The skull had been there for a while, standing on top of a broken beam near the 72nd Street entrance to the Riverside Park tunnel. Next to it were two femurs bundled in cargo pants and neatly laid into an old child stroller, with pieces of dry leathered skin still attached to them.
This was the tunnel’s way to greet you.
When two Amtrak workers finally found the remains in December 2006, months after adventurous kids had first made the grim discovery, the police wasn’t immediately able to identify who the bones had belonged to.
Even the homeless people living in the area weren’t sure who had died.
Brooklyn, a woman living on and off the streets since her teenage years, thought it could have been an older man who used to roam around with his shopping cart, getting scrawnier every time she encountered him.
Juan, an illegal alien sleeping in a manhole and avoiding the outside world as much as he could, said he had often seen a stranger sleeping where the body had been found. Someone he didn’t know and didn’t want to know.
TJ, a witness of the tunnel’s shantytown 1995 dismantlement who had contracted AIDS by shooting heroin with infected needles, thought it was a vagrant from an outer borough who had come here for some peace in his final moments.
No one knew for sure but Eugene.
And Eugene was a good man.
He would have never killed anyone.
“I probably had the best moments of my life here in this tunnel,” Eugene once told me, a smile on his face and a nostalgic tone in his voice. “I would do it all over again if I had to.”
Eugene was an odd character, a legend among the outcasts of New York. His life had been struck with difficulties and pain, yet he had gone through it and left his mark, turning from bum to casual homeless advocate while always keeping ties with his roots.
I know he meant every word of what he said that day.
His move from Florida to New York in the late seventies happened almost overnight. Big cities were synonymous with endless possibilities. A black man had more chances to succeed up north than in some small-ass town in the swamps.
Eugene hadn’t planned to become the leader of what would grow into one of the most thriving vagrant communities in America — the Freedom Tunnel shantytown, capital of the mole people, there in Manhattan’s innards, hidden underground and hungry for survival.
“There were things we had to do, right? I’m not saying it was easy back then because it wasn’t, and it was a constant battle for everything. Everything that mattered you had to fight for. Food, belongings, drugs, your whole life was reduced to that, and you had to be ready to die for it. It puts things in perspective. It makes you think differently.”
Almost everyone I knew who had come across Eugene unequivocally loved him. Years had taken a toll on him but his stature was still present and his charisma was making up for his graying hair and his slumping stance.
He didn’t like to be called a leader. “Someone has to take care of shit or nobody will,” he used to say. “It doesn’t make you better than the others if you decide to do it. It just makes you a better person.”
Although Eugene liked to share stories about his life in the tunnel, he rarely ventured into personal details during our first conversations.
It took years for him to open up.
“I was smoking crack night and day at one point,” he told me when he decided we were close enough to talk about these things. “I was fucked-up. This part I regret, it’s true. But it was necessary, you see. It was necessary for me to have that, the drugs, to keep me going. Otherwise — I don’t know.”
He was staring at me with his eyes wide open as he was speaking. He wanted me to understand. He wanted to be certain I was worthy of his story.
“There was a brother who had a shack in the upper eighties, near the tennis courts, you see?” Eugene recounted. “And people were talking, you know how it goes, somebody hears this, somebody hears that — and there was a word on how this brother was luring girls in his shack to make them do things. People were talking, so me and a couple of guys went to check on him — keep in mind we were all pretty much high on coke or crack or whatever it was we had been doing that day, and so we get there and what we see, man, blood — soaked plywood, blood just everywhere and girl stuff scattered on the floor. Hair brushes, accessories, underwear. Girl stuff.”
“The brother was half-asleep in his tent with a bottle of booze near him. But there was no girl. Just blood. So we beat the shit out of him until he didn’t move and we waited. We drank his booze. We took his stereo. We took his cassettes. We wrecked his place. And when he came through, we beat him again. I broke his arm, like that, crack, and he yelled but we were in the tunnel, right, so nobody cared for that. We asked him what he had done with the girls. He said he had played with them, that’s all — and then when we asked him about the blood, he started bawling. He said the cops wouldn’t find them, and that we were fine, everything was fine. I had knots in my stomach. I had seen ugly shit but not like that. We were a community, you know what I mean. There were tacit rules you couldn’t break. Enough worries outside the tunnel, you couldn’t bring more inside. Of all the wrong things — we were high and drunk but we still knew right and wrong, right? We were trying to make ourselves a place in the world.”
“So we beat him up some more and he ended up passing out. And then we were so drunk that we ended up passing out too.” Eugene shook his head. “When we woke up, he had left with his backpack.”
“They found a girl a year later in a creek near Union Beach, New Jersey. The others, I don’t know. We didn’t know how many there were in the first place. We hadn’t asked. We were so wasted — and on his booze, at that.”
We stayed quiet a long time after he finished his story. The neighboring church bells were ringing through the open windows of his Harlem apartment.
The silence felt nice and safe.
“Did you ever find the guy after that?” I asked softly.
And I’ll always remember the look Eugene gave me that day. A caring look, almost fatherly in its raw love, honest and kind, a look that stood for all the lost years and the forgotten joys, bursting with the true grace only broken people seem to hold at heart.
“Some things are best left unsaid,” he simply replied.
We never talked about it again.
Eugene died a few months later.
The NYPD officer who had been assigned to investigating the retrieved remains was busy but had agreed to meet me in a small Amsterdam Avenue luncheonette he had his habit in. I waited for him in a booth and we both ordered the same meal.
The case was cold and the bones had never been identified successfully. The subject was an African-American male in his late sixties who had presumably died inside the tunnel about six to eight months before its discovery.
No details had really stood out from the medical examiner’s report.
The upper section of the body had been in advanced decay already, the clothes bonded to liquefied parts of human adipose tissue. The autopsy hadn’t been able to determine the cause of death, although missing front teeth could have indicated a recent fight or surgery.
I didn’t say anything when the officer asked me why I was interested in an almost nine-year-old unsolved case.
I was relieved my questions had been kept without answers.
The skull had been there long enough and the 72nd Street entrance to the tunnel had since been condemned, regularly checked over by patrols and park employees.
It was time to move on.
These bones were the last riddle of the tunnel. The last reminder that something had existed, one day not so long ago, hidden underground and hungry for survival.
With Eugene now gone, the history would vanish soon, replaced by the newer, cleaner tales of a newer and cleaner city. Without him, the shantytown’s legacy would fade, carried away by time and ending like legends end, swallowed by the pale light of tomorrow’s promises.
Because Eugene was who he was.
The Lord of the Tunnel.
A good man.
And he would have never killed anyone.
Some names have been changed in respect to the anonymity of the people
involved in this story.
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