Patrick Marquis

Until he passed away in the late 1990s.

And I remember going to the memorial service with him and there were some other folks in the tunnel who were there.

There was a remarkable woman named Margaret Morton who was a photographer who did a book of photos of the people living in the tunnel.

She had gotten to know the folks there really well.

And the photos are just really like stunning, just something black and white photos.

But you actually really see that kind of incredible light in the tunnel.

I mean, it's kind of a strange thing to say, but the tunnel was actually a very beautiful place in many ways.

Really?

Yeah, I mean, it was... You know, the train tunnel was actually sort of a human-made creation.

It wasn't, like, excavated under the park.

It was... Actually, the park was built over the rail line by Robert Moses.

And so there were these ventilation shafts, and sometimes you would just see shafts of light coming through in the middle of the tunnel.

And it was just kind of, in some ways, a beautiful place, although a grim place and obviously not a place where anybody should be living.

So...

When I was at that memorial service, you know, I got to talking to some of these folks.

And, you know, they remembered their time, you know, in the tunnel as something that they had survived.

And obviously, you know, it was a place that they had lived.

So in some ways they missed it because they had sort of been displaced from it.

They were forced to leave it when Amtrak ended up closing down the tunnel.

But they were just also so much sort of healthy.