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New York City: Web Links,
Books, and Research and Reference Materials.
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Links and
Internet Resources
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http://www.panix.com/~christos/underground.html
This is a non-site, just a couple of pictures. But for
the sake of completeness...
www.darkpassage.com
A couple people who organize tours every so often. Not
really anything on their website, but if you're they're
good people to know of.
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In 1999, there was a show broadcast-- the
information can be gleaned from these emails: us_nyc_ny_resources1.txt,
us_nyc_ny_resources2.txt,
us_nyc_ny_resources3.txt
New York Underground (VIDEO)
Written & Produced by Elena Mannes ; an Elena Mannes
Productions, Inc. film for The American experience ; WGBH
Boston. PBS Home Video, c1997.
- Butler Media Reserves VIDEO TF847.N48 N48
1997
A 60-minute video that was shown by PBS. A terrible
piece of uninformative, tiresome film. A few interesting
pictures of the subway construction and such, but mostly
a bland hash of NY history stories that should be old hat
to anyone who has read anything about the subway.
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Toth, Jennifer. The
Mole People Life in the Tunnels beneath New York City.
Chicago Review Press, Chicago, 1993
- Columbia Libraries HV4506.N6
T68 1993
This book is sensationalist shit with some great
pictures and great interviews and lotsa stories that
would be great if you didn't have to take them with the
whole salt shaker. Joe Brennan (yep, the great guy who
did that wonderful list of abandoned NYC subway stations)
has a review that he calls "fantasy in The Mole
People" at http://www.cc.columbia.edu/~brennan/rails/mole-people.html
Morton, Margaret
(PHOTOS) The Tunnel: the underground homeless of
New York City. New Haven, CT Yale University Press,
c1995.
- Barnard, Social Work
HV4506.N6 M67 1995
Morton's book is a wonderful photo essay on those who
dwelt in the Riverside Park Tunnel (now Amtrak Tunnel) in
NYC, how they lived, the great murals in the place, and
the tunnel itself. The excellent photos in The Mole
People are from her oeuvre, and all appear in this
book.
Greenberg, Stanley
(PHOTOS) Hidden New York. 1999.
- Avery, Fine Arts, NH32 G82
G82
Greenberg takes beautiful pictures of the hidden,
abandoned, forgotten spaces in the city. This book
focused on the industrial archeology in the city;
powerplants, suspension bridges, and a bit of water
supply. He is planning on coming out with another book on
the water system itself. The pictures are great, high-res
and detailed. He insists for some reason on only using
availible light, but the resultant clarity and depth from
the long exposures is wonderful. However, the book
doesn't have many pictures in it, and he doesn't tell
much of anything about the sites.
Jones, Pamela. Under the
City Streets. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, New York,
1978.
- Avery library, Ware and
Avery collections, HD 2767 .N75 N74
New-York specific. She talks about the multitudinous
layers of utilities and facilities that are-- you guessed
it-- under the city streets. She follows each issue from
its technological/historical foundations-- for water
supply she goes back to the founding of NY, for electric
she goes back to Edison. A nice explication of steam
technology, and some great maps-- esp. the Viele-MacCoun
Water Map, which shows the location of streams that may
(or may not) run underneath buildings today.
Granick, Harry. Underneath New York.
Originally published 1947. New publication, with an
introduction by Robert Sullivan: New York: Fordham
University Press, 1991.
- Butler Stacks, TD25.N6 G7 1991
New-York Specific as well. Very similar to Under
the City Streets but with less relevant industrial
info. Jones seems to take a lot of her underground
stories from him though. The Sullivan intro is
excellent.
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McCann, Colum. This Side of
Brightness. London : Phoenix House, 1997 (first
edition). New York : Henry Holt & Company, 1998 (first
American edition).
- Butler Stacks and Barnard PR6063.C335 T48
1998b
This novel follows two characters-- One was part of
the crew to dig the original east river subway tunnel at
the turn of the century; and the other, his grandson,
worked the high steel putting up the World Trade Center.
The grandson (Treefrog) now lives in the Riverside Park
Amtrak Tunnel (which his grandfather also helped build.)
The novel is imbued with an incredible sense of New
York's infrastructure development and is laced throughout
with tunnel metaphors, tunnel stories, etc. He brings in
all sorts of fun stuff, too-- the famous tunnel blowout,
for example, where a digger got sucked into the mud and
geysered out of the river still alive, here is a
three-person, one-fatality fountain. Racial oppression is
a key element of the story, and McCann ties it into the
physical elements a lá Ralph Ellison.
Unfortunately, McCann is awfully heavy-handed, which he
shows whenever he tries to make his characters
sympathetic. But even his heavy hand can't begin to
dampen the resonance of 90 years and three generations of
NYC tunnelers.
Daly, Michael. Underground: a
novel
The name has such promise but this is just a
human-in-new-york story that happens to be about a NYC
subway cop. It's not even very good.
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National Geographic had an article about the New
York Underground in the February 1997 issue, starting on
p. 110. The article is by Joel Swerdlow, photos by Bob
Sacha. There are some fantastic pictures and nice cutaway
drawings of the layers, but not much real information
that you wouldn't already know.
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