Book Talk: Terry Williams | Life Underground

EventIn Person

In Partnership with Housing Works

On June 26, join us 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.

View photos from the event on Flickr.

If you missed this event, you can watch a recording of it on the MAS YouTube Channel.

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.

Wednesday, June 26
6:00 PM — 8:00 PM

Housing Works Bookstore
126 Crosby Street
New York, NY 10012

Tickets:
Free!

Attend
  • Terry Williams and Hakim Hasan.
    photo 1 of 2
  • Life Underground, Encounters with People Below the Streets of New York. Credit: Columbia University Press.
    photo 2 of 2

Meet the Speakers

Terry Williams, Featured Writer

Terry Williams is a professor in the Department of Sociology at the New School for Social Research. He has written many books about New York and has become a biographer of New York City’s hidden social worlds. His previous books are: Growing Up Poor (1985); The Cocaine Kids; (1989) The Crack House (1992); and most recently The Con Men: Hustling in New York City (2015); Teenage Suicide Notes: An Ethnography of Self-Harm (2017); Le Boogie Woogie: Inside an After-Hours Club (2020); and The Soft City: Sex for Business and Pleasure in New York City (2022), Life Underground: Encounters with People Below the Streets of New York (2024)

Hakim Hasan, Moderator

Hakim Hasan is the former Director of Public Programs at the Museum of the City of New York. He also co-founded the Urban Dialogues Seminar series at Metropolitan College of New York. Mr. Hasan just completed a collection of poems titled “Speak For Myself.”