[ Train whistle blows ]
-There's this tunnel underneath Riverside Park.
Steve 161 stole some dynamite from a construction site,
and he blew a hole in the bathroom.
We went down there, slid down this embankment.
Then we had to jump about 5 feet from there.
And there we were, in the tunnel.
The Freedom Tunnel.
♪♪
Graffiti was ending on trains,
and kids were looking for places to paint.
So this tunnel became a destination to go.
-Rough estimates are that 5,000 people
live in the tunnels below New York City.
-Some of the other homeless people that had moved in,
I was trying to capture the way that they lived.
My name is Chris Pape, better known as Freedom,
which was my graffiti name.
"I Was There" -- the Freedom Tunnel.
I grew up in New York City.
In New York in '64,
my memories of it are sort of in black and white.
♪♪
The city was dying.
Factories left, construction sites were closed down,
and all of these abandoned lots.
It gave birth not only to skate culture,
but to graffiti, as well.
[ Kids shouting playfully ]
I was writing my name with spray paint on a wall,
hitting the insides of a subway train.
All right. What do I do next?
Well, I got to paint the outside of a train.
Well, then I have to walk on the tracks.
For me, writing wasn't about the rush.
I wanted the attendant fame that went with it
and the acknowledgement by my peers.
And around the same time, my brother said, you know,
there's this tunnel underneath Riverside Park.
This is very secretive stuff --
all this great death-defying stuff
that is very appealing to 14-year-olds.
And that's what we did.
We went down there, and there we were, in the tunnel.
And there were freight trains lined up.
We climbed up and down the freight trains,
hung off the rafters in the ceiling.
We did all sorts of things.
♪♪
I liked painting graffiti on the trains,
but I could never be what some of those guys --
like Zephyr or Dondi or Futura -- people like that.
They were willing to fail in a public level.
And what that means in graffiti
is that a great deal of writing graffiti
is benching, you know, the trains
and watching what you wrote
and watching your peers dissect it.
So you'd have to sit there with them as they said, you know,
"Oh, nice job. That really sucks."
And I didn't have the heart for that.
That's part of what, you know, drove me into the tunnel.
-The 33-year-old artist's works appear under five city blocks.
-The concept was just to make the two torsos work together.
-Why did you choose this space for this?
-I had always wanted to paint something here.
-So, I did a large Freedom To Write piece
with James Dean underneath.
I painted my "Mona Lisa."
That was the very beginning of the tunnel stuff.
♪♪
In 1986 -- so, I had become more and more
kind of fascinated with the history of graffiti.
So I decided to do a long, long
sort of half a city block painting
of the history of graffiti in this one area
where there were all these gradings above.
It went from 95th Street to 96th Street,
because I was generally in the middle of the tunnel,
and there was a whole group of people
living in the south end of the tunnel.
And as I was painting it, this guy came over
from the cement cubicles in the dark.
I was up on the ladder -- "Oh, no, no."
No, thank you, homeless person. Go away."
And then the next day, he came back,
and he was like, "Hey, man," you know, "you can come over."
We're just hanging out, sitting by the fire,
and I was like, "Fire?
I'm trying to paint my history of graffiti."
And by the third day, I was just about done,
and I realized I was about as rude as I could be.
And he didn't come over that day.
So I went over to him,
had a cup of tea in this charred metal cup
that I was sure I was gonna get tuberculosis from.
It was very good.
His name was Bernard,
and he gave me a little background about himself.
Bernard had been a model. He had gone to college.
He was a very bright guy.
Some of the other homeless people had moved in that year,
and Bernard would always make tea, cups of tea for everybody,
and they'd cook omelets and things like that.
I continued to check in with Bernard and Bob
and the people who lived there each time I went down to paint,
and I would have two sketchpads,
trying to capture them, the way that they lived.
-Rough estimates are that 5,000 people
live in the tunnels below New York City.
They do not, however, consider themselves homeless.
-After the book "The Mole People" came out,
a horde of journalists descended on the tunnel.
But one of the most intriguing ones
was when Jerry Springer came down there.
And he was incredibly professional
and maybe got more information, I thought,
out of Bernard in his interview than anybody else.
-Could this ever be made into a place for people to live?
-The late '80s, they were having many problems
in this city in the shelters, a lot of murders and crime.
And I said to myself, "Why don't the city let me --
Sell me this tunnel or let me renovate this tunnel,
and I could house 200 people right here."
-And in '89, Amtrak purchased it.
By 1995, they did seal the tunnel off.
A number of the people actually dug with her hands
to get underneath the wall to get back into the tunnel --
which is kind of horrible when you think about it.
♪♪
Bernard -- he was a good friend,
and he will definitely be missed.
Passed away about five years ago.
Over the years from 1980 to 1995,
I painted a little over 40 paintings.
It was a really good time in my life.
And the graffiti legends -- some failed, some succeeded.
I wound up somewhere in the middle by doing illustration.
But it was one of those things of,
is this stuff only gonna work in the tunnel?
Or am I ever gonna be able to solve that?
But the idea that you're making either historical work
or work that would become part of the, you know,
fine art canon...
And that would be the paintings in the tunnel themselves.
Anything that I do off of that
is merely a representation of what has happened down there.
And eventually, the Freedom Tunnel
became a destination for urban explorers around the world.
And they all wanted photos
in front of the "Buy American" piece,
which was the large epilogue that I did
based on my time in the tunnel.
So, all of these societal factors
wound up turning it into something
much more than I ever thought it would be.
And I'm thrilled that it happened,
'cause it's made a career for me.
[ Laughs ]
My kids are so bored with my life.
It is -- It's unbelievable.
I have an 11-year-old and a 9-year-old,
and...yeah, they don't care.