The City Beneath Our Feet

Late last year I blogged about the romantic allure of life "underground", of living at a remove from  polite society, of residing in a netherworld where the squares and scolds and scoundrels of The Real World dare not intrude. In some way, I mused, this very blog is an underground itself -- a totally obscure yet really cool little world within the vast universe of the Internet.

But only a privileged dude like moi could ever find the idea of underground life truly exciting -- or something that would make for a bearable way of life.

This massive journalistic photo project shows the literal underground life of New Yorkers in Queens who sweep our floors, clean our offices and homes, serve and deliver us our food, stock our shelves, and do all the brutal, nasty, boring work that most of us New Yorkers won't and don't have to do. They live in basements and basement apartments -- many of them illegal conversions -- often in bunks or with roommates. They have very little personal room or light, these places smell, and these underground lives are, to put it simply, rough. This is whole other city beneath our feet, a world most of us know nothing about but that keeps our city humming. 

But these folks, most of them immigrants (legal or not), persevere and keep working each day, sending money home, believing that better days for them and their families are ahead of them, that one day they will be able to emerge from this underground life and into the light of the good life. 

They're not oppressed -- they're optimistic. They don't complain -- they just work. 

And they are, truly, the best kinds of New Yorkers we have.