Press
Reviews
2010
Baloney's Not the Answer
Pastor Ryan Bell on Molossus Review, December 2010
Teun Voeten is not the first to document the lives of the people living in the
tunnel systems of New York City. His newly updated account, Tunnel People, is unique, however,
because of Voeten's commitment not only to his craft, but also to the people. Articles and books
have been written about the tunnel people and Mark Singer's award winning documentary, Dark Days,
introduced the world to this underground society in what Voeten himself calls a "shockingly honest
portrayal." But Voeten went a step further, living in the Amtrak tunnel on Manhattan's west side
for five months over two years, digging beneath the surface of the tunnel people's lives as well as their complex
and diverse social environment. "To add something new to the earlier studies," Voeten writes in the introduction
to his book, "I decided to take the anthropological approach, using its favorite research method of participant
observation"
During Voeten's time living in the tunnel, Amtrak closed the tunnel, evicting all the residents. City and federal
agencies made valiant efforts to place the tunnel people in permanent housing. Now, thirteen years later, Voeten has
reestablished communication with as many of the former tunnel people as he can find. In a brand new Part 4, Voeten
describes where his friends are and how they are faring. Some have successfully integrated into life up top while other
have not. Some have returned to the streets, others have died, a few have overcome some remarkable challenges.
Voeten is no stranger to dangerous situations having covered more than a dozen conflict zones as a photo journalist,
he brings all his unique talent and experience to bear upon this subject.
There is no shortage of people who want to help the homeless, serve the homeless, even study the homeless.
There are federal and local programs to end homelessness in ten years. These efforts have a range of motivations,
from sparing the rest of us the visual obstacle of people living on our streets to moral outrage over the inhumanity of
allowing widespread suffering to continue unchecked. Those in a position to help others don't often stop to consider how
those on the receiving end experience that help. Many of the tunnel people didn't consider themselves homeless at all.
Indeed, the tunnel was their home. Voeten's account gives us a window into this complexity:
"Yesterday, Frankie was also approached by an outreach worker. He holds the same kind of grudge as Bernard toward the do-gooders
that try to intervene in his life. This time it was a friendly man who gave him a baloney sandwich and offered him a place to stay,
that is to say, a city-operated shelter. Of course, Frankie was deeply offended.
"What the fuck do they think they're talking about?" Frankie says angrily. "A shelter and a lousy sandwich! I told the guy,
'Come to my place, I'll make coffee and cook burgers and we gonna watch the ballgame on TV.' But this asshole, he didn't dare to come down."
It sounds like it was Do-Gooder Galindez again. "Something wrong with the system," Frankie ponders, "when you got those guys making
thirty grand a year driving fancy cars and handing out baloney sandwiches." (p. 105)
Still, life on the streets - or in a tunnel - is difficult and dangerous. It's hard to escape the conclusion that people are not meant to live this way,
even when so many willingly chose it. The tension between respect for people's choices and the outrage over a society that structures life in such a away
that so many get left behind is not easily resolved. Handing out baloney sandwiches is not the answer.
As someone who regularly encounters homeless people on the streets of Los Angeles and interacts with half a dozen social service agencies working
among the homeless, I found Voeten's book deeply insightful and helpfully frustrating. Tunnel People offers a penetrating vision of a slice of
life that is uniquely American, recounted by a uniquely qualified Dutch writer.
Authentic Account
Andrea Star Reese on Amazon, September 30th 2010
Tuen Voetens account of tunnel life is authentic because Tuen dared to live the life. His story isn't exaggerated, nor is it a superficial
report driven by a deadline. Tunnel People is the historical account of underground life in the 90's around the time of Amtrak's efforts to rid the "Freedom Tunnel"
of it's residents and the train company's efforts to house the homeless with the help of the NGO Project Renewal. More important it is a fascinating up close view of
a group of often unnoticed people living on the fringes of conventional society. Tuen followed the tunnel dwellers learning how they found and earned money for
their needs, and how they managed to made themselves comfortable in the dark shadows of the underground. He shared in their everyday lives, listening to their hopes,
frustrations,dreams and despairs. Ultimately Mr. Voeten, the anthropologist and war photographer writes about a group of fascinating damaged and fragile people,
and their surprising strength, resilience and determination.
Andrea Star Reese, a photojournalist familiar with the tunnel
Notes From the Underground
Jessica Freeman-Slade in TK Reviews, October 5th
When in 1906 the journalist Upton Sinclair released his novel The Jungle, critical of unsafe
labor as well as meatpacking practices, he found himself disappointed by its reception:
reform came not for the workers, but for the meat. Sinclair discovered readers were more interested in the bestseller's exposé
of unsanitary meatpacking practices than its searing portrait of the horrors of factory life; he noted, "I aimed at the public's heart,
and by accident I hit it in the stomach." When faced with exposés such as Sinclair's, or Teun Voeten's Tunnel People (PM Press, $24.95),
it often proves less difficult for readers to stick with the unsightly details than to confront the book's larger, more terrifying issues.
Yet in Voeten's book, whose central focus is the humanity of the tunnel people, it is impossible, dishonest, and ultimately the reader's loss,
to look away.
First published in Amsterdam in 1996, and now available in its first American edition, Voeten's book details his experiences of cohabiting
and corresponding with the residents of New York's Amtrak tunnels from 1994-1996. Beneath Riverside Park, Voeten is led through the
underground by a handful of guides. Its denizens become as familiar as family: most memorable are the affable Bernard, "New York's most
famous homeless man," and the poetic Julio, who defends his albums of Beethoven, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky from marauding rats.
Not every figure in this world is endearing - Voeten takes great pains to describe the ominously absent Bob, a scheming amphetamine addict whose vacated
tunnel abode Voeten uses during his reporting, and the elusive Kool-Aid Kid, who leaves a trace of green Kool-Aid in every camp he vandalizes.
Most of the people Voeten meets are far from caricatures: Frankie and Ment, two teenage boys who greet him with a baseball bat yet quickly decide
to share their dinner, and Kathy and Joe, one of the few couples in the tunnel community, who carve out a domestic life in the most unlikely of circumstances.
When early stories emerged about the tunnel people they were labeled "mole people" and "CHUDS" (cannibalistic human underground dwellers).
As Voeten notes, "There were urban legends about subway maintenance workers who had disappeared without a trace, having met their final
destiny on the roasting spits of starving savages." Yet Voeten's subjects are anything but monsters, or even case studies:
they are his neighbors. Voeten is humane and sympathetic at every level of his reporting, never patronizing, always aware of the choices
these people have made. (Though he does not shy away from identifying the crack and heroin users in the bunch, he never attempts to change
their stories or convince them to quit.) These are vibrant, funny, and often deeply self-aware people, cognizant that their situation is one
they've created for themselves. Bernard, a philosopher to his very core, says, "One thing made me really sad - in the tunnels
I never encountered a real human that accepted his fate. Most people here allow their past to haunt them. . . . I never saw here any spiritual growth."
Voeten's extraordinary tunnel photography demonstrates the macabre, labyrinthine quality of these quarters and this life, but nothing in his portrait
is sugarcoated. Voeten details the disparity between what he found in portrayals of the homeless by mainstream media and reality:
"The slapdash folder of the Coalition mentions that:
° One out of five homeless people has a job but cannot afford housing.
°One out of three homeless is a veteran.
°Women and children are the fastest growing segment of the homeless population.
From my own experience and from what the tunnel people have told me about their fellows, combined with data from sociological research and literature,
I reach different conclusions:
°More than fifty percent of all homeless have some kind of criminal past, are on parole or are fugitives.
°Most homeless who say they are veterans have hardly seen a battlefield, or have been discharged from the service for all kind of reasons.
°Ninety-five percent of the money you throw in that paper cup will be spent on crack."
It's hard to read this book without getting mired in the thought that hundreds of thousands of people today have recently begun to think of themselves
the way the tunnel people do-as on the fringe, better off scavenging for what they can get, with nothing significant on the horizon to keep them afloat.
In light of the recession's effects, and with the number of homeless families skyrocketing, tunnel life still seems a viable alternative to life on the
increasingly crowded streets. As Voeten notes, then as now, it is nearly impossible to get a real sense of the homeless population- "families who are camping
out in the highly crowded rooms in welfare hotels but still have some privacy are technically not homeless. The alcoholics who live in cheap motels in rooms of thirty square feet,
or the poor black families who are cramped into squats are also not considered homeless. Overlooked in most studies and surveys are the 'couch people',
those who have lost their homes and are staying on the couches of friends or relatives." In a study conducted in 2009, the Department of Housing and Urban Development found
that on a typical October night, there are as many as 730,000 homeless people on the streets. That's up from the 1996 statistic of 444,000 people,
the year Voeten concluded his research. There's nothing to suggest that the problem is abating - if anything, it's exploding. And though the tunnels may have closed,
their former residents seemed to anticipate this problem. "Bernard gazes up toward the grate. 'Here it was a Heaven of Harmony. It became a Heaven of Headaches,'
he says dramatically. The sunlight falls down and lightens up his silhouette against the dark tunnel walls. With his high forehead and bald patch,
his straight nose, and his powerful chin he looks like a stern prophet from the Old Testament. 'But who am I to complain about chaos?
Even God has to accept the existence of chaos.'"
In the summer of 1995, the tunnel people were evicted by Amtrak, once seemingly unconcerned so long as the trains continued to run on time. With the American edition,
Voeten has added an epilogue updating us on his main characters. Some have restarted their lives, kicking drug habits and finding apartments through the Housing Works program.
Others have died, horribly, of AIDS, violence, and continued exposure to street conditions. And some are still roaming, their whereabouts unknown. It is hard to know
if any of the many reporters covering the tunnel people invested as much as Voeten in these people's futures, "canning" with them, defending them against investigations by social services,
and even smoking crack with them. Voeten's journalistic objectivity can be questioned, but not his commitment to this story and these people.
He seems to understand, perhaps better than his readers ever could, just how much these underground safety nets can mean to the people who benefit from their shelter.
But more importantly, he has found a way to show us the tunnel people not by their statistical trademarks - drug addiction, alcoholism, crime, and AIDS - but rather through
their humanity, their talents, their extraordinary attitudes of good humor and hope.
2000-2009
Will be updated shortly...
1996-2000
Will be updated shortly...