Sandhog

Sandhogs in New York City's East Side Access

Sandhog is the slang term given to urban miners, construction workers who work underground on a variety of excavation projects in New York City.^[1] Generally these projects involve tunneling, caisson excavation, road building, or some other type of underground construction or mining projects. The miners work with a variety of equipment from tunnel boring machines to explosives to remove material for the project they are building. The term is an American colloquialism.

Starting with their first job in 1872, the Brooklyn Bridge, the "hogs" have built a large part of the New York City infrastructure including the subway tunnels and sewers, Water Tunnels No. 1 and No. 2 as well as the currently under construction Water Tunnel No. 3, the Lincoln, Holland, Queens-Midtown, and Brooklyn-Battery tunnels. In addition, they worked on the foundations for most of the bridges and many of the skyscrapers in the city. Many of these workers are Irish or Irish American and West Indian.

Sandhogging is often a tradition and is passed down through generations of families; since mining projects span decades, it is not uncommon to find multi-generations of families to work together on the same job.^[2]

Appearances in media

• In the October 1997 issue of Esquire magazine, a series of photographs by David Allee, with a text accompaniment by Thomas Kelly, document the life and work of sandhogs. In 2006 at Grand Central Terminal in New York City there was a large-scale photo and video installation about the sandhogs, "The Sandhog Project", created by artist Gina LeVay.
• Thomas Kelly's 1997 novel about sandhogs, Payback, was reissued in 2008 as Sandhogs (ISBN 978-1593762360) by Soft Skull Press.^[3]
• David Grann's 2003 article about sandhogs, City of Water, appeared in the September 1 issue of The New Yorker^[4] and was republished in his collection The Devil and Sherlock Holmes. It has been optioned for a movie.
• On September 7, 2008, The History Channel began "Sandhogs" a series on the sandhogs.^[5]
• The CSI: NY episode "A Man a Mile" deals with the death of a sandhog during construction of Water Tunnel No. 3.
• The Cold Case episode "Sandhogs" (Season 4, Episode 3) deals with the death of a Sandhog in 1948.
• A Public Broadcasting System (PBS) sponsored documentary show American Experience 2014 episode "The Rise and Fall of Penn Station" details the work done by the sandhogs in the creation of the rail tunnels connecting New York and New Jersey.^[6]
• The podcast 99% Invisible released an episode on sandhogs in March 2015.^[7]
• Chuck Wendig's urban fantasy novel, The Blue Blazes (ISBN 9780857663351). The protagonist is a former sandhog, and one of the central elements of the plot is Water Tunnel No. 3, a sandhog construction project.

Literature

• Colum McCann's "This Side of Brightness," Picador, New York 1998, ISBN 0-312-42197-4.
• Jimmy Breslin "Table Money," Tickner & Fields, New York 1986, ISBN 9780899193120.
• E. L. Doctorow's "Ragtime (novel)": Chapter 13, Random House, 1975, ISBN 0-394-46901-1

Movies

• In the 1996 film Daylight, directed by Rob Cohen and starring Sylvester Stallone, there are references to "Sandhogs" as well as detailed history on how these men lived under the pressures of building the Holland Tunnel.
• In 2007 Edward Burns also narrated the film The Greatest Tunnel Ever Built for The History Channel.

References

Further reading

• Armagnac, Alden P. (September 1947). "Sandhogs'". Popular Science. 
• Chase, Borden (1941). Sandhog; the way of life of the tunnel builders. Evanston, Ill.: Row, Peterson and Co. OCLC 1525997. 
• Delaney, Paul E. (1983). Sandhogs : a history of the tunnel workers of New York. OCLC 11517630. 
• LeVay, Gina (2009). Sandhogs. Brooklyn, NY: PowerHouse Books. ISBN 978-1576875230. 

External links

• New York City Sandhogs Local 147
• The Sandhogs, a New York Times interactive feature