Wide Angle

Wide Angle 20.4 (1998) 9-50

---

Urban Nightmares and Future Visions:
Life Beneath New York

David L. Pike

[Figures]

---

1.

At the conclusion of the first installment of the Planet of the Apes series (1967), Taylor (Charlton Heston), the astronaut turned escaped slave, achieves insight into the hinge of the premise of the five-part science-fiction epic through a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty, half buried in the desert, torch protruding from the sand at a dangerously oblique angle: he has journeyed through time rather than through space, and the planet of the apes is nothing else than the post-apocalyptic future of his own world. This vision of the Statue of Liberty looks more like a visual metaphor than the thing itself fallen off its island perch in New York Bay, however, the enduring cliché of everything Taylor has seen destroyed for him in this future, the blasted myths of America. It is not until midway through the second installment, Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), that the metaphor is made concrete, uncategorically asserting that where Taylor is, New York City once was. Penetrating the surface of the planet through a series of caves in search of an explanation for how his world came to be ruled by apes, Taylor's successor, Brent (James Franciscus) stumbles upon a second relic, this time unmistakably the thing itself: a ruined platform, much of its signature tiling still intact, of the Queensboro Plaza station of the New York subway. Following the path of the subway tunnel in imitation of the erstwhile commuter, Brent journeys deeper underground, eventually discovering a tribe [End Page 9] of mutant humans who worship the sole remaining atomic bomb in the midtown Manhattan ruins of St. Patrick's Cathedral on 5th Avenue. The prisoner Taylor will duly explode this bomb in a dying gesture that wipes out the degenerate planet and locks it into a time-warp cycle of men and apes, escape and destruction. While the Statue of Liberty stood for an abstract America, the New York subway ushers in the inescapability of material history: by contrast with Bartholdi's emblematic creation (first assembled in Paris, and copied infinitely since), the viewer knows implicitly that these tunnels could not, and would not be reproduced anywhere else, in any other world. On the planet of the apes, as always, the subway embodies an irreducible trace of the past; as Brent mumbles, incredulously: "This is where I used to live. This is where I used to work."

At the same time, by promising a solution to the overarching cipher of script- writer Paul Dehn's cyclical vision, the subway partipates in a complex dialogue of visual and material metaphors that in New York of the seventies and eighties used the underground of the city to enunciate a series of questions about class, homelessness, and race. After all, the question for which Taylor and Brent are urgently seeking an answer is one of racial inversion transparently troped in time-honored social Darwinian language: how has a world evolved so that gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans have established a primitive regime of brutal domination of humans who have in consequence lost the power of speech? The answer proposed by the underground is striking in its pulp obviousness: it is their own fault. ¹ Now, if the plot structures of popular fiction are often viciously circular in their logic, they are seldom so in the visual imagination of their settings. The force of such fictions, both cinematic and literary, lies in their manipulation of the spaces of everyday life and of the metaphorical power embedded in those spaces. The self-evident quality of pulp truth is equally the power of visual recognition: the conviction that what we (and Brent) see can only be the New York City subway. In this article, I explore the peculiarly [End Page 10] powerful sway of underground New York on the postwar American (and global) imagination, focusing on the flood of these underground myths in movies of the seventies and eighties, as the deterioration of the subway came to stand in for the deterioration of the social fabric as a whole, and as a division that had long been conceived in terms of class was mobilized, through various codes and sub- texts, in terms of race. I conclude with a look at changes in underground imagery in nineties cinema, and consider why New York in the last decades has taken over from Paris and London as the nerve center of underground metaphors.

New York is home to the two most culturally resonant underground populations of the postwar era: the sewer alligator and the "mole people." Both were long believed to be more legendary than real, and both have galvanized the resources of underground mythology as their existence has become progressively more certain. Since at least Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926), Manhattan has stood visually for the city of the future, and usually in a critical rather than a utopian sense. As urban living has lost its hold on the positive imagination of most of the country, and inner cities have rapidly become (and/or been stigmatized as) ghetto wildernesses, the entrails of New York have gained symbolic precedence over the skyscrapers. ² As Harry Granick wrote in 1947 in the seminal book on the subject, Underneath New York, "[P]eople are more likely to stare down the holes in New York City than to crane their necks up at the magnificent towers that rise above them." ³ At the same time, whereas in the nineteenth-century metropolis, the vision of the city as a space vertically divided between above- and underground was primarily class-based, in New York of the seventies and eighties a racial component complicated the economic split in various ways.

The emblematic moment of this shift was certainly the visual and symbolic stranglehold gained by graffiti artists over the New York subway system during the seventies. Institutionalized neglect had severely deteriorated the system, ridership had declined since the sixties, and the apparent inability of the Transit Authority in any way to control the graffiti artists became synonymous with the decay of the system and the city as a whole. ⁴ Here, as always, the meaning of the transformation of the subway was fought over through the production and interpretation of its images. For many of the artists, it was a thrill of celebrity, creativity, and rebellion against authority. For many in the downtown art [End Page 11] scene, it was an image of anarchy and novelty, as underground culture emerged into the mainstream. ⁵ The graffiti-writers had transformed the rolling stock of an urban transportation system into a private visual language of codes and tags known only to other artists and fellow travellers. To the average commuter, however, at least as he or she was generally portrayed in the press, this urban sign-system was simply a depressing reminder of the difficulty of living in a rapidly sinking ship: "The graffiti seemed to me a realistic symbol that my hometown, if New York City can be called a hometown, was really going down the drain." ⁶

A pair of movies from the period, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) and The Warriors (1979), use the subway to represent the changing nature of the city, taking the points of view of the commuter and the graffiti culture, respectively. ⁷ In Joseph Sargent's crime drama, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, based on a novel by John Godey, five men "hijack" a subway car and its passengers on the Lexington Avenue line for a million-dollar ransom. The Transit Authority personnel are depicted as stereotypically tough, old-school ethnic New Yorkers--Jews, Italians, and Irish--with reference to the changing face of law enforcement made in the form of a series of comic faux pas by the Transit Authority Lieutenant, Zachary Garber (Walter Matthau): he refers to a quartet of visiting transit officials from Tokyo as monkeys, before discovering that they speak perfect English; on first meeting the African-American in charge of the police forces, he stammers, "I hadn't realized you were... so tall"; to the undercover officer who was on the subway train disguised as a long-haired hippie, and is now lying face-down, wounded, on the tunnel tracks, Garber says reassuringly, "We'll have an ambulance here in no time, Miss." Frank, [End Page 12] the head of transit operations, epitomizes the "Old New York" attitude, cursing the effect of the hijacking on his schedules: "Screw the goddamned passengers. What do they expect for their lousy thirty-five cents, to live forever?" The kidnapped passengers, on the other hand, represent a Hollywood microcosm of present-day ethnic New Yorkers: tough blacks, a histrionic Hispanic woman with children in tow, a wise and elderly Jewish man, a drunk who sleeps through the entire ordeal, a few prostitutes, and an assortment of unmarried city-dwellers possessed of Big Apple eccentricities; the end credits list each actor opposite the requisite stereotype rather than any fictional name. The humor is meant to be of the "tough" New York type cited above: the running gag is that this ordeal is just a typical day on the subway. The filming was done mostly on location, and documentary-style authenticity is the order of the day--we learn all about how the subway is run, who runs it, and where it goes. ⁸ Pelham shows a city in transition, an old school of both crime and authority giving way awkwardly but in the end optimistically to new blood. The film's gestures toward realism function to assert the place of underground New York in a holistic urban fabric: no matter who lives in it or how poorly it stumbles along, the city will continue to function.

The Warriors , Walter Hill's film of gang warfare, from a novel by Sol Yurick, was likewise shot primarily on location at various subway stations and tunnels, as well as in Riverside Park, but Hill and cameraman Andrew Laszlo transform its urban landscape into a zone of tribal ritual and warfare with an epic narrative rooted in Arthurian myth and classical Greece. Snappily edited to rock music and wholly stylized in its settings, The Warriors aspires to the urban cool of graffiti culture. An extended opening montage sequence shows the journey of the eponymous Coney Island gang, complete with spray-can "writer," to a gathering of 40,000 fellows deep in the Bronx at Dyre Avenue and 233rd--the opposite extreme of the subway system. Fittingly, the rolling stock they ride on is covered in graffiti. The goal of the meeting is a union of the boroughs' gangs with the aim of running the city: "The future is ours," pronounces Cyrus, the self-styled leader and voice, we are led to assume, of Black Power. But Cyrus is shot dead by a white gang, and the multi-racial Warriors are framed for the murder and must make their way back to the relative safety of Coney Island through the hostile wilderness of the nocturnal city. The trains are the gang's [End Page 13] only means of return, and Hill's vision transforms the familiar images of underground New York into an un- familiar terrain full of alien figures with painted faces, unknown codes, and little in common with the images of the above-ground city we saw under siege in Pelham 1-2-3. For Hill, the defamiliarized face of the city ex- teriorizes the alienation of the inhabitants of its underclass for whom, as for the passengers of Pelham 1-2-3 but with wildly divergent consequences, the subway ride is both a daily routine and a life-and-death trial.

Both films ascribe symbolic meaning to the New York subway through versions of the descent through hell. The sardonic humor of Pelham 1-2-3 frames the descent more in terms of a social allegory: the subway is a hell to be submitted to by working- and middle-class commuters who hope in return to survive another day. The structure of The Warriors gestures at more of an epistemological meaning: the journey home through hell bestows invaluable knowledge and experience on the gang members who are able to survive. ⁹ Those who die along the way include both innocent victims like Snow (Brian Tyler) and "unworthy" ones like the predatory Ajax (James Remar), set up by a female undercover cop in Riverside Park. Con- sistent with its gang-member point of view, Hill's film refuses any illumination of broader significance outside of a nihilistic survival instinct and a deep-seated malaise; his Warriors are not morally brutalized as they might have appeared from an external, aboveground standpoint, but neither are they capable of any manner of social analysis of their situation. The possibility of mobilization and organization is precluded at the start of the film by the assassination of Cyrus. Instead of taking over, the city's 40,000 gang members remain strictly passersby. [End Page 14]

2.

If Pelham's commuters and Warrior's gang represent city-dwellers trapped underground temporarily, insofar as they live in a deteriorating, twilight city, they also resonate with the most powerful images of subterranean New York, the images of those who literally dwell beneath the city streets. The first permanent communities underneath New York were reported in the fifties. In his book Subways Are for Sleeping, the African-American writer Edmund Love described a man who boasted that he refused to ride the subways except at night, when he would use his encyclopaedic knowledge of the various routes to avoid police attention and grab eight hours of sleep every night with brief interruptions to change trains. ¹⁰ Love's profiles of members of what he called "an entirely different kind of society" became the unlikely subject of a Broadway musical comedy, premiering at the St. James Theater in December 1962. ¹¹ Opening to mixed review, Subways Are for Sleeping charmed mostly by its set pieces: dance numbers on a subway platform and among the commuters in Grand Central Station; a show-stopping romantic duet in the Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum, where one of Love's vagrants claimed to have spent the night on and off for ten years, "sleeping in the sarcophagus of the French king." ¹² The lone wholly negative evaluation took particular issue with the premise of romanticizing the lower depths:

There is nothing highly hilarious or entertaining or remotely believable in this hoked-up kingdom of vagrants who infest the city.... We are asked to believe that an attractive reporter for a slick ladies' magazine is assigned to do a story on the king of New York's penniless subway-sleepers, that she meets this adorable renegade and falls violently in love as a result of being bashed about through a night of subterranean horrors, and renounces the job in journalism for a life of unwashed squalor with her seedy Prince Charming. ¹³

In his book, Love had gone to great pains to account for the unlikely lure of the underground, adding that he had himself been "caught in this life": "It gives them real security. They become afraid to leave something they are sure of. To them there is more security in a home on a fire escape or in a job washing windows than there is in a furnished apartment or a regular job." ¹⁴ Love carefully distinguishes between the "vagrants" he describes, who still have hope in their lives, and the common "bum," ¹⁵ invoking a frequent taxonomical [End Page 15] trope of underworld descriptions. It is easy to see how the Broadway adaptation of these sketches of individuals could have been caught between the sensationalism to be gained from depicting the worst scenarios of underground living and the fact that a Broadway audience could identify only with the extraordinary but not so theatrical lives of those able, like Love himself, to exist on the threshold between above and below. As urban lower-depths dramas from La Bohème to Rent have demonstrated, suffering in an alternate lifestyle is a more socially acceptable state than simply surviving or actively choosing to live one's life in such a situation. The legitimacy of representing life underground to an audience of surface-dwellers is a leitmotif of both progressive and reactionary culture: does one take the point-of-view of the dwellers-above, does one attempt to report from below, or does one essay the complex juggling act of incorporating both perspectives?

In Robert Daley's book, The World Beneath the City (1959), we find a humorous tone similar to that evident in the musical and most of its reviews: the perspective of someone safely ensconced in the world above. Until the manholes leading to the under-street tunnels of the New York Steam Company were sealed-up, Daley reports, the warm corridors served as another nighttime shelter for the down-and-out. ¹⁶ The first stationary underground community on record appears to have been established by a group of homeless men in 1955 in an abandoned and partially walled-up station platform of the New York and Harlem Railroad. As Daley tells it, an elderly woman noticed them going down manholes near Ninetieth and Park with sacks on their backs and never coming out. A police search revealed the old carbon lamps still in use, clotheslines with drying laundry, and an assortment of pallets and mattresses. ¹⁷ Daley's imagination of the scene (evidently based on interviews with police witnesses) depicts it as a humorous nuisance. The anecdote concludes the chapter "Rats under the Piecrust," on the topography beneath Park Avenue, and presents the men as vermin, and as vermin because out of their proper territory of the Bowery: "'Imagine the noive of them bums,' said one cop. 'Under Park Avenue of all places. Couldn't they have picked some dumpy street? What would them swells along Park Avenue have said if they'd known they was living right on top of a hobo jungle?'" ¹⁸ The comic concern about ignorance of what goes on in the lower depths is curiously echoed by the dark opening conceit of Underneath [End Page 16] New York, where Granick asks the reader to imagine what would happen if the underground infrastructure were to cease functioning:

There is a look of terror on everyone's face. The streets are foul with garbage and human wastes. Food is becoming scarce. Food in your home, in stores, in warehouses is rotting for lack of refrigeration. Your father's newspaper, now reduced to handbill size and printed on a hand press, reports factories closed; hospital service almost at an end for lack of water, light and proper sanitation. Fires are raging in many parts of the city. There is looting and violence because the police cannot be promptly notified and because all burglary alarms are useless. And worst of all and most terrifying, typhoid fever is breaking out due to drinking the dirty river water.19

The underground is the place that prevents such disasters from happening; but it is equally the locus of the fear of those who might have a stake in causing them: "Imagine the noive of them bums." Comic distance from the lower depths is rapidly converted into apocalyptic fear of the same.

The fifties scenarios of Love and Daley can be seen in retrospect as early attempts to come to grips with a fairly unprecedented phenomenon. Although underground spaces have been intermittently inhabited throughout history, and although underground construction and the accompanying labor also date to prehistory, only with postwar New York did the permanent habitation of man-made spaces in the urban underground come to be considered as a viable option and begin to make its presence felt in visual representations of the urban underground. The closest earlier parallel was the trench experience in the First World War, where we witness a similar combination of humorous domestication and apocalyptic fear. British soldiers made themselves at home in their trenches by naming them after the streets and junctions of their capital metropolis. ²⁰ The urban was the most readily available model for making sense of the alienness of the underground network of the trenches, which equally gave birth to underworld legends, tales of "wild men... deserters, who lived [between the lines] underground, like ghouls among the mouldering dead, and who came out at nights to plunder and kill." ²¹

In the aftermath of the trench experience, Lewis Mumford first theorized underground labor as the anticipation of a new kind of lived environment: [End Page 17]

The mine... is the first completely inorganic environment to be created and lived in by man.... Day has been abolished and the rhythm of nature broken: continuous day-and-night production first came into existence here. The miner must work by artificial light even though the sun be shining outside; still further down in the seams, he must work by artificial ventilation, too: a triumph of the "manufactured environment." ²²

The needs of industrial mining gave birth to most of the technologies of the modern underground: railways, artificial light and ventilation, and the tunnelling techniques that have allowed the enormous increase in actual space and mobility underground over the past two centuries. ²³

Most recently, the Vietnam War introduced Americans to the possibility of long-term habitation and guerilla warfare conducted solely from beneath the surface of the earth. ²⁴ Joe, who claims to have been with Special Forces in Vietnam and who lived during the late eighties in a New York tunnel with Cathy, ex-wife of another Vietnam "tunnel rat," makes the connection explicit: "I know how it is to be a tunnel rat because I did that tour myself--flashlight and gun, go down in the tunnels, visit people. If the enemy doesn't get you, 'two step' will get you. That's a little snake, bites you, you can say your prayers, you got it made." ²⁵ The wartime combination of traumatic experience and mythmaking seamlessly merges with that of life beneath New York.

As the inveterate tunnel dweller Seville reports in Jennifer Toth's journalistic account, The Mole People, the eighties were the

decade of the tunnels, because that's when we all found them. There were people in the late seventies who used the tunnels occasionally to get high or whatever, but it wasn't until the eighties that people started settling in, living down here. It's the decade of crack and homelessness. It's the decade of the tunnels. People've been down and out since the beginning of time, but we's the first to actually live in tunnels. ²⁶

The sense of themselves as pioneers or exceptional individuals seems to be essential to the self-image of those tunnel dwellers who choose to maintain a link with the world above. As Bernard, long-time leader of an underground community in the Amtrak tunnel under Riverside Park on the West Side, puts it: [End Page 18]

So we just started going left about maybe five or six hundred yards, and we saw some of these houses, and that was it. I said, "we'll get us some shelter, and we'll just go from there." And that was the beginning of something with me, as unique as it is. And till this day I still say it's probably the greatest thing that I've done in my life--it is... There's a certain level of consciousness required of man. And one can't perfect that within functional society. You have to basically be separated and apart from it. ²⁷

Mac, a white man in his fifties who stays much deeper in the tunnels, lives off "track rabbits" (rats) and carries a worn copy of Thoreau's On Walden Pond in his back pocket, from which he can quote at length: "I am simply being myself, living for myself, so I can have things down here established when others come down and need me. It's my calling, you might say." ²⁸ Says the elected "mayor" of a two-hundred member community under Grand Central Station, "I want you to write that we're better off down here without the perversions of the world upstairs." ²⁹ Seville switches back and forth between the rhetoric of individual freedom and an above-ground realism: "You can't go back up... I just want to tell you that. The tunnels take your life. That freedom stuff is bullshit. Everyone down here knows it. They won't say it, but they know it." ³⁰ For the tunnel dwellers, too, there is an essential self-consciousness that leads them to distinguish their life underground as a passage through hell, a search for knowledge or peace. Those exercising this self-consciousness are known as "track people," who live near the surface and maintain a fair amount of contact with the world above, working jobs and visiting soup kitchens.

Those who have wholly abandoned the daylight world are known above and below as the "mole people," and as usual with underground images, their difference can be coded either positively or negatively. The essence of hell is seen in the Dark Angel, a white man with glowing red eyes who is feared by all who journey underground, either because he is dangerously insane or because he wields satanic powers. ³¹ But hidden in the same tunnels under Grand Central Station, we also find the large group that envisions itself as a full-fledged alternative community, boasting of certified teachers and nurses, a complex system of "runners" that provide food and mail from above, laundry and bathing facilities, and an ethics based on "caring and protecting our brothers and sisters, on communication and love.... It's what sets our race above all others." ³² [End Page 19] Mayor Ali M. complains of the "myths and undeserved rumors" about his community; and we see from Seville's experience that judgments concerning this other "species" swings rapidly between utopian and infernal:

"The further down you go, the weirder people get, and I mean real weird," Seville says. "There are people down there, man, I swear they have webbed feet.... Can't hardly see them at times, they're so sneaky. They make strange noises and sounds, like trains, but they aren't trains; they're communicating with each other. They said I could stay but that I could only be allowed to go back up with their permission. I ran from that place, man, and I ain't never going back. They're the mole people. ³³

In Seville's image of the amphibious ("webbed feet") mole people, we find the conjuncture of the two literary sources that predicted the seventies and eighties underground, if not directly influenced its particular expression: Richard Wright's novella about an African-American man's construction of an underground lair in "The Man Who Lived Underground," and Thomas Pynchon's founding legend of the alligators in the New York sewers in V. Because no concrete details were widely available before Toth's first articles in 1990, the cultural reaction to the eighties phenomenon of the underground homeless was based almost wholly in various elaborations of these seminal, fictionalized images.

3.

Wright, along with Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man, showed how the condition of living underground could be used to analyze the place of African-Americans in postwar society; Pynchon gave fresh proof of the myth-making power of underground New York. "The Man Who Lived Underground" was based on a 1941 story in True Detective of a series of thefts of money and goods from shops along several neighboring Los Angeles streets. When finally apprehended, the culprit turned out to be a white sewerman, perfectly sane, who had constructed a basement hideout from which to perpetrate his burglaries. ³⁴ Wright shifted the location to an unidentified city, most probably based on Chicago, changed the unemployed average citizen to an innocent black servant framed by the police for murder, and gave the matter-of-fact underground of the Los Angeles story a deeper allegorical resonance of social and racial alienation. [End Page 20] Fred Daniels's desperate search for recognition from those around him is overtly existential, especially in the shorter, published version, which begins with the frantic descent into the sewers, as opposed to the long narrative development that originally preceded it. ³⁵ The metaphysical thrust is balanced by the grittiness of the prose. As with Dostoyevsky's Underground Man, Fred Daniels's situation is a state of mind, but in Wright's depiction it is also a brutally material state in which the dark, damp, slime, and stink of the tunnels reflect the reality of the treatment Daniels has received above-ground because of his skin color and his social class.

Once underground, he finds himself with ready access to everything that had been refused him above: he listens in on a Church service, takes in a movie, helps himself to tools, a typewriter and a radio, fruit and meat from the local butcher, and a bag full of money and another full of diamonds and watches from a jeweller's safe. He takes them all back to the dirt cave he has excavated underground and, in a childlike orgy of decorating, plasters the walls with hundred-dollar bills, hangs his baubles on nails, scatters the diamonds with his feet, and types his name over and over on the typewriter: "He had triumphed over the world aboveground! He was free! If only people could see this! He wanted to run from this cave and yell his discovery to the world." ³⁶ Daniels's underground is, strangely enough, eminently plausible, not only because it was based on a real case, but because in the stories of the tunnel dwellers in New York, we can hear the same language: Bernard, for example, gives a detailed description of the food readily available to him as an underground scavenger, concluding with a paean to the simple life he has that he would not be able to lead in the world above: "Larry and I sat here the other day, and I made steamed cauliflower, wild rice, chicken. We're sittin' there listening to jazz--and a forty ounce of beer apiece. So we finished eating and he sat his feet on that side and I had my feet up here. And I said, 'Larry, this is too simple for most people'." ³⁷ "The Man Who Lived Underground" is deeply concerned with the dialectic that makes the underground both the only place left to live and an inherently untenable situation. At the same time, it participates in a symptomatic demographic distortion, already evident in Wright's changing the race of his protagonist. The New York underground dwellers of the eighties and early nineties were in fact racially and ethnically mixed, sometimes segregated, as in the [End Page 21] Amtrak tunnel, sometimes integrated, as in Ali M.'s community. But the dominant application of images of them--whether in a reflective or exploitative manner--has been toward expressing problems of postwar race-relations in the polarized terms of the relationship between above- and belowground, white and black.

In Wright's rendering, Daniels is driven back to the surface by the urge to tell those above of what he has done and of what he has discovered. But once back on the surface he goes unnoticed, all dripping with sewage as he is; passersby simply take him for a sanitation worker. Even the police refuse to pay him any heed; the actual murderer, a white man, has since been apprehended, and Daniels serves only to remind them of possible accusations of police brutality and misconduct. As he continues to insist on proving his unlikely tale, they accompany him to the manhole, pretend to follow him down, and proceed to shoot him, leaving him for dead, swept away by the flood of water in the main collector: "You've got to shoot his kind. They'd wreck things." ³⁸ Wright's novella is a simple and cruel parable; its power derives from the underground setting, for the combination of visceral reality and mythic resonance it lends to the narrative gives credence to an otherwise uneasy combination of naturalist prose and existentialist musings.

Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel, Invisible Man, takes Wright's schematic vision and makes it simultaneously more metaphorical and more real as the framing tale of an epic work. Where Daniels became invisible only as the consequence of his subterranean life, Ellison's narrator begins and ends the novel underground. He carefully distinguishes his space from those of a different, horrid underground; he is a track person rather than a mole person:

The point now is that I found a home--or a hole in the ground, as you will. Now don't jump to the conclusion that because I call my home a "hole" it is damp and cold like a grave; there are cold holes and warm holes.... My hole is warm and full of light. Yes, full of light. I doubt if there is a brighter spot in all New York than this hole of mine, and I do not exclude Broadway.39

For the narrator, the 1,369 lightbulbs of his tunnel represent a vision of truth that was unavailable to him in the darkness above. The reversal of categories [End Page 22] that characterizes underground existence serves to crystallize, as it did for Fred Daniels, the untenable extremes of existence above, in the white world.

This truth is not a pleasant one, but the narrator is able to use his ironic voice to distance himself from it as Daniels could not: "I'm an invisible man and it placed me in a hole--or showed me the hole I was in, if you will--and I reluctantly accepted the fact.... Once you get used to it, reality is as irresistable as a club, and I was clubbed into the cellar before I caught the hint." ⁴⁰ The undeniable materiality of life underground serves to embody the experience of invisibility above ground. Ellison concludes the long novel with the narrator's account of an episode in the subway. ⁴¹ It is quite close to the experience of Fred Daniels: the narrator sees an old white man, lost under the city, and recognizes him as a figure out of his past. The man asks for directions without in turn recognizing the narrator, who begins an insane conversation with Mr. Norton, who treats him as he apparently would any homeless person: "I've lived too long in this world to be ashamed of anything. Are you light-headed from hunger?" ⁴² The narrator concludes by giving him directions and "laugh[ing] all the way back to my hole." ⁴³ But the chance encounter on the subway platform spurs him into reconsidering his "hibernation," "shaking off the old skin" and returning, "no less invisible without it," to the world above, "since there's a possibility that even an invisible man has a socially responsible role to play." ⁴⁴ Like Wright, Ellison sets his narrative on the line between the physical reality of life underground and the metaphorical expression of psychic disempowerment. Both works conclude with the realization of the material sources of the psychic invisibility above. This is not, however, a synthesis that can occur belowground, in a materially alien space. The underground is a potent symbol because of its visual concreteness and familiarity, but by that very token it can never be a locus for social change. ⁴⁵ Wright's and Ellison's visions cut their protagonists off from the world above only to posit in the end the respectively tragic or revolutionary necessity for return to it.

Whether or not Thomas Pynchon knew Wright's and Ellison's work, the sewer episodes of V reproduce in a parodic vein both the motif of the underground as temporary shelter and the existential dilemma of those condemned to it. Pynchon's version prefigures the distortion of material circumstances that [End Page 23] would characterize cinematic visions of underground New York in the seventies and eighties, but without the explicitly racial component that descended from Wright and Ellison. In V, the underground pilgrim is a deranged priest, Father Fairing, who maintains a detailed and heartfelt record of his attempts to convert the legions of sewer rats, sole inhabitants of his parish, and the novel's existential confrontation is between Benny Profane, hired assassin for the Alligator Patrol of the Department of Sewers, and his reptile target which, tired of living, appears to want him to shoot it: "The alligator was pinto: pale white, seaweed black. It moved fast but clumsy. It could have been lazy, or old or stupid. Profane thought maybe it was tired of living." ⁴⁶

Pynchon plays the New York mythology for all it is worth, spinning off the idea of alligators in the sewers into a full-fledged underworld journey and confrontation for Profane, but dressed-up in the mock-heroic armature of a paramilitary organization or a SWAT team operation:

They worked in teams of two. One held the flashlight, the other carried a 12-gauge repeating shotgun.... Each hunter got an armband--a Zeitsuss idea. ALLIGATOR PATROL, it said, in green lettering. At the beginning of the program, Zeitsuss had moved a big plexiglass plotting board, engraved with a map of the city and overlaid with a grid coordinate sheet, into his office. Zeitsuss would sit in front of this board, while a plotter--one V. A. ("Brushhook") Spugo, who claimed to be eighty-five and also to have slain 47 rats with a brushhook under the summer streets of Brownsville on 13 August 1922--would mark up with yellow grease pencil sightings, probables, hunts in progress, kills. ⁴⁷

Like other central groupings in V--the Whole Sick Crew, the multi-national gang in Florence planning to burglarize the Uffizi Gallery--the Alligator Patrol is held together much more by the force of will and imagination than by any concrete bonds. In comparison to the underground of individual and racial alienation experienced by Fred Daniels or Ellison's invisible man, Pynchon's sewers have a history and mythology that is less material but more communal.

Pynchon borrows the pulp rhetoric of war movies and crime stories to spin a half-parodic, half-serious underground history, beginning with his version of the grizzled veteran with a story to tell--"Brushhook" Spugo and his forty-seven [End Page 24] rats. The centerpiece of this mythic history is the wild figure of Father Fairing, whose apocalyptic vision of a city taken over by rats leads him to a missionary vocation of converting the future rulers of the city:

One night early in Roosevelt's first term, he climbed downstairs through the nearest manhole, bringing a Baltimore Catechism, his breviary and, for reasons nobody found out, a copy of Knight's Modern Seamanship. The first thing he did, according to his journals (discovered months after he died) was to put an eternal blessing and a few exorcisms on all the water flowing through the sewers between Lexington and the East River and between 86th and 79th Streets. This was the area which became Fairing's Parish. These benisons made sure of an adequate supply of holy water; also eliminated the trouble of individual baptisms when he had finally converted all the rats in the parish. Too, he expected other rats to hear what was going on under the upper East Side, and come likewise to be converted. ⁴⁸

Just as the Alligator Patrol follows the generic conventions of counter-insurgency narratives, the legend of Father Fairing traces every station of the Jesuitical narrative of converting the natives: "He set about his first task: learning to communicate with the rats." ⁴⁹

Excerpts from Father Fairing's journals detail the theological debates between catechumens Ignatius, Teresa, and Bartholomew, the departure of the apostate Ignatius for the "pagan reaches of Downtown," ⁵⁰ and the story of the beloved disciple Veronica, on the subject of whom Fairing's language is heated enough to have given rise to apocryphal stories of an unnatural relationship. This is all typical Pynchon, as is the accompanying disclaimer: "It is this way with sewer stories. They just are. Truth or falsity don't apply." ⁵¹ What V accomplishes here through the letter-perfect displacement and exaggeration of the narrative models is to put its finger on those urban myths that most resonate. Profane's journey underground (and Stencil's briefer jaunt) are crucial elements of their two emblematic postwar trajectories: the schlemiel on the road and the obsessed searcher on his endless quest for the mysterious woman V. In retrospect, Pynchon's comic reworking of the myths of white male culture can be seen to reveal their foundations in the imagination and to contextualize them in the narratives surrounding them. His underground is not polemical and it is not sordid; it is content to show and to laugh, and until recently it has dominated the reception of underground New York. [End Page 25]

The irony here is that Pynchon is popularly regarded and widely cited as the inventor of the legend of alligators in the New York (or any other) sewers. But what reads like Pynchonesque fiction appears to have some basis in reality, or at the very least to have been a widely-perpetrated hoax dating back to before the war. On February 10, 1935, the New York Times published an account of a seven-to-eight-foot alligator, dragged out of the sewers and clubbed to death by a group of Italian-American teenage boys on East 123rd Street. There were even police on the scene, and the corpse was removed by the Department of Sanitation, but the only remotely plausible theory was that it had slipped off a steamer from the Everglades. Pynchon's direct source was evidently Daley's The World Beneath New York, which dates the first sightings of alligators by sewer inspectors around 1935, a veritable underground colony but mostly measuring in the vicinity of only two feet long. The sightings were substantiated by the (himself) legendary Superintendent of Sewers, Teddy May, who retold the episode to Daley during the fifties. Daley (or May) appears to be at the source of the "pet alligator" explanation: purchased as babies in a prewar fad, the pets would be thrown down a sewer drain once they outgrew their aquariums. ⁵² Pynchon gave the story its poetically fitting twist of the toilet bowl flush; his version of the alligator hunting is equally more conducive to reverie than was May's straightforward account:

A few months later they were gone. Some succumbed to rat poison. Others were harassed by sewer inspectors into swimming into the trunk mains, where the Niagara-like current washed them out to sea. Some were drowned when blockages filled their secluded pipes with backwash--to the very top [a fate nearly suffered by Wright's Fred Daniels as well]. And a few were hunted down by inspectors with .22 rifles and pistols--not as part of the job, but as sport--possibly the most unusual hunting on earth, a veritable sewer safari.53

Only in the final flourish does Daley allow himself a glimpse at the symbolic potential of the image; for him, the alligators are just a novelty and a nuisance. This is curious, because, as in the anecdote of the hoboes above, Daley endows the rats with a strong sense of a threatening, organized underclass not unlike the estimation of Father Fairing:

By even conservative estimates there are, despite the rat killers, eight million rats living beneath the streets of New York today.... Nowadays, the line of [End Page 26] "no rat land" in the tunnel has been marked off at Fifty-ninth Street. It is presumed that the rats enter through the north end of the tunnel at Ninety-sixth, and that by the time they reach Fifty-ninth they are hungry and will search out the baits. ⁵⁴

There can be no mistaking the social topography implicit in the geographical barriers against the infiltration of rats from uptown. This would be the locus of a submerged racial undertone to Pynchon's mythography; it is the threat that would equally be attached to the alligators and the less recognizable underground fauna descended from it in the seventies and eighties; and it would be directly related at that time to the influx of homeless persons, many of them not invaders from uptown but the forcibly discharged wards of mental institutions, which led to the creation of a permanent underground population estimated by various New York officials at somewhere between six and twenty-five thousand. ⁵⁵

4.

The 1980 film Alligator, directed by Lewis Teague from a script by John Sayles, infuses a Pynchonesque vision of the sewers with the social consciousness of Daley's rat stories. Transplanting the New York myth to a nameless American city that mostly looks and sounds like Chicago (but was filmed in the sewers of L.A.), Sayles's script expands the New York paradigm into a tongue-in-cheek microcosm of American society. Dubbed RamYork paradigm into a tongue-in-cheek aley's rat stories. Transplanting the New York myth to a nameless American city that mostly looks and sounds like Chicago (but was filmed in the sewers It is presumed that theamous" herpetologist. The initial object of her affections does not fare so well, feeding on toxic waste, mostly the corpses of contaminated laboratory animals dumped into the sewers by the local pharmaceutical company, Slade Laboratories. Grown into a thirty-two-foot behemoth, Ramss American city that mostly looks and sounds like Chicago (but was filmed in the sive agenda. Chased out of his nest by the obsessed heroics of suspended police detective David Madison (Robert Forster), Ramón bursts through the sidewalk of the local ghetto, and, in Sayles's words, "the alligator eats its way through the whole socio-economic system." ⁵⁶ In the film as it stands, in fact, he is more selective, eating only the rich and their cronies. Along the way to his inevitable [End Page 27] showdown at the mansion of Slade (Dean Jagger), who is marrying his daughter off to Arthur Hill, the doctor responsible for developing the evil hormones, Ramon pauses on his journey out of the ghetto only to devour a roving policeman and an odious big-game hunter. Once arrived at the mansion, Rama roving policemanwedding party, swallows Hill in one gulp, and pounds Slade to a pulp with his tail, before heading back underground, his work accomplished in the world above.

As Vincent Canby was quick to point out when the film was released, Alligator makes no pretense at being more than a formula genre film; indeed, it plays the genre conventions to the hilt. ⁵⁷ As another reviewer noted, it basically had only one set: the Los Angeles sewer system. ⁵⁸ This is the key: just as the formal structure of the script was wholly grounded within the conventions of the monster movie, so was its setting wholly grounded within current metaphorics of the underground. The film is self-evidently a parody of the massively successful film to which it also owed its existence as a cheap exploitation quickie: Jaws (1977). Jaws derived its terror and its far more allegorical and free-floating ideological content from the depths of the ocean and from the big-budget effects of a quality production. Canby's language astutely suggests the connection: "Alligator is a sort of underprivileged Jaws, made by people who clearly don't have the resources to spend half a million dollars fabricating a lifelike, machine-operated, 32-foot Ramon, about people who cannot afford to vacation on Long Island, Cape Cod, Nantucket, or Martha's Vineyard." It is set underground because financially and artistically necessary--the alligator effects are primarily created by the darkness of the tunnels, whereas Bruce the shark could surface in all his mechanical glory on the sun-bathed New England coast--but also because that is where a creature of Raman's sympathies must live. Ramnn is never sentimentalized to the degree of misunderstood monsters such as King Kong or Godzilla, but the revolutionary impulse he embodies is taken as seriously as the genre around it: he is neither attractive nor legal, but his brand of blind, underground justice is brutally effective. Consequently, the wholly predictable false resolution--Ramutally effective. Consequently, the wholly iously as the genre around it: he is neither attractive nor legal, but his brastomping grounds--is simultaneously and inextricably both a genre contrivance to leave open the possibility of Alligator 2 and a straightforward enunciation of the inevitable repetition of the social processes that gave rise to the first Ramón. ⁵⁹ [End Page 28]

During the eighties, Ramón's offspring came home to nest in the New York underground, while his Midwestern-style class warfare looked more like straight racial strife the closer it got to Manhattan. Escape from New York (1981), C.H.U.D. (1984) and C.H.U.D. 2 (1989), Underground Terror (1988), Ghostbusters 2 (1989), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990), and the cult television series Beauty and the Beast (1987-1990) all imagined a non- or partially human lifeform inhabiting the world beneath New York. ⁶⁰ Most extreme, as well making the most extensive use of actual tunnel locations ("filmed entirely in and under New York City and at CHUD Studios, NYC," runs the credit), is C.H.U.D. The initials are supposed to stand for Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers, big shambling rubber outfits with glowing yellow eyes and very large teeth that make short work of their downtown victims. As it turns out, the same four letters are also stenciled on the crates of toxic waste being dumped by the city in the tunnels, standing for "Contaminated Hazard Urban Disposal." The underlying message, we may assume, is that the (underground) homeless are themselves regarded by the powers-that-be as urban disposal; like Ramrge teeth that make short work of their downtown victims. As it turns out, the same four letters are also stenciled on the crates ogator, however, the first being that the CHUDs are wholly unsympathetic, undiscriminating, and evil vehicles of death. By contrast, the movie's non-deformed "undergrounders" are uniformly Caucasian; as opposed to the mutant CHUDs, they are also distinguished as homeless cosmetically rather than physically, by virtue of a bit of charcoal smeared over their faces. ⁶¹

The human link between above- and below-ground is provided by George Cooper (John Heard), a prominent fashion photographer who has gained even greater celebrity by dropping out of sight for six months, reappearing with a story on the tunnel dwellers. He teams up with Bowery soup-kitchen operator A. J. Shepherd, aka "The Reverend" (Daniel Stern), to investigate the mysterious disappearance of his underground regulars. They are aided by Police Captain Bosch (Christopher Curry), whose wife becomes a CHUD victim before the opening credits are finished. The symbolic topography established by the use of the underground space combines progressive environmental ideology with some dubious racial politics. ⁶² The film's heroes are dedicated threshold-crossers Cooper, Shepherd, and Bosch. As in Alligator, the villains are the officials who sacrifice the welfare of the city to their own greed and misdeeds. Because [End Page 29] there remains a dwindling colony of "good" undergrounders, subjects photographed by Cooper, the ones transformed into CHUDS evidently belong to the category of those who have turned bad, the "mole people" of Seville's typology above. Conversely, the survivors, whom we meet on our first descent into the tunnels in the company of Cooper, inhabit an open, arched space not dissimilar in its aesthetic of genteel Victorian poverty to the resolutely positive community beneath Central Park in Beauty and the Beast. To round off the associations of a positive underground, the two men we meet in this vaulted space are named Victor and Hugo, one of the filmmakers' several self-conscious gestures to past influences. The sociological division between temporary and permanent homelessness, between lesser and greater separation from aboveground values, is thus troped along racial lines. The goodness of the white victims is reinforced by their high-culture resonance (Les Misérables), while their minimal makeup suggests the possibility of simple retrieval to "normal" society. The "blackness" of the CHUDs, in contrast, is biologically permanent, for their very humanity is put into question by it. Moreover, they resonate with the popular culture of The Time Machine's Morlocks, and are shown to have no chance of returning to the world above. There are in fact no easy racial or ethnic splits in homelessness in general or among underground dwellers in particular; however, the power of cultural representations of these groups, from The Planet of the Apes to Extreme Measures (1996), seems to derive from a symbolic vertical hierarchy reduced, precisely, to racial lines.

As a testimony to this pulp power, the divisive metaphorics of C.H.U.D. seem to have entered the vocabulary of the actual dwellers-below; not surprisingly, it is the horrific images that stick. On one of her tours underground, Jennifer Toth notices the word "CHUDs" scrawled on a boulder in orange spray paint and comments:

Track maintenance crews call tunnel homeless "CHUD people," for "Cannibalistic Human Underground Dwellers." "It's not all a joke," one railroad engineer insists. "We know they are there. We can see their eyes. And when you aren't looking, they'll steal your tools, your food. I had a pair of pliers right next to me once, and a few seconds after I put them down, they were gone right from my side.... And sometimes they'll even 'pipe' you," he complains, indicating a club smashing into his head, "usually to steal from you but sometimes just [End Page 30] cuz they're wacked out or scared. I usually bring an extra sandwich or two when I work on the tracks here, and I leave them around so they can take them and not get nervous and bother me. When I leave, all the sandwiches are gone, but I never see them being taken. So I wouldn't laugh at the CHUD thing," he cautioned. "They eat dogs, I know, and I'd bet my life they'd eat people." ⁶³

In the combination of tall tale and bona fide fear exhibited by the maintenance crews, we find the register of Wright's "Man Who Lived Underground"--the vanishing tools and food, the unseen assailant--fully meshed with the exploitative fears voiced in C.H.U.D. Where Ramfind the register Jaws, personified a social force, the CHUDs are individualized, the trope of cannibalism a sign that their alienness is frightening and dangerous precisely because they remain somehow human in spite of it. ⁶⁴

It is on the question of the humanity of the otherworld dweller that the exploitation horror genre of C.H.U.D. crosses the path of the fantasy/romance discourse of Beauty and the Beast. This popular TV series self-consciously presented itself [End Page 31] as a modern-day fairytale; the pilot episode opens on the words "once upon a time," and introduces one Catherine (Linda Hamilton), an East Side debutante dissatisfied with the emptiness of her life. The coincidences of "fate" will give her another chance when a pimp mistakes her for one of his prostitutes, slashes her face, and leaves her for dead in Central Park. She awakens, eyes bandaged, in the care of Vincent (Ron Perlman), a beast-man who is human in every way except for an extra dollop of empathetic psychic powers, and face makeup that amounts to a kinder, gentler, and more feline version of John Chambers's Planet of the Apes masks. Beauty and the Beast imagines tunnel society as the Otherworld of medieval romance: a different, older, probably better alternative to the crude world above. ⁶⁵

In conception, it is quite similar to the self-image of Ali M.'s community beneath Grand Central Station, except transplanted to the more pastoral associations of Central Park. It is a self-contained society--the soundtrack of every scene underground is punctuated with tapping on pipes, the sounds of communication in underground code. ⁶⁶ The very presence and toleration of Vincent testify to this world's adherence to an ideology of racial equality; for he is the metaphorical stand-in for a homeless community generally figured in the popular imagination as African-American (none of whom can be glimpsed among the original, Caucasian community of Beauty and the Beast). As Vincent explains to Catherine: "There's a whole world of tunnels and chambers that most people don't even know exist. There are no maps to where we are. It's a forgotten world, but it's warm and safe and we have all we need, so we live here and we try to live as well as we can and we take care of each other. It's our city, down here." Half of this statement is quite close to the discourse of the tunnel dwellers interviewed by Margaret Morton and Jennifer Toth, as well as to Edmund Love's description of his fifties vagrants.

There remains a crucial distinction even from the most utopian rhetoric of the tunnel dwellers. Even Bernard, an eloquent defender of the underground way of life, concedes that living underground ceases to be a viable or dignified life when judged by aboveground standards: "I mean food really is our least problem here--it's just that one must not have false pride when it comes to going and getting." ⁶⁷ Ali M. expresses the same problem, although he frames it as an [End Page 32] issue of otherness and prejudice: "You probably won't be able to see things the way we see them because of your conditioning.... Take care to open your mind as much as possible and recognize that your eyes physically can't see what we see. It takes weeks for eyes to adjust to the darkness." ⁶⁸ The Otherworld of Beauty and the Beast, in contrast, is immediately "visible" to the aboveground viewer, wholly aestheticized in the soft browns and oranges that match the overcrowded Victorian medievalist decor of the multi-levelled library that houses Vincent and his adoptive father. The show itself signals its mythic location when Vincent begins reading to Catherine from Great Expectations. Not only the sentimentalized Victoriana now associated with Dickens, but the structure of the child terrified by the criminal who will become his benefactor gives a nostalgic glow to the kernel of reality that some people do indeed manage somehow to lead a semblance of normal lives under conditions of extreme poverty and hardship.

The subtext of the modern update of the fairytale becomes evident when Vincent removes Catherine's bandages, sign that her eyes have adjusted; she is now scarred, marked by her time underground. They are linked, but their love remains forbidden. Here again, generic conventions coincide with the underlying social and racial topography: the bond between them, and what makes it unique, is the impossibility of consummating their love; this love is just as clearly coded as one of class and racial miscegenation:

"I've seen your world. There's no place for me in it. I know what I am. Your world is filled with frightened people, and I remind them of what they're most afraid of."

"Their own ignorance."

"Their aloneness."

The pop-psychological analysis of knee-jerk reactions to poverty and homelessness as other is self-evident in this exchange; what is noteworthy is how the analysis psychologizes a social problem: Vincent will wait underground nobly (and hopelessly) for the time when each and every surface dweller has matured enough to face his or her own problems. It is instructive to compare the romantic anti-capitalism of Beauty and the Beast with the racist social satire of C.H.U.D.: in the former, race and class identity are distinguished as the primary [End Page 33] causes of social conflict, only to be reduced to the level of individual awareness; in the latter, the social critique remains on a material level, but must thereby jettison any direct analysis of class or racial difference. It is a trade-off governed by generic choices--fantasy/romance versus science fiction/horror--that are set underground in a space that mobilizes social anxiety while precluding comprehensive insight into the causes of that anxiety.

The longed-for relationship of equality is available in fantasy/romance, but only when sublimated in the dreamworld of "once upon a time." The unabashed romanticism of this vision of underground utopia is perfectly expressed in the title sequence of the subsequent episodes. First, we hear Vincent's voice over a montage of aerial shots of Times Square and midtown Manhattan: "This is where the wealthy and the powerful rule. It is her world, a world apart from mine. Her name is Catherine." The montage zooms in to images of Catherine, and the voice-over concludes its description of her with the words, "She would change my life, forever," spoken over a bridging shot of Catherine walking over a subway grating. The camera cuts to a shot also used under the end-credits--a free-standing steel spiral staircase with a light glowing far below--and Catherine's voice continues over a montage of Vincent in his underground library: "He comes from a secret place below the city streets, hiding his face from strangers, from hate and harm. He brought me there to save my life and now, wherever I go, he is with me in spirit, for we have a bond stronger than friendship or love. Although we cannot be together, we will never, ever, be apart." While the underground vision of the science-fiction/horror film provides the fantasy of violent action against injustice but at the cost of individual agency, the fantasy/romance holds forth a dream of the wholesale elimination of conflict, but only as an isolated monad.

Two examples in the comic vein strike parallel, if more self-conscious attitudes to the models of C.H.U.D. and Beauty and the Beast. In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, radioactive sewer ooze creates both the eponymous superheroes Donatello, Leonardo, Raphael, and Botticelli and the arch-villain sewer rat Shredder. According to the codes of comedy, passage through the underworld simply amplifies to comic proportions whatever qualities one already possessed. Since the generic model remains the romance, the underground experience is [End Page 34] individualized, and the conflict enunciated as one between good and evil, worked through on the level of a personal vendetta. In Ghostbusters II, by contrast, we find ourselves in a horror comedy, and conflict is consequently on the macroscopic level: it comes from beyond in the figure of the Carpathian Vigo, a personification of evil; and from below, in the "psychomagnotheric" river of sewer ooze that has distilled the bad vibes from above into a strange brew ready to explode on New Year's Eve. While Vigo could be seen vaguely to represent a threat of external foreignness (one of the Ghostbusters does joke with the Eastern European henchman that he is unlikely to get a green card if he doesn't reform his behavior) and the ooze to represent the danger of domestic unrest, Ghostbusters 2 resolutely portrays the river as a comically exaggerated version of individual irritation rather than a social force on the order of Ramoes joke wit ⁶⁹

The film's iconography is rooted in New York history rather than in class or racial conflict. The river of ooze is first discovered running through the abandoned 1870 tunnel of Alfred Beach's pneumatic subway, a favorite item of New York trivia; walking through a shut-down train tunnel, the Ghostbusters are nearly run down by the phantom of the old New York Central, derailed in the twenties. When Vigo threatens to coat the city in negative ooze and release all of its ghosts, the heroes have only one recourse: transform the goo into feel-good Jello through a surfeit of positive emotions. Only one symbol is deemed potent enough to do the job. Just as in the Planet of the Apes series, where the subway and the Statue of Liberty personify the symbolic extremes of the city, so here Lady Liberty strides up Broadway to the cheers of the gathered throngs to defeat the evil entrenched uptown beneath the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The fact that one of the four Ghostbusters is African-American underlines the message of both this film and the Ninja Turtles: in a Manichean world of good and evil all other differences pale into insignificance. If we are searching for an underlying message of class struggle, there is at most a small dollop of populism to be found in the symbolic topography. The final joke of the movie is that the Ghostbusters' victory over bad vibes leaves even the villainous foreigner Vigo feeling good about everything and loving his neighbor--sufficient punishment, apparently, for any self-respecting New Yorker. [End Page 35]

5.

It is tempting to read into these comedies a movement away from the contradictory but highly charged material that dominated images of underground New York from The Planet of the Apes to Beauty and the Beast. Underground New York in the nineties has been portrayed either with labored realism or as total fantasy. Matt Ruff's recent novel, Sewer, Gas & Electric: The Public Works Trilogy, conflates the metaphorical systems of Jaws and Alligator within an expanded vision of Pynchon's New York sewers. ⁷⁰ It is the year 2023; the Alligator Patrol is now the Zoological Bureau of the Department of Sewers, a genuinely paramilitary force armed to the teeth in a toxic underworld filled with mutant life forms, the most prominent of which is a giant, "alternative-environment-adapted" great white shark that has been christened Meisterbrau so as not to alarm the media. Ruff is upfront about his sources, using an epigraph from Daley and having his commandoes allude to "that guy who nobody was allowed to take his picture." But Meisterbrau is never supposed to do more than provide some laughs and thrills before making a dramatic entrance at just the right juncture of the plot beneath the Tower of Babel, a skyscraper being erected by a latter-day Donald Trump over the razed ground of what was once Harlem. Sewer, Gas & Electric is by no means lacking in social content centered around the problem of race relations: a major component of its future vision is the elimination of the world's black population by a deadly virus in order to replace it with Artificial Servants. One of the sole survivors of the epidemic, Philo Dufresne, captains a polka-dotted nuclear submarine on unlikely sabotage missions extrapolated from contemporary Greenpeace junkets. When the "Yabba-Dabba-Doo" visits New York, it employs an underwater submarine dock built by the lunatic fringe to welcome invading Nazis. Unlike visions of the previous decades, however, Ruff's novel plays the social charge of its underground images as farce: "Guessing future history is a losing game, and anyway not as much fun as just making it all up." ⁷¹

There is a sense, strangely enough, that a moment of crisis has passed. One Transit Authority official has placed the beginning of tunnel living in the seventies, the peak of the "problem" in 1989. In 1990, the Authority's homeless outreach program was dramatically stepped-up, asserting that it transferred [End Page 36] over seven thousand underground homeless to shelters in 1990 and another four thousand during the first third of 1991. ⁷² This has been paralleled by a new investment in the subways and the enormous increase in police presence all over the city under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. At the same time, the most significant change in representation of the underground has been the simultaneous increase in interest and in knowledge. As late as 1991, an authority on the city such as Robert Sullivan could still write about the situation, like Daley, as if it remained a novelty. ⁷³ The appearance of Toth's journalistic accounts and Morton's ethnographic study has given a new materiality to what in the seventies and eighties remained shrouded in mystery and ignorance. ⁷⁴ Their matter-of-fact reportage and compassionate representation of the underground communities imparts an unmistakable sense of permanence to the situation. The underground homeless--and by ongoing and inevitable metaphorical extension the homeless and the underclasses as a whole--are neither going to go away, nor are they going to start a revolution in the streets. ⁷⁵

Borrowing the generic conventions of journalism and of ethnographic writing in attempts faithfully to represent the uniqueness, variety, and humanity of the underground communities, Toth and Morton have no choice but also to follow the trajectory of their generic narratives. Toth always maintains a critical distance and frames her accounts of interviews with different communities and individuals by including information: the history of underground communities, the history of the New York homeless, the demographics of the communities, the responses and attitudes of law enforcement and the homeless outreach programs. She speaks, in the best tradition of descents into the abyss of poverty, of the nightmares she has had about the conditions below, of the violence, the drugs, the loss of life. She also remains aware of her own motivation in making a descent that was both physically and mentally dangerous:

Very early on, I recognized that they gave me more than I could give them.... They showed me that, even in the worst conditions, people can care for each other over themselves. But some also showed me how they can extinguish whatever hope they have and chances they are given.... They took from me unrelenting optimism. At times, they took my happiness. They brought an emptiness to my adventure, turning a great story into a human one that I might never put to rest. ⁷⁶ [End Page 37]

Toth shows herself struggling with the same liberal framework that was unselfconsciously employed in Beauty and the Beast. But for Toth the moment of insight comes when she finds herself losing her objectivity, beginning to "interfere with their behavior." ⁷⁷ She is nearly killed.

The Mole People remains an account of social outrage; it states its hope to eliminate an aberrant condition in society, but does not seem particularly convinced that it will happen; as such, it borders on exploitative sensationalism just as its turn-of-the-century London predecessors did. Morton's ethnographic study almost wholly eschews authorial intervention; the book is composed of photographs interspersed with the directly transcribed words of the dwellers of a single tunnel. It is a site-specific study, to such a degree that Morton is evidently at work on a CD-ROM version of the tunnel in which, "The user 'walks' through the tunnel using a mouse, shining a computerized flashlight into the darkness." ⁷⁸ The conventions of ethnography are quite apparent in the book's conclusion: first comes a list of those of the tribe who have been reassimilated, leaving the tunnel, then a list of those who remain, followed by the almost wistful notice that the tribe itself is at risk of vanishing: "Most of the entrances have been padlocked or welded shut by Amtrak police. Many long-term residents have been informed they are trespassing and have been threatened with arrest. As this book goes to press, the tunnel residents have been notified that eviction is imminent." ⁷⁹ It is well apparent that both Toth and Morton have reflected a great deal about questions of genre and presentation, but both remain painfully aware of the combination of voyeuristic curiosity and repulsion that coexists with the humanitarian impulse. ⁸⁰

The same combination, and the same assertion of the tunnel dweller as a creature of reality rather than fantasy is evident in the fictional garb of George Dawes Green's thriller, The Caveman's Valentine (1994), which describes, in the words of one reviewer, "the logical extreme in... the downwardly mobile" trend in private eyes. ⁸¹ Romulus Ledbetter is an African-American Juilliard graduate who now inhabits a cave in Inwood Park in Upper Manhattan, where he has installed a scavenged Zenith TV that gives him the News, primarily the doings of Cornelius Stuyvesant, who is bombarding the city with Y-rays from the Chrysler Building. Green does not render his protagonist with the exuberant [End Page 38] Pynchonesque excess of Ruff's novel; this is a traditional crime drama, and Ledbetter is presented as much as is possible on his own terms, half-lucid, half-crazy, but as self-aware and contradictory as Philip Marlowe ever was. To be sure, even more than Toth's and Morton's studies, The Caveman's Valentine uses the novelty of the underground set-up as a hook for the otherwise conventional murder-mystery plot, but there is no mistaking the intent of realism at the book's core; Ledbetter's alienation places him firmly in the tradition of Wright's Daniels and Ellison's invisible man.

Two further examples show the degree to which the underground community has now hit the cultural mainstream: Joel Swerdlow's February 1997 feature article, "Under New York," in National Geographic, and Michael Apted's 1996 thriller Extreme Measures. An encyclopaedic update of Granick's classic, Swerdlow's article, accompanied by Bob Sacha's photographs, combines geology, archaeology, sandhog lore, and computer-generated maps of the technological underground with an ethnographic report on the underground homeless: the entire ecosystem is painstakingly and beautifully profiled as a fascinatingly alien culture. Readers' letters in response to the article ran the gamut from admiration at the computer graphics to a query about the pneumatic postal system to memories of an infernal subway ride to an objection by the president of Amtrak's Northeast Corridor service over the "characterization of Amtrak's handling of the homeless population in one of our rail tunnels." In contrast to Morton's concern with the vanishing tribe, Swerdlow's article takes even more distance from its subject, placing the reported demise of life beneath New York ("Efforts citywide have reduced the underground homeless from 5,500 to 1,000") in the context of the myriad other activities that continue to lay claim to the same space and resources.

As "Under New York" testifies to the current documentability of the world of the tunnels, Extreme Measures demonstrates its availability less as a source of danger than as a potent means for representing the ethical dilemmas of an aboveground topic such as medical research. Hugh Grant plays Guy Luthan, a rising young surgeon at Gramercy Hospital who stumbles on a scheme for squirreling hospitalized homeless persons into a nearby research facility where they become test subjects for fatal experiments on their spinal columns. [End Page 39] Apted's film stages its central premise in the opening sequence, where Luthan chooses to save an injured cop over the crack addict who shot him. The rest of the film will juggle the issue of his liberal guilt over the decision with the practical truth that the policeman who owes him a favor because of that choice is around to save his neck at the end of the film.

In between, Luthan finds himself driven underground, stripped of his credentials, his good name, and his future by the powers behind the illegal research, primarily Dr. Lawrence Myrick (Gene Hackman). The central episode depicts Guy's desperate descent into the alien world of the underground community under Grand Central Station, closely and carefully modeled on the account in Toth. The banging pipes are there, along with the infirmary, the nomenclature of "The Condos," and the community spirit: "This is our home. We have rules. Do you think we're keeping ourselves healthy so you can kill us one by one?" In its pulp fashion, the movie allegorizes the homeless situation and a series of possible responses to it. Always the good liberal, Luthan insists on carrying the escaped lab victim to a hospital, thereby bringing the problem to the surface, as it were. Once the pair are ambushed by misguided FBI and NYPD agents, however, the question changes into whether the issue can be properly addressed and solved, or if it will be sidelined by perverted principles and the exigencies of capital, the quick fix solution of shelters versus longterm social change.

More than is usual in such popular genre material, Extreme Measures mirrors the above-ground protagonist Luthan's psychological situation with the material circumstances of the homeless, who are of various races and ethnicities. His path in the film describes a journey underground that is completed when he awakes in a hospital bed, paralyzed. Myrick appears to present the ethical dilemma in suitably pulp terms: would he sacrifice those homeless people in order to regain the use of his limbs: "What would it be worth to go back to your own life?" The final stage of life underground is represented as total paralysis. It is a potent image as far as it goes, and bespeaks a serious ethical intent on the part of the filmmakers. But at the same time, this is the moment when the generic requirements of closure take over. Luthan discovers that he is drugged rather than paralyzed, Myrick tries to murder him, and the movie quickly devolves into a mad scientist denouement. The shootout stops long enough for [End Page 40] Myrick to pose the question one more time, and for Guy to make the correct response: "You choose for them and you cannot do that, because you're a doctor and you took an oath." Unfortunately, given the unusual potential for a moral decision, the exchange is followed by the necessity that Luthan shoot Myrick dead, a development which rather diminishes the scope of the decision. The final sequence shows Luthan's life returned to normal. He is met by Myrick's wife, who hands him the data from the research, saying to him, "I believe there's hope in this package. Perhaps you could do it... the right way." This is underground New York in the nineties, reasserting the lesson of Taylor, Brent, and the New York subway on the planet of the apes: the underground recurs as a setting for conflict because it stages social problems and social fears with a visceral power unmatched over the last couple of decades; however, it is a setting within which nothing can be solved.

Never before has the underground held quite such a fascination over the popular imagination. Think merely of the number of crucial underground sequences or premises in recent Hollywood blockbusters (a lion's share set in New York); a list that requires updating with surprising frequency: the New York subways where the deceased Patrick Swayze learns his trade in Ghost (1990); the run-off tunnels where Richard Kimble first encounters his pursuer, the U.S. Marshal, restaging Les Misérables, in The Fugitive (1993); the runaway Los Angeles subway train in Speed (1994); the New York subway and the city water aqueduct in Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995), not to mention the entrails of the high-rise in the first installment and of the airport in the second, of which an underground "caretaker" poses extensive maps; the New York subway in The Money Train (1996); a 1996 episode of the cult-TV series, The X-Files, "The Host," concerning a mutant half-human/half-tapeworm spawned by Chernobyl and lurking in the sewers of Newark, New Jersey; homeless communities beneath Chicago in Primal Fear (1996) and beneath L.A.'s McArthur Park in Volcano (1997); the Channel Tunnel in Mission: Impossible (1996); New York's Holland Tunnel in Daylight (1996); the underground headquarters hidden somewhere near Holland Tunnel in Men in Black (1997); the catacombs under Rome in Double Team (1997); the utility pipe bowels of Moscow in The Saint (1997); the New York sewers in Mimic (1997); the New York subway in the ABC-TV remake of The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 (1998) and in the HBO omnibus film Subway Stories [End Page 41] (1997), which had its premiere showing outdoors in midtown Manhattan's Bryant Park; the Washington Metro in the climax of The Jackal (1997); the New York subway as the Devil's preferred mode of transportation in The Devil's Advocate (1997), and as a setting of plot-resolving violence in the contemporary remake of Great Expectations (1998)--and every reader I'm sure has more to add to these. There is also the spate of bestselling novels: the tunnels of the London Underground in Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine's King Solomon's Carpet (1991); the flooded tunnels under Chicago in Sara Paretsky's Tunnel Vision (1995); the tunnels under New York in Patricia Cornwell's From Potter's Field (1995); the New York subway in Michael Daly's Under Ground (1995), John Skipp and Craig Spector's The Light at the End (1996), and William R. Dantz's Nine Levels Down (1997); the Vietnam veteran who works off his trauma by digging a complex tunnel network beneath his Midwestern town in Joseph Flynn's Digger (1997); the Vietnam veterans who work off their trauma in the old city beneath Seattle in Rob Ryan's Underdogs (1999); the fantastic otherworld of the disenfranchised beneath London in Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere (1997) and in another guise in Tobias Hill's Underground (1999). In all of these popular representations, the underground appears, as it often did in the nineteenth century, as an excuse for spectacular realism, a combination of the grittily material with the conceptually fantastic. ⁸² In Victorian London, where we find the majority of such plays and novels, they are evidently responding to the ambivalent novelty of the new underground constructions: the Thames Tunnel, the underground railway, the Thames Embankment; in Paris, we find a similar phenomenon around the reconstructed sewers, the quarries and catacombs, and, of course, the bowels of the Opera.

I submit that the underground is being newly mobilized in response to a different novelty. In the nineteenth century, the ambivalence was toward the contamination of one space with the other, of ways of using the underground without being stuck in it, of dealing with the classes mingling in the close quarters of industrial London without becoming intertwined. At the end of the twentieth-century, it is the growing sense of the permanence of the underground that has become novel. Back then, underground sites always served only as thresholds, spaces of transport and transition; the shock of recognition today comes from the living image of the nineteenth-century fantasies of [End Page 42] permanent underground communities. At the same time, it is significant that the acceptance of the reality of underground populations in popular culture of the nineties was paralleled by the practical elimination of that reality by New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's crime-fighting strategies: a policy of zero tolerance and a massive increase in the numbers of law enforcement officers. Indeed, the dramatic drop in New York crime rates led to praise of the Republican Mayor even from liberal opponents. The proliferation of images of the "mole people" is also paralleled by another proliferation: of portrayals of "normal" and "well-adjusted" African-Americans, Hispanics and other minorities everywhere from movies to television to advertising. Once the "bad" underground dwellers have been safely localized and restricted to the deep underground tunnels of the pulp version of the urban underworld, the "good" underground dwellers can be integrated in the color-blind images of the no-place that is nineties utopian suburbia. The 1972 Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, produced amidst the Watts riots and the height of popularity of the blaxploitation movie, climaxed in a full-scale race revolution; the closest equivalent in the nineties, Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days, produced amidst the Rodney King riots, concludes hopefully in the arrest of the criminally racist officers by the honest, white Chief of Police, and the redemption of the white underworld figure, Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes), by Angela Bassett's tough, gainfully employed, family-oriented, and African-American Mace. The roles are somewhat more complicated and the racial politics more explicit, but we are very close to another Beauty and the Beast, except that this time the mismatched couple is allowed to get together and live in the world above.

It is noteworthy, however, that we see few if any fictions set in the most rapidly growing type of underground space, the middle-class networks of shops and passages now proliferating beneath cities such as Chicago, Toronto, or Montreal. These are urban spaces that attempt to duplicate suburbia under the inner city, implicitly or explicitly excluding the homeless and the poor from their controlled spaces--literal expressions of the metaphorical underground of the suburban mall. ⁸³ Instead, we are bombarded on all sides with ever more realistic images of the dark underground, which stand in symbolically for the infernal elements of society and the city, even as the meanings of that inferno remain ever subject to change. Subterranean New York continues to authorize the [End Page 43] portrayal of poverty and conflict, emblematic of the function of underground space as a vital location for the definition of the fears and failings of the society it represents, and hence also of the positive desires of that same society. Yet if underground space is indeed becoming more and more sanitized and suburbanized, one cannot help but suppose that the current obsession with its dark version is at once a denial of where conflict may at this point actually be located, and a nostalgia for a non-existent Victorian past when it would have been possible to localize, enclose, and then experience the edifying effects of pity and fear for an undesirable urban underworld from the safely distant vantage point of far above it.

David L. Pike is Assistant Professor of Literature and Film at American University. He is author of Passage Through Hell: Modernist Descents, Medieval Underworlds (Cornell University Press, 1997), and is currently completing a book on underground space in London and Paris.

List of Films and Television Shows Cited

(Listed by date of production, country of production when not the United States, and film director or television network.)

Metropolis (Germany, 1926-27, Fritz Lang)
Force of Evil (1948, Abraham Polonsky)
Pick-up on South Street (1953, Samuel Fuller)
Guys and Dolls (1955, Joseph L. Mankiewicz)
While the City Sleeps (1956, Fritz Lang)
The Honeymooners (1955-56, TV series, 39 episodes)
The Time Machine (1960, George Pal)
Dutchman (UK, 1966, Anthony Harvey)
The Planet of the Apes (1967, Franklin J. Schaffner)
Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970, Ted Post)
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972, J. Lee Thompson)
The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 (1974, Joseph Sargent)
Jaws (1977, Steven Spielberg)
The Warriors (1979, Walter Hill)
Alligator (1980, Lewis Teague)
Escape from New York (1981, John Carpenter)
Style Wars (1982, Tony Silver and Henry Chalifant)
The Rats / Deadly Eyes (1982, Robert Clouse)
Mutant (1983, John 'Bud' Cardos)
Wild Style (1983, Charles Ahearn)
Beat Street (1984, Stan Latham)
C.H.U.D. (1984, Douglas Cheek)
Subway (France, 1985, Luc Besson)
Transmutations / Underworld (1985, George Pavlov)
Turk 182! (1985, Bob Clark)
Beauty and the Beast (1987-1990; CBS TV series, pilot plus nineteen episodes)
Die Hard (1988, John McTiernan)
Underground Terror (1988, James McCalmont)
C.H.U.D. 2 (1989, David Irving)
Ghostbusters 2 (1989, Ivan Reitman)
Alligator 2: The Mutation (1990, Jon Hess)
Die Hard 2 (1990, Renny Harlin)
Ghost (1990, Jerry Zucker)
Jacob's Ladder (1990, Adrian Lyne)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990, Steve Barron)
The Fisher King (1991, Terry Gilliam)
Batman Returns (1992, Tim Burton)
The Fugitive (1993, Andrew Davies)
Speed (1994, Jan de Bont)
Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995, John McTiernan)
Mission Impossible (1995, Brian De Palma)
Money Train (1995, Joseph Ruben)
Strange Days (1995, Kathryn Bigelow)
Daylight (1996, Rob Cohen)
Extreme Measures (1996, Michael Apted)
Primal Fear (1996, Gregory Hoblit)
The X-Files, "The Host" (1996, Fox-TV series episode)
The Devil's Advocate (1997, Taylor Hackford)
Double Team (1997, Tsui Hark)
The Jackal (1997, Michael Caton-Jones)
Men in Black (1997, Barry Sonnenfeld)
Mimic (1997, Guillermo del Toro)
The Saint (1997, Phillip Noyce)
Subway Stories (1997, HBO omnibus film)
Volcano (1997, Mick Jackson)
Great Expectations (1998, Alfonso Cuarn)
The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 (1998, ABC-TV movie, Felix Enriquez Alcala)

Notes

1. See Michael Atkinson's discussion of the pulp radicality of the films' racial politics, "Son of APES," Film Comment 31:5 (Sept.-Oct. 1995): 62-66. For an in-depth look at the films' reception in terms of allegories of race relations, and the subsequent use of the "planet of the apes" epithet to describe white (and, less frequently, black) fantasies of black dominance, see Eric Greene, "Planet of the Apes" as American Myth: Race and Politics in the Films and Television Series (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1996), esp. 1-20 and 176-79. Surprisingly, considering Greene's focus, for example, on the Watts riots as subtext for the fourth film, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972), he does not consider the spatial resonance of the pop cultural imagery in the series.

2. On the central polarization of subway and skyscraper, both in their material development and in their status as cultural icons, see Michael W. Brooks, Subway City: Riding the Trains, Reading New York (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1997),106-39. Film noir, with its stress on urban underground spaces both metaphorical and physical, is a key moment in this development within postwar representations of New York. The spectacular final descent of Joe Morse (John Garfield) to the banks of the Hudson beneath the George Washington Bridge and the corpse of his brother in Force of Evil (1948) charts the metaphorics onto the topography of Manhattan. Fifties noir such as Pick-up on South Street (1953) and While the City Sleeps (1956) staged key sequences in the subway tunnels themselves.

3. Harry Granick, Underneath New York (1947; New York: Fordham University Press, 1991), 7. One thread of the New York underground that is beyond the scope of this article is the lives of those who work underground but live on the surface, primarily the tunnel diggers, or sandhogs. This tradition dates back at least to Theodore Dreiser's 1927 short story, "The Tunnel," based on the 1870s disaster during the excavation of a tunnel under the Hudson. The key popular version is the sandhog character played by Art Carney in the fifties sitcom, "The Honeymooners." Also of interest are Jimmy Breslin's best-selling novel Table Money (1986) and Thomas Kelly's recent thriller, Payback (1996), but this more realistic and working-class underground has not had the same popular culture allure as the more lurid or sensational aspects.

4. Jim Dwyer, Subway Lives: 24 Hours in the Life of the New York City Subway (New York: Crown, 1991), 232-40; see also Brooks, 190-205.

5. As pop artist Claes Oldenburg put it in New York magazine in 1974, "You're standing there in the station, everything is gray and gloomy, and all of a sudden one of those graffiti trains slides in and brightens the place like a big bouquet from Latin America. At first it seems anarchical--makes you wonder if the subways are working properly. Then you get used to it. The city is like a newspaper anyway, so it's natural to see writing all over the place" (qtd. Dwyer, 235). The comparison to Latin America underlines Oldenburg's desire to see graffiti as a third-world import to liven up the drabness of middle-American life; the comparison of New York to a newspaper stresses an intellectual attention to the lived space of the city as itself a sign-system.

6. Quoted in Dwyer, 235.

7. For films dealing more directly with the graffiti scene, see Wild Style, Style Wars, and the more commercial Beat Street. Turk 182! is a good example of the ways in which the dissident image of the graffiti artist could be mobilized within a traditionally liberal narrative of social injustice. My thanks to Christina Glengary for these references.

8. Lest we mistake this for reality, however, there is a note in the credits that warns us that "The Transit Authority did not tender technical advice and assistance." To no avail, for the movie entered real life nonetheless: Dwyer reports that "for more than a decade, no transit planner dared schedule a train leaving Pelham at 1:23, morning or night. ... [T]here is no shortage of nuts with strong appreciation for literary landmarks in New York" (44).

9. As Brooks observes, the novel is "a modern re-creation of Xenophon's Anabasis" (210); as in its classical counterpart, its structure is quite simply the problem of anabasis, a going up, the counterpart of the katabasis, or descent.

10. Edmund Love, Subways Are for Sleeping (London: Victor Gollancz, 1958); Robert Daley, The World Beneath the City (Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott, 1959), 201.

11. Book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green; music by Jule Styne; directed and choreographed by Michael Kidd.

12. Love, 171.

13. John McClain, "Musical Lacks Magic," New York Journal American 28 (December 1961): 136.

14. Love, 15.

15. Love, 13.

16. Daley, 201.

17. Daley, 152-53.

18. Daley, 153.

19. Granick, 7.

20. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (London: Oxford, 1975), 42-3.

21. Fussell, 123.

22. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934), 70; see also Rosalind Williams, Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination (1990; Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 1-21.

23. See also here Benson Bobrick, Labyrinths of Iron: Subways in History, Myth, Art, Technology, and War (1981; New York: Henry Holt, 1994), 75-86.

24. See Tom Mangold and John Penycate, The Tunnels of Cu Chi (New York: Random House, 1985), and Tunnel Warfare (New York: Bantam, 1987).

25. Margaret Morton, The Tunnel: The Underground Homeless of New York City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 97. The same connection between Manhattan tunnels and Vietnam appeared in fictional garb in the 1990 film Jacob's Ladder.

26. Qtd. in Jennifer Toth, The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1993), 14.

27. Morton, 6, 17.

28. Toth, 31.

29. Toth, 192.

30. Toth, 27.

31. Toth, 165-68.

32. Toth, 196.

33. Toth, 21.

34. Michael Fabre, The World of Richard Wright (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985), 93-94.

35. Wright first wrote "The Man Who Lived Underground" as a short novel of around 150 pages, but does not appear to have been averse to the radically shortened published version (Fabre, 94-95).

36. Richard Wright, "The Man Who Lived Underground," 1944; rpt. in Eight Men (New York: Pyramid, 1969), 22-74, this citation, 50.

37. Morton, 15.

38. Wright, 74.

39. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952; New York: Vintage, 1972), 6.

40. Ellison, 559.

41. For a general analysis of African-American representations of the New York subway, see Brooks, 183-89.

42. Ellison, 565.

43. Ellison, 565.

44. Ellison, 568.

45. This argument was taken to its logical conclusion perhaps by Amiri Baraka in his controversial short play Dutchman (1964, adapted for British television in 1966), where an encounter in the New York subway between a seductive white woman and an apparently assimilated, middle-class black man explodes into an archetypal and tragic episode of gender and racial warfare.

46. Thomas Pynchon, V (1963; New York: Bantam, 1964), 99.

47. Pynchon, 101.

48. Pynchon, 105-6.

49. Pynchon, 106.

50. Pynchon, 107.

51. Pynchon, 108.

52. Daley, 188.

53. Daley, 189.

54. Daley, 151.

55. Toth, 39.

56. David Chute, "John Sayles: Designated Writer," Film Comment 17 (May/June 1981): 54-9, this citation, 58.

57. Vincent Canby, "Long in the Tooth," The New York Times (June 5, 1981): C12:3.

58. Carrie Rickey, "On the Loose: Which Way is Up?" The Village Voice (June 17-23, 1981): 46.

59. The remake did indeed surface in 1990 as Alligator 2: The Mutation, set in a Southeastern coastal town. It takes a middle-of-the-road approach, attempting neither realism nor parody, however; it works neither as pulp nor as serious drama, and finishes up like a mediocre Jaws, with the final showdown on the surface of a lake.

60. Some other films of underground sewer mutations not explicitly set in New York include: The Rats (aka Deadly Eyes; 1982); Mutant (1983), set in "Goodland"; Transmutations (aka Underworld; 1985).

61. A similar dichotomy is evident in John Carpenter's influential Escape from New York, in which the date is 1997 and the island has been sealed off as a maximum security prison. If we take Manhattan (shown almost entirely at night, and filmed in fact mostly in St. Louis) as an underground space, the various factions of prisoners, with their codes, hierarchies, and territories, form the "normal" layer of subterranean society. Underneath this track society live the "Crazies," scarcely glimpsed cannibalistic degenerates who come up from the tunnels at night to feed.

62. In this respect, the moviemakers' tribute to the glowing eyes and rubber suits of the Morlocks in George Pal's 1960 adaptation of H.G. Wells's The Time Machine is perfectly apt: Wells's Darwinian model of class devolution (even in the depoliticized MGM version) brought a strong racial charge to its vertically segregated society of meek, light-skinned Eloi and cannibalistic, dark-skinned, and bestial Morlocks.

63. Toth, 74.

64. In an article on The Time Machine, Kathryn Hume argues in a similar vein that the suspected cannibalism of the Morlocks is the key to the novel's anxieties about "power, size and gender" ("Eat or Be Eaten: H. G. Wells's Time Machine," Philological Quarterly 69:2 [Spring 1990]: 233-51).

65. It is comparable in this to the Arthurian world created by the traumatized imagination of Henry Sagan/Parry (Robin Williams) in Terry Gilliam's The Fisher King (1991). After his wife is killed in a shooting spree at a yuppie club, college professor Sagan becomes Parry, moves into a sub-basement boiler room, and undertakes a quest for the Holy Grail involving Jack Lucas (Jeff Bridges), whose hate-radio program had inspired the massacre. Parry's medieval world, too, is grounded in Central Park, but because it is a world based in hallucination, Gilliam nimbly sidesteps any confrontation with the reality of homelessness. His critique dwells solely in the aboveground world of eighties capitalism; whence its ability successfully to integrate its protagonists in a concluding vision of a better version of the same.

66. A similar code was apparently used by the community beneath Grand Central Station: "J.C. stops and taps on a thick pipe with a heavy stick lying nearby, and we wait for a moment until answering taps arrive before moving forward again. The pipes begin to clatter with new tapping, and more tapping, until it sounds like a tin cavalry. 'That's Junior,' J.C. laughs. 'He thinks he can bang out real messages on the pipes' (194). It is not clear whether fiction preceded reality or vice versa, or whether the resemblance is sheer coincidence.

67. Morton, 12.

68. Toth, 195.

69. Batman Returns (1992) makes a similarly humorous use of the underground myths of New York in its vision of Gotham City: the Penguin's criminal mind apparently originated in the trauma of having been flushed down the sewers as a child.

70. Matt Ruff, Sewer, Gas & Electric: The Public Works Trilogy (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997).

71. Ruff, xi. Compare, for example, with Madison Smartt Bell's 1985 novel, Waiting for the End of the World, an apocalyptic account of a scheme by domestic terrorists to detonate an atomic device in the tunnels far beneath Times Square that eerily predicted aspects of both the Oklahoma City and the World Trade Center bombings. The central protagonist, Larkin, a barely functional Brooklyn artist, possesses identifiable traits of underground dwellers, both in the Dostoyevskian mode (including his friend, Arkady, an Orthodox Russian mystic) and in contemporary garb: he is epileptic, borderline insane, addicted to alcohol and heroin, and moves at will through the world of the derelict and homeless of the Bowery. Bell's underground is resolutely alien and frightening; the only permanent tunnel dweller we meet is Worm, a pale white "sewer fish" who resembles no one more than the cave-dwelling Gollum of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth: "You don't want to go. Not nice. ... Bad people. ... Bad people came. Sickness. Guns." Although the tunnels are rendered in strongly realistic terms, the struggles of Bell's novel are metaphysical, rather than everyday: the primary settings of the tunnels, the Bowery, and Williamsburg are powerful backdrops for the larger struggles; in contrast to Ruff's exuberantly absurdist apocalypse, the terrorist cell works as a darkly negative version of Pynchon's imaginary communities.

72. Toth, 52-53.

73. Robert E. Sullivan, Jr. "Introduction," in Underneath New York, xi-xxviii.

74. See also the New York Times and other articles cited by Toth, and the account in Michael Pye, Maximum City: The Biography of New York (1991; London: Picador, 1993), 27-31.

75. Toth writes that "Transit authorities would like to ignore the issue, both quantitatively and qualitatively, and they would prefer that the media did the same, lest their accounts frighten off riders and give the city a bad name. Homeless advocacy groups are also reluctant to deal with the underground homeless openly--or at least to publicize their plight--for fear the public will lump all homeless people with the most violent and dangerous of the underground homeless and thereby lose their sympathy and support" (40).

76. Toth, 251-52.

77. Toth, 252.

78. Daniel Zalewski, "Scanners," Lingua Franca 6:6 (Sept.-Oct. 1996): 11.

79. Morton, 143.

80. This is most strikingly expressed in the metaphysical language addressed by the Dark Angel to Toth: "You have a fascination with the darkness of my tunnels. The evil within it. And it is evil. . . . Everything down here is pure evil" (165).

81. D. Keith Mano, "The Dirty Detective," The New York Times Book Review (January 30, 1994): 12.

82. This phenomenon is especially apparent if we compare the two versions of Pelham. If the 1974 film treated the subway sardonically as a microcosm of the city and its changing ethnic makeup, the 1998 version eliminates any social texture or local color beyond the iconographic subway setting. The semi-documentary approach to both the hijacking and the everyday workings of the subway has been replaced with personalized conflicts--one of the hijackers and one of the transit cops are women who undergo moral dilemmas--and a rote approach to the genre, which takes the setting as just that--a setting. The new argument is that New York is just like anywhere else.

83. An instructive exception is Luc Besson's 1985 film, Subway, in which Christopher Lambert goes on the lam in and beneath the Paris metro, where he discovers a permanently entrenched counter-cultural population. Unlike New York's underground homeless, however, this multi-ethnic group freely roams the tunnels by day, and especially by night, when the metro is closed, and they raid the shops and cafes of the Châtelet-Les Halles complex for provisions. They even start an underground rock band, all of which goes to show that underground Paris inspires a far different set of spatialized values than underground New York.