Watch: ‘Dark Days’, an eye-opening documentary made by Marc Singer, who spent two years living with tunnel dwellers and became a part of the subculture.

Watch: ‘The Tunnel Dwellers of New York,’ a documentary by Chantal Lasbats, who travels through narrow portals into a maze of corridors and passageways to meet a few hardy denizens of this hidden world who continue to live there

Read: ‘Mole People: Life in the Tunnels beneath New York City’ by Jennifer Toth

        

Wednesday, December 26th 2007, 4:00 AM

DelMundo for News

Ike Ilklw, above, and Jose Estrada, below, go deep underground to combat taggers who plan their attacks “like ‘Mission: Impossible.’”

DelMundo for News

Rows of steel subway trains, dark and silent, sit idle on parallel sets of tracks in the rail-yard tucked in a corner of Manhattan and encircled by barbed-wire fences.

On a recent night, a sheet of ice covered the ground. The only sound was the thumping of cars passing overhead on the elevated Harlem River Drive, above the eastern edge of the yard that abuts the river.

Three men lurked in the shadows, but they were not there to do harm. Former NYPD Sgt. Robert Barrow and ex-NYPD Detectives Ike Ilklw and Jose Estrada are part of a new NYC Transit squad waiting for vandals who routinely cut holes in the fences to spray paint their tags on trains.

“This is cat and mouse,” Barrow said.

More like cat and eagle.

Barrow, Ilklw and Estrada are members of the Eagle Team, an anti-graffiti surveillance squad quietly formed three months ago. Two other members of the team also were in the Harlem railyard: a former U.S. Marine and another ex-cop who had taken up posts inside a parked train.

In and around railyards all across the city, other members of the unit, almost exclusively former police detectives and sergeants, are on the prowl.

In addition to the yards, they check sections of tunnels where trains are regularly stored – and defaced.

Vandals engrossed in the graffiti subculture will spend hours, sometimes days, scouting a yard before striking, watching the patterns of police and transit workers and searching for vulnerabilities to exploit.

They plan in advance how they will enter, escape and flee if suddenly interrupted.

“Every ‘i’ is dotted, every ‘t’ is crossed,” Barrow said. “It’s almost like ‘Mission: Impossible’ for them.”

After one vandal raid, authorities found a grappling hook and rope dangling to the ground on the outside of a 20-foot-high perimeter wall.

The Eagle Team, which began operating in September, was formed to supplement the efforts of the police, said Vincent DeMarino, NYC Transit vice president of security.

It has yet to catch its first vandal, spray-paint can in hand, tagging a train, but the teams are out there every night, talking to train cleaners, dispatchers, track workers and others who could alert them to security breaches.

Their message is simple: Vandals beware. The Eagle has landed.

pdonohue@nydailynews.com

        

The Freedom Tunnel is home to a legendary series of graffiti murals painted in the Amtrak tunnel under Riverside Park in Manhattan. The tunnel is named after the graffiti artist called “Freedom”.

The name may also be a reference to the freedom one may find in this tunnel — a freedom to live unobserved, freedom to create artwork — and freedom from rent (the tunnel has served as a home for many people who could not find a place elsewhere).
At its height, hundreds of people lived in the tunnel.

The tunnel has unique lighting provided by the ventilation ducts (when walking through Riverside Park one may pass over many of these grates). The shafts of light create a gallery space for artwork. Often, the artwork is centered under the light giving the space the feeling of a chapel or great cathedral.

        

From New York Urban Exploration:

“Down in the tunnels you quickly learn that there are reoccuring names, and these are the names of people who have, years earlier, combed through these very tunnels we explore today. Smith estimates that REVS covered up to 80% of the subway tunnels.

With recent discoveries, we were given with more than enough clues as to where REVS’ obscure “first page” is (which we had all seen in ESPO’s book.) So tonight, we decided to roam the tunnels for it, with an unneccessarily large amount of people who were in it for the adventure. A few of us wanted to see the fabled first page for ourselves. What we discovered was far beyond our wildest imaginations. An entire emergency exit, transformed into what my fellow explorer, Hanvey described as a “shrine of sorts.” The walls were wallpapered with old wheatpastes that influenced today’s whole “street art” phenomenon. There were drawings that the guy would use to draw on canvas and bolt and cement onto doorways. And in this very spot is where he, again, took graff to a creative new level.”