Sandhog is the slang term given to urban miners and construction workers who work underground on a variety of excavation projects in New York City,[1] and later other cities.[2] 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 tools including using tunnel boring machines and explosives to remove material for the project they are building. The term sandhog 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. Traditionally, these workers have been Irish or Irish American. Some West Indians are now sandhogs.
Sandhogging is often a tradition and is passed down through generations of families; since mining projects span decades, it is not uncommon for multi-generations of families to work together on the same job.[3]Warren Beatty was a rare exception in the 1950s, as a recently-arrived to New York individual, who worked as a Sandhog relatively briefly on the third tube of the Lincoln Tunnel.[4]
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.[citation needed]
Thomas Kelly's 1997 novel about sandhogs, Payback, was reissued in 2008 as Sandhogs (ISBN978-1593762360) by Soft Skull Press.[9]
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.[13]
The podcast 99% Invisible released an episode on sandhogs in March 2015.[14]
Chuck Wendig's urban fantasy novel, The Blue Blazes (ISBN9780857663351). The protagonist is a former sandhog, and one of the central elements of the plot is Water Tunnel No. 3, a sandhog construction project.[citation needed]
The final episode of season 4 of The Strain refers to sandhogs as the builders of Water Tunnel No. 3, where the scenes were filmed.
Scorpion Season 3 Episode 14,[15] where Walter refers to the workers as mole rats, as he felt the sandhogs nickname 'is illogical', and Toby corrects him to sandhogs.[16]
On September 12, 1956, NBC's Screen Directors Playhouse aired the final episode of the program, a teleplay directed by Allan Dwan and starring William Bendix and Dennis Harper. The title alludes to the high air pressure necessary to keep the river from flooding the work site. The episode tells the story of a father and son working as "Sandhoggers" constructing a tunnel below the Hudson River.
On January 23, 1949, Box 13 episode "Three to Die" aired. It starred Alan Ladd as Dan Holiday. Dan goes undercover as a sandhog where construction on a new tunnel under the city's river has been plagued with deadly sabotage.
In the 1943 romantic comedy No Time for Love, photographer Claudette Colbert is on assignment to take pictures of a tunnel project under the Hudson River and falls for sandhog Fred MacMurray.
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.[3]
^Butler, W.P. (2004). "Caisson disease during the construction of the Eads and Brooklyn Bridges: A review". Undersea and Hyperbaric Medicine. 31 (4): 445–459. PMID15686275.
