Documentaries and Videos

Jane's New York: Underground New York

http://www.wnbc.com/janesny/2867416/detail.html

Documentary piece on underground NY with some good footage. Some stuff is fairly generic but the sections on the Beach Pneumatic Subway and the Grand Central Dynamo Room are pretty cool. Also the segment features several of my photos, in the intro and in the section on Jinx and the Croton Aqueduct. (If you go to the website for the piece, the first image on the streaming video feed is one of my photos too.) They didn't credit me but that's life I guess... Oh yeah, I also make a brief appearance in the jinx section, riding on an elevator.

Dark Days. (VIDEO) Documentary video by Marc Singer.

Documentary video on the homeless community in the Riverside Park tunnel, circa 1990-1995. I think; I'm not sure if it's ever clear what time period it is. Takes place over a year or two, including the original large community and then the efforts of amtrak to get them out of there. DVD includes some follow-up footage with the main characters but the movie. Great movie, very nice photography, excellent characters, great story, and some beautiful underground shots. Highly recommended.

 

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.

Books (nonfiction)

New York Underground: Anatomy of a City by Julia Solis; published by Routledge, 2004. Click HERE for information about the book, or HERE to see it on amazon.com.

An excellent book by Julia Solis of Dark Passage and Ars Subterranea. With full-color plates; includes some of my photos on the sections on sewers & storm drains and on Columbia University tunnels.

 

Invisible Frontier by LB Deyo and Lefty Lebowitz of Jinx.

When LB called me up in 2001 and said "We're working on a project. Want to come exploring?" I had no idea that the end result would be something so excellent. This book details a summer of venturing through the hidden spaces of the city, from subway tunnels to bridge tops. Along the way, LB and Lefty throw in stories of the city's history and development, along with hagiographies of great explorers of the past and asides on philosophy, physics, math, etc.
Most important, the book does an excellent job of articulating all that is magnificent about exploring-- not only the adrenaline, but also the thrill of fully participating in the magnificent urban landscape that is our heritage as Americans, and the sense of wonderment that comes of experiencing historical artifacts in their original and untouched context.
Book is in paperback, B&W. There are only a few photos, which appear at chapter headings, but among the photos are a couple of my shots from the GW Bridge and the Croton Aqueduct.

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 a good read 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, but the problem with it is that it is essentially sensationalist and so it's impossible to know how much she stretches th truth. Still a good read. The photos are all from Margaret Morton, see listing below. For more critiques on this book, see the following:
Joseph Brennan
The Straight Dope
Control of LTV

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 available 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.

 

Greenberg, Stanley. Waterworks: A Photographic Journey Through New York's Hidden Water System. Princeton Architectural Press; 1st edition April 2003

Another fantastic set of photos from the photography of Invisible New York. Greenberg's photos in this book range a little further afield from the city in this book, as he explores dams and reservoirs upstate, but his fantastic eye for composition remains the same as in his earlier work. These are sensitive and rich photos and glow with all the aura of the century-old stone structures that are their primary subjects.

Jones, Pamela. Under the City Streets. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, New York, 1978. Avery library, Ware and Avery collections, HD 2767 .N75 N7 Lib. of Congress # HD 2767 .N75N47 (at Avery Library, Columbia U, same number)

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 Granick though. The Sullivan intro is excellent. Very entertaining enthusiastic writing:

"There is the City, we think, a grand stirring spectacle! There it is spread out below us, every bit of it!

Every bit of it?

Of course not!

For even as your brain, nerves, heart, lungs and stomach are hidden from view, so it is with the City..."

Books (fiction)

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 a very good book. I could not finish it.

Articles/Stories

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. Some of Sacha's superb pictures from this project are also available at http://www.atlasmagazine.com/photo/sacha6/