The Freedom Tunnel is a 3-mile train tunnel under New York City’s Riverside Park that runs from 122nd to 72nd Street. Trains stopped running through the tunnel from 1980 to 1991, years in which it became a haven for street artists and squatters. The tunnel is named for graffiti artist Chris “Freedom” Pape, who created over 40 paintings in the tunnel. The Freedom Tunnel was also home to a colony of squatters who constructed a labyrinthine village from scavenged materials inside. In 1991, Amtrak reopened the tunnel, leading to a mass eviction of the hundreds of people who lived there. When Amtrak sealed the tunnel, people dug under the wall with their hands to return.
Chris Pape painted a large Freedom to Write sign on the outer wall of the tunnel. His paintings inside the tunnel included two murals depicting the tunnel dwellers’ eviction: “There’s No Way Like the American Way”, a parody of Coca-Cola advertising, and a recreation of Francisco Goya’s The Third of May. Other paintings included his “self-portrait” featuring a torso with a spray-can head, reinterpretation of the Venus de Milo, full train car recreation of the iconic hands from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, and Salvador Dali’s melting clocks. In 2009, Amtrak began repainting the tunnel. Most of Freedom’s murals were lost. Still, artists continue to write in the Freedom Tunnel, urban explorers to explore.
I first walked the Freedom Tunnel on March 8, 2014 with a journalist friend. It was a bright, crisp early spring day. Tags swarmed around the tunnel’s mouth. Light glinted off of the double tracks curving into the darkness. Inside, the air stilled and we moved through a deep quiet, our footfall the only sound. Shafts of light stark as pillars poured through grates in the tunnel’s ceiling. Icicles hung from the ceiling like stalactites. The ghostly laughter of children drifted down from the park. It felt as if we’d departed the world.
While most of Freedom’s murals had been painted over, the tunnel was still an underground gallery. Artists had painted elaborate tags and murals where light streamed through the ceiling grates. I would return to walk the Freedom Tunnel six times and find many of Freedom’s smaller paintings—his self-portrait, Venus de Milo, and melting clocks—love letters from the tunnel’s past life.
Passing through three miles of subterranean shadow, quiet, art, and debris—shards of glass, rusted paint cans, condoms, pill bottles, unwound cassettes, a crutch leaned against the remnants of a mural—felt meditative.
The ground vibrated and we turned to see a train’s light boring through the tunnel. Its horn exploded the quiet. There was a wide space between the tracks and tunnel walls. We pressed our backs against the wall and waited, hearing the sound of our breath. A silver train whooshed past—a shuddering roar of noise and light. Wind swept over us, blowing our hair back, lifting the dust. I stared up at the bright-lit windows flashing by, the people inside the cars so close. Could they see us? When the last car passed, we stood on the tracks and watched the train snake into the shadows.
That first time exploring the Freedom Tunnel, we couldn’t find the gap in the fence through which to exit. I tried a door in the tunnel wall, sure that it was locked. The door opened into a brightly lit car garage, an alarm sounded, and a car attendant rushed over. My friend and I stood, blinking in the fluorescent light and blare of the alarm. We apologized to the car attendant, who kindly let us exit through the garage. Dazed, we wove through the cars and stepped into the bustle of the Upper West Side. It felt as if we’d walked through and out of a dream. Only the dream lingered—the streets and people surreal.
Walking the Freedom Tunnel was a ritual for crossing the space between an old self and a new one: dreaming with its artists and explorers past and present, pressing our backs against the tunnel wall, our selves sucked into silver train rush and tunnel dust, passing through three miles of graffitied quiet to wake, anew, to the world. That passage birthed my novel Country of Under. I walked out of the isolation of writing a memoir and into a novel that was—sometimes overwhelmingly—in dialogue with the world. Country of Under is rooted in the Texican border-town we moved to when I was 11 and my mother married my Mexican-American stepfather. The novel draws from the freedom I felt watching a high school friend perform drag in our town’s only gay bar to tell the fictional story of two young people creating themselves. I wrote and lived this novel for 10 years, engaging in activism and advocacy; attending talks, exhibits, and performances aligned with the world of the novel; researching and interviewing undocumented immigrant friends and students, my Garza family, immigration lawyers and judges, drag queens, activists, artists, priests, and nuns. The Freedom Tunnel was vital not only to the novel’s gestation, but to its story. A character in Country of Under says of the Freedom Tunnel, “Here we reclaim the parts of ourselves the world has discarded. In this quiet, we hear ourselves breathe. In this darkness, we are the light. This is why we explore. To walk through and beyond death, to transform the decaying rooms of our pasts into a resurrection. To remake ourselves: These tracks our skeletons, this graffiti our unspoken, this tunnel our birth canal.”
Freedom Tunnel Press wants to dig under the walls of traditional publishing to build a squatter colony of books. We want to create the FREEDOM TO WRITE (and publish) books that break the mold. Books like silver trains shuddering through the darkness; books that blow our hair back, lift the dust. Books like dreams that linger and color the world we wake to. Books that depart the above ground world to give us language for buried things. Books that walk death’s border to remember life. Send us letters from lives lived along the vein. Send us a vision to save our dying world.