YOU take the A train, they take the “muck train.” You get stuck in traffic, they’re stuck between walls of bedrock. They’re sandhogs – and they’re indispensable.
Technically, a sandhog is a tunnel worker, but a more accurate description would be “tunnel digger.” We owe them our subway, our Battery Park Underpass and – most important of all – our water.
But while it’s likely they won’t be getting back to the Second Avenue subway or extending the 7 anytime soon, the sandhogs are hard at work excavating for Water Tunnel No. 3. And photographer Gina LeVay caught it all on film.
OK, not all – but for the past three years she’s been enjoying unprecedented access to both men and tunnel, which are now the subject of “The Sandhog Project,” a weeklong photographic and video show at Vanderbilt Hall in Grand Central Terminal starting Monday.
“I was fascinated that this was going on below Manhattan, and I had no idea about it,” says LeVay, who followed the Hogs 500 feet below the sidewalks for a chance to check out the view. “I was amazed by the simultaneity of city life with the subterranean life – that there is such a traditional form of mining in our modern metropolis.”
LeVay says she hopes her show will give people the feel of what it’s like to be down in the tunnels and the black fabric she’s used to encase the walk-through portion of her show ought to help. The exhibit also features pictures of the tunnel environment, life size portraits of 16 Sandhogs and a screening of a ride aboard the muck train, the train Hog’s use to go down under.
LeVay says she started the project started in 2002, when she was working on her thesis at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. And, it’s never stopped.
“I wanted to know what I could do to let people know about this, to spark the public’s consciousness about what’s going on below us. This is for our survival and our benefit,” she says.
Started in the ’70s, Water Tunnel No. 3 runs 60 miles from Kensico Reservoir in Westchester County through the Bronx, Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. The city’s two other water tunnels already pump between 500-800 billion gallons of water each in to the city. But since they were completed in 1917 and 1936, they’re leaky and in need of repairs. No. 3 is expected to be complete in 2020, will cost about $6 billion and is estimated to bring about 1.5 billion gallons of water in to the city daily.
“A lot of people have no clue what we do or that we exist. People appreciate seeing what it take to make a project like this go,” says Neil Hickey, a third generation Sandhog. “And it was kind of unique to have a girl come down,” he says.
Hickey says he wasn’t the only one who appreciated the female company. There are no women Sandhogs in New York City – and those tunnels can get cold and lonely.
“It’s a male dominated industry, sure, but I wouldn’t want my daughter down there,” says Hickey, a father of two little ladies, ages 6 and 8. “It’s a tough world – dusty, wet, damp – and when you’re working in shafts that are soaking wet and cold it can get rough.”
It can also get dangerous. The Hogs describe the job as “a man a mile”, because in the last 25-mile phase, 24 men have died.
“The job itself is very dangerous. They’re essentially miners and there are cave-ins and machinery accidents and people get hurt,” says LeVay. “They risk their lives everyday when they go down there. This is a tough industry.”
Tunnel vision
UNLESS you’re on a subway train or in a car, tunnels are awfully hard to get into. No. 3’s off limits but others can be gotten into.
The New York Transit Museum in Brooklyn used to offer tours of unused subway lines and stations, but post-9/11, those days are over. “Now we just do the regular lines,” says a museum spokesperson, “but we can point out the decommissioned stations.” To learn about upcoming tours, visit mta.info/museum or call (718) 694-1600.
Take a tour or just head over to the Brooklyn Heights museum, which is housed in a decommissioned station at Boerum Place and Schermerhorn Street. See sandhogs through history in the permanent exhibit “Steel, Sand and Backbone.”
The Municipal Art Society is offering a tour January 14 called “Downtown: Planning and Preservation,” which culminates in a walk through the maze of four different subway lines at Broadway and Nassau streets. For more information, visit mas.org or call (212) 935-3960.
Ars Subterranea is an urban archeology arts collective dedicated to underground art – literally. One show, for instance, was held in the abandoned Atlantic Avenue Tunnel in Brooklyn. For events and information, go to creativepreservation.org.
While the above organizations host exclusively legal events, there is an underground underground, if you will. The urban exploration movement – basically, people in cities who go where they’re not supposed to – is alive and well in New York City. Some sites that offer tantalizing illicit footage include NYC Exposed (nycexposed.com), Expedition NYC (expeditionnyc.com) and Netherworld (netherworldonline.net).