Downsiders

Downsiders takes place in New York City, and Neal Shusterman briefly clarifies how his depiction of New York merges fact with fiction. Alfred Ely Beach was a real person, and he built New York City’s first subway in secret to avoid the corrupt but influential politician William Magear Tweed (Shusterman calls him Mayor “Boss” Tweed in the story). Beach’s trial subway was elegant, but Tweed, new technology, and an unstable economy felled the project.

The official subway system, run by the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), lacks Beach’s glamor, and, like Tweed, the MTA regularly appears mismanaged. On November 11, 2017, three journalists published an expose on New York City’s subway system, in which they wrote, “[T]he problems plaguing the subway did not suddenly sweep over the city like a tornado or a flood. They were years in the making” (Rosenthal, Brian M., et al. “How Politics and Bad Decisions Starved New York’s Subways.” New York Times, 18 Nov. 2017). In Shusterman’s novel and in real life, authority has the potential to be corrupt.

The real Beach didn’t invent an underground society to separate himself from the corrupt city, but other New Yorkers have retreated underground. In 1993, the American journalist Jennifer Toth published The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City (Chicago Review Press), documenting some of the people who lived in New York City’s tunnels and subways. In Toth’s account, the “mole people” are unhoused and battling myriad challenges. Lindsay wonders if Talon is a “homeless boy,” and Todd calls him a “bum,” but Downsiders aren’t unhoused persons. Downsiders have shelter and exist in an elaborate, separate society beneath New York City.