Mole People
Mole People is a term used to refer to the unknown number of homeless people purported to live under New York City in abandoned subway tunnels. Estimates of the number of individuals living in this way are hard to obtain and impossible to verify, but a 1989 survey suggested they numbered around 5,000.
Mole People and Urban Folklore
While it is generally accepted that some homeless people in large cities do indeed make use of accessible, abandoned underground structures for shelter, urban legends persist that make stronger assertions. These include claims that 'mole people' have formed small, ordered societies similar to tribes, numbering up to hundreds of people living underground year-round. It has also been suggested that these have developed their own cultural traits and even have electricity by illegal hook-up. The subject has attracted some attention from sociologists but is a highly controversial subject due to a lack of concrete evidence.
Jennifer Toth's 1993 book , written while she was an intern at the Los Angeles Times, was an account of her travels in the tunnels and interviews with tunnel dwellers. The book helped canonize the image of the Mole People as an ordered society living literally under people's feet, reminiscent of the Morlocks of science fiction writer H.G. Wells.
The book has met with criticism, primarily for the inaccuracy of geographical information, compounded by numerous factual errors and an apparent reliance on largely unverifiable 'urban myth'. The strongest criticism came from Joseph Brennan, a New York subway enthusiast who declared that none of the subway-specific facts described in Toth's book could be independently confirmed.[1]
A widely-read reference to urban folklore, Cecil Adams's The Straight Dope, devoted two columns to the dispute. The first, published on January 9, 2004 after contact with Toth, noted the large amount of unverifiability in Toth's stories while declaring that the book's accounts seemed to be truthful. The second, published on March 9, 2004 after contact with Brennan, showed more skepticism to the basic facts about the existence of 'mole people' as a unique entity, based on the total unreliability of the subway data (unlike that of the tunnel dwellers, this did not necessarily need to be fictionalized or obscured for privacy reasons).
However, many of Toth's assertions have been verified by Steven Dupler's 1994 documentary, Outside Society.
Media portrayals
The Marvel Comics comic book series
X-men has featured a society of superhuman mutants, known as
The 1994 short documentary film by Steven Dupler, Outside Society, went underground in New York to cover the homeless community living in the Amtrak tunnel, as well as the NYC subway system. It was awarded the Nombre D'Or Prize for Best Documentary in 1995 by the International Broadcasting Conference's Widescreen Film Festival in Montreux, and also received the United Nations' UNESCO Prize for Best Direction, Human Rights Programming, at the 1995 International Electronic Cinema Festival in Amsterdam. It was one of the earliest verite documentaries shot in HDTV.
An episode of Upright Citizens Brigade featured mole people, referred to as "Mole Men." "Excuse me? Is that moleman perfume you're wearing?" "What?" "I'm sorry, you smell just like a moleman."
An episode of The Jerry Springer Show featured this society.
The video game Deus Ex features a level where the player, while hunting terrorists, must enter a subway station controlled by Mole People.
The 1987-1989 television series Beauty and the Beast featured Vincent, a lion-like man who lived among a group of the homeless in the tunnels of New York Below.
The film Extreme Measures featured Mole People.
The film Subway (1985) featured Mole People.
The Documentary "In search of the mole people" was about underground homeless in New York subways.
The 2006 film Urchin features a society of Mole People who call their home Scum City.
Neil Gaiman's novel Neverwhere depicts Mole people in their world of London Below.
Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child's sci-fi/horror novel "Reliquary" deals with mole people living in numerous communities in the subway tunnels, sewers and service tunnels beneath Manhattan.
One episode of the television show Law & Order: Special Victims Unit featured a community of homeless people living in New York City's abandoned subway tunnels. Among the group was a character named Samael ("Control," season five, episode nine).
The 1984 horror film C.H.U.D. features a society living under the streets of New York which is being preyed upon by an unknown killer.
Mervyn Peake's Titus Alone novel of the Gormenghast series features a poor, displaced, underground society who live in an area known as the Under River.
The NBC show "ER" recently featured children who lived in tunnels underneath Chicago.
The protagonist of Ralph Ellison's novel, Invisible Man, lived underground and tapped into the electric power grid.
The 1999 book Grand Central Winter by Lee Stringer detailed his life as a homeless person, including time spent living underground.
See also
References
External links
- Fragile Dwelling - Margaret Morton
- disinformation:the mole people
- In Search of the Mole People - Victor David
- NYU Portfolio Review: The Mole People - Jennifer Toth, The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City - Chicago Review Press, 1993.
- Straight Dope article: Are there really "Mole People" living under the streets of New York City?
- Straight Dope article: The Mole People revisited
- Joseph Brennan - Fantasy in The Mole People
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