Weekend Deviation – New York’s Tunnellers & Subway in the Sky

It’s taken me fully 12 years to hear about and finally get around to finding a copy and reading Colum McCann’s This Side of Brightness from 1998. Didn’t help that for some reason I thought it was called The Tunellers and so had never found it any bookshop! Anyway, it’s a great novel with a lot of detail on the sandhogs that build the New York subway system around the time of the First World War and especially the dangerous tunnels under the river. The sandhogs have long fascinated me so this was a great read and despite my being way behind the curve in reading it a dozen years after it was first published well worth the wait and worth a plug too.

On a bitter winter’s day in 1916, deep below the streets of New York, a group of men is working in one of the huge pressurized tunnels that will make up the subway system. Suddenly, a tiny hole appears in the roof of the tunnel and the air rushes in, sucking the men up through the bed of the Hudson, to be suspended on a spume of water high above the river. Almost 90 years later, Treefrog, a homeless man, stumbles through the same corridor, under the twirling flakes of snow, to his makeshift home under the city. A love story in three generations, this is also about hope and despair and survival.

By the way: as well as tunnellers the book also features some of the amazing men that worked on the steel frame structures of the skyscrapers of New York- another fascinating bunch of workers. Interesting to note that Subway sandwiches just opened a branch on the 27th floor of the new World Trade Center in New York to make it easier to get lunch for the guys working high up who lost most of their break taking the cage elevators up and down. Click here.

that was then…

…this is now