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Photographer Gina LeVay, creator of The Sandhog Project with the Sandhogs (Gina LeVay/ClampArt Gallery)

NEW YORK, NY January 09, 2006 —Most New Yorkers take the city’s water supply for granted. We turn on the tap, and there it goes. But that water comes from reservoirs north of the city, as far as the Catskill Mountains, and travels through tunnels deep underground. And a new tunnel is now being built by a fraternity of miners who call themselves the Sandhogs. Their underground world is revealed in a new photography exhibit opening today at Grand Central Terminal. WNYC’s Beth Fertig has more.

REPORTER: The sandhogs are working round the clock hundreds of feet below the West Side of Manhattan.

ABA: Exactly 577 feet. Takes about 3 minutes.

REPORTER: Mike Aba is an engineer with the city’s Department of Environmental Protection. We’re in a steel cage elevator that’s descending into the Third Water Tunnel. DEP has been building the tunnel since 1970 to upgrade the current delivery system. It’s the largest construction project in city history spanning from Yonkers through the Bronx, Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. It’s scheduled for completion in 2020.

Construction in Manhattan is now entering its final stages. And this shaft which runs below West Thirtieth Street at 11th Avenue is the nerve center. Turn north and you’ll see a gray, dimly lit tunnel about 12 feet in diameter that appears to stretch into infinity. Turn the other way, says Sandhog Chick Donohue, and you’ll see another tunnel heading south and east.

DONOHUE: That’s the south heading. You could go down practically to the Battery. You wouldn’t know it. It all looks the same. And then it turns around and goes to the Lower East Side.

REPORTER: Here in the shaft, the walls are covered with wire mesh to keep rocks and equipment from falling. It’s damp and slippery and the men wear rubber boots as they walk through puddles. Water rains down on us from the constant release of moisture trapped in bedrock that’s hundreds of millions of years old. In the distance, a boring machine can slice through rock at a rate of 75 feet per day.

A small train rolls into the shaft whenever there’s new muck, or rubble created by the drilling. Ralph Huggler – who’s job title is the Walking Boss and keeps an eye on the worksite for his fellow union members - gives a quick progress report.

HUGGLER: They’re drilling and shooting in there today on top, they’re mucking out rock. In the east we just started mining yesterday. We’re about 25 feet in.

REPORTER: The sandhogs are now working on a loop that goes east and ends at the 59th Street Bridge. The dirt and stones that come back are dumped onto a conveyer belt, which then carries them to a pile at street level. Rocks that are too big for the journey are crushed into smaller pieces.

Being a sandhog is safer now thanks to modern machinery. There’s less reliance on dynamite. But it’s still dangerous work. Twenty four men have died while building the Third Water Tunnel. And everyone was reminded of the perils after last week’s tragedy in West Virginia. Newspaper stories about the accident are lying on the bench where the Sandhogs eat their lunch. Jim O’Donnell says he and his colleagues are all thinking about it.

O’DONNELL: Our hearts and prayers go out to every one of those people involved in that tragedy because we all know that on any given day if something happens catastrophic like that any one of us could be in their shoes.

REPORTER: O’Donnell’s grandfather was a coal miner. Most of the sandhogs come from a long line of miners, many of them Irish and Caribbean immigrants. They also work with operating engineers from two other unions.

GUNN: I’m Matt Gunn from the Operating Engineers. It’s all about watching each other’s back no matter who goes down, or it Jimmy goes down. It doesn’t matter. Everybody’s on top of it. Anybody could fall into a pit or get hurt anywhere anytime anyplace and there’s always somebody to dive in headfirst. We are men’s men.

REPORTER: Chick Donohue says the camaraderie between the thousands of men who work and have worked underground is real. The Sandhogs are proud of their work and their name.

DONOHUE: My name is a nickname Chickie, or Chick. But the sandhogs it’s not a nickname. Sandhogs is in the dictionary. And the word Sandhog described in Websters is a soft ground miner. And the first Sandhogs here in New York were soft ground miners, that was the foundation to the Brooklyn Bridge, to the Hudson tubes, across the Hudson, and those were all soft ground jobs.

REPORTER: It’s this world that 26 year-old photographer Gina LeVay sought to capture in her new exhibit at Grand Central Terminal. She began shooting the sandhogs 2 years ago for her masters thesis at the School of Visual Arts when she became fascinated by the city’s infrastructure.

LEVAY: I wanted to capture really just the vibrant characters that I met, the sandhogs and also just the extraordinary underground systems that they’re developing.

REPORTER: LeVay – who’s now a commercial photographer - also wanted to give her images a different feel.

LEVAY: I mean you’ve seen a lot of black and white journalistic shots of tunnels, or workers. When I met them they’re such colorful personalities and they’re very diverse in interests and backgrounds and they all love their jobs. And I wanted to bring more of a conceptual approach to it.

REPORTER: LeVay shot in color with film and digital cameras. Her multi media exhibit at Grand Central Terminal includes eleven images of men working in the tunnels. Each photo is ten-feet high and extremely detailed. One shows two men laying dynamite before blasting a wall. In another, you can see dust from a giant drill reflected in orange against the flood lights. LeVay also shot 16 life-size portraits of the sandhogs. They’re wearing their jumpsuits at the end of a workday, looking tired but proud. LeVay says she wanted to capture their individual personalities.

LEVAY: Especially this one we’re looking at, I mean if you look closely, I mean he has some scars on his neck. It just seems like it’s a rough, it’s a rough industry and just so the details and the physicality is interesting to me. And to really look closely like oh what’s in his pocket, okay that guy has lunch like a cooler ready to go, like little details I really appreciated in their clothing.

REPORTER: LeVay’s exhibit also includes a video taken by the men while riding a train into the 12-foot diameter tunnel. It’s projected on a screen that’s nearly life size. The multi-media effect is completed with audio from the tunnel, along with snippets of interviews LeVay conducted with the Sandhogs.

SANDHOG IN EXHIBIT: “It’s a whole different world down there, it’s kind of unbelievable for people who haven’t seen it before.”

REPORTER: As LeVay made some final adjustments yesterday, a few sandhogs came for a sneak preview. Thirty-three year old Kevin Tucker – whose father was also a sandhog – said the photos showed HIM a different side of a world he’s known forever.

TUCKER: I’ve taken pictures many times down below and when you’re down there everything is sort of black and white, it’s very dark. It’s very dreary. And everything’s covered with dust. And there really is not much color down there. But these pictures are spectacular. I mean the oranges and the yellows and the greens and the – they’re just unbelievable, I can’t believe the color in them!

REPORTER: His colleague, 42-year old Fitzroy James had a similar impression.

JAMES: Oh this is beautiful. It’s great to show the beauty of the work of the sandhogs. It’s hard working guys. The work is very dangerous and they’re doing their best to work in a safe environment.

REPORTER: James’s uncle died on the job several years ago. For him, and the others, this exhibit is a chance to show the people passing through Grand Central Terminal who REALLY built this city. Michael Jimenez - who was photographed wearing his bandana and engineering tools - says too many people take the water supply for granted.

JIMENEZ: And they turn on the tap and they have no idea where it comes from, they flush a toilet they have no idea where that goes, you know, it’s amazing. If it gets the attention of the public to understand what tunneling is all about great job.

REPORTER: Gina LeVay’s Sandhog Project will be on display through January 14th in Vanderbilt Hall at Grand Central Terminal. For WNYC I’m Beth Fertig.