underground explores this society below the surface and the varieties of experience among unhoused people. Bringing together anecdotal material, field observations, photographs, transcribed conversations with residents, and excerpts from personal journals, Williams provides a vivid ethnographic portrait of individual people, day-to-day activities, and the social world of the underground and their engagement with the world above, which they call "topside." He shows how marginalized people strive to make a place for themselves amid neglect and isolation as they struggle for dignity. Featuring Williams's distinctive ethnographic eye and deep empathy for those on the margins, Life Underground shines a unique light on a vanished subterranean community.

Review Quotes

There's much to like about this book, but Williams should be most applauded for presenting the lives he encountered respectfully, humanely, and without mystique.-- "Social Forces"

By allowing the unsheltered residents to tell their stories and to decide what matters to them, Williams gives us a fuller perspective of who they are as people, their backgrounds, day-to-day experiences, dreams and aspirations.-- "The Sociological Review"

Life Underground provides unique documentation of the lives of homeless people living in underground tunnels and other spaces beneath the streets of New York City. No other work studies in so much detail the lives of people who might be considered the worst off of the city's worst off.--Thomas J. Main, author of Homelessness in New York City: Policymaking from Koch to de Blasio

In Life Underground, Terry Williams meets Fyodor Dostoyevsky in the netherworld of New York City, unearthing the everyday lives of the city's misbegotten bottom dwellers, immortalizing them for posterity. Richly observed and well-written, this book is a must-read for anyone who cares to truly understand the lives of those at the end of the line.--Elijah Anderson, author of Black in White Space

Terry Williams has once again written a beautiful ethnographic piece, offering us a profound sociological work on 'shelterless life' below and at the margins of one of the richest but also socially polarized cities in the world: New York. Based on interviews, field notes, maps, journals, dream records, and a photographic register, Williams makes visible the living conditions of a population that is all too often invisibilized: homeless people. Their voices and life experiences are at the center of this research work together with the neoliberal transformations of said city. A fascinating and illuminating book that everyone should read, especially those who want to understand, challenge, and put an end to the housing crisis - in New York and globally.--Ana Cárdenas Tomazič, Institute for Social Research (IfS), Goethe University Frankfurt

About the Author

Terry Williams is a professor in the Department of Sociology at the New School for Social Research. His previous Columbia University Press books are The Con Men: Hustling in New York City (2015); Teenage Suicide Notes: An Ethnography of Self-Harm (2017); Le Boogie Woogie: Inside an After-Hours Club (2020); and The Soft City: Sex for Business and Pleasure in New York City (2022). Williams is the recipient of the 2024-25 Eastern Sociological Society Merit Award.