An old story I had forgotten about came back to me last week. It was a piece I did for Men’s Vogue, but sadly when that magazine folded the web archives were taken down. I thought maybe I would republish some parts of the piece here for posterity.

The men who built the New York City subway were known as Sand Hogs.  They got dirty. They carved out the pathways that make this city work. They understood better than anyone the connection between these underground roads and the city above.

In 1916 Marchall Mabey was working beneath the East River with two other men when the pressurized shaft of the tunnel was punctured from above. As air rushed out Mabey was pulled through twelve feet of earth, through the river itself, and then ejected twenty five feet into the air.

“I was being held tight,” Mabey, the only survivor, later told reporters, “Tighter than any girl ever held me.”  Few passengers today will experience the intimacy of subway and surface as Mabey did. A pedestrian walking above a train might feel it rumbling over the tracks below. The connection between that street and trains line on a map, however, is far less concrete.