{"product_id":"life-underground-encounters-with-people-below-the-streets-of-new-york-9780231177931","title":"Life Underground: Encounters with People Below the Streets of New York","description":"\u003cp\u003eAboveground, 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 took 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 revisited his contacts repeatedly in the years that followed. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003eLife Underground\u003c\/i\u003e 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, \u003ci\u003eLife Underground\u003c\/i\u003e shines a unique light on a vanished subterranean community.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTerry Williams is a professor in the Department of Sociology at the New School for Social Research. His previous Columbia University Press books are \u003ci\u003eThe Con Men: Hustling in New York City\u003c\/i\u003e (2015); \u003ci\u003eTeenage Suicide Notes: An Ethnography of Self-Harm\u003c\/i\u003e (2017); \u003ci\u003eLe Boogie Woogie: Inside an After-Hours Club\u003c\/i\u003e (2020); and \u003ci\u003eThe Soft City: Sex for Business and Pleasure in New York City\u003c\/i\u003e (2022).\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Columbia University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50613786673426,"sku":"9780231177931","price":35.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_bdc848e2-315b-4373-a5a0-196f81d60825.jpg?v=1732417622","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/life-underground-encounters-with-people-below-the-streets-of-new-york-9780231177931","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}