MAS presents Book Talk: Life Underground w/ Terry Williams and Hakim Hasan

On June 26, join the Municipal Art Society of New York for the next installment of the Municipal Art Society + Housing Works author series, featuring a discussion with Life Underground author Terry Williams, moderated by Hakim Hasan.

The pair will discuss Williams’ recent publication, which explores this society below the surface and the varieties of experiences among unhoused people in New York City. Additionally, they will discuss Williams’ work as a sociologist and how New York City impacts his work.

Light refreshments and snacks will be available for purchase. Additionally, there will be copies of Williams’ books available for purchase at the event. Doors at 6 PM. Event at 6:15 PM. Email events@mas.org with any questions.

About the Book

Aboveground, Manhattan’s Riverside Park provides open space for the densely populated Upper West Side. Beneath its surface run railroad tunnels, disused for decades, where over the years unhoused people have taken shelter. The sociologist Terry Williams ventured into the tunnel residents’ world, seeking to understand life on the margins and out of sight. He visited the tunnels between West Seventy-Second and West Ninety-Sixth Streets hundreds of times from 1991 to 1996, when authorities cleared them out to make way for Amtrak passenger service, and again between 2000 and 2020.

Life Underground explores this society below the surface and the varieties of experience among unhoused people. Bringing together anecdotal material, field observations, photographs, transcribed conversations with residents, and excerpts from personal journals, Williams provides a vivid ethnographic portrait of individual people, day-to-day activities, and the social world of the underground and their engagement with the world above, which they call “topside.” He shows how marginalized people strive to make a place for themselves amid neglect and isolation as they struggle for dignity. Featuring Williams’s distinctive ethnographic eye and deep empathy for those on the margins, Life Underground shines a unique light on a vanished subterranean community.

Read more about the book here.