Life Underground

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

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

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

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

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