Fire in the Ashes (2 page)

“He boasts about it,” one of the two social workers told me. “He describes it to us openly, and gleefully. He goes into considerable detail.…” Some of the guards, the social worker said, took advantage of the younger mothers too, as
one of those mothers, a smart and savvy woman who told me she had had to fight off their advances, reported to me at the time and has repeated since.

There was no need for secrecy, it seemed, because there was a sense that this was “a closed system,” where rules of normal law and normal governance did not apply. Complaint or protest would have no effect except to prompt the guards or manager to punish the complaining woman by denying her essential services or else, if the manager so wished, by calling the police and charging her with one of many forms of misbehavior that were common in a building in which almost every person had to break some rule or operate some petty scam in order to survive.

Cooking, for example, was officially prohibited because of fire dangers, but the city’s meager allocation of subsistence funds to purchase food made it unthinkable to buy it from a restaurant and forced the mothers in the Martinique to cook their children’s meals in secret, then conceal their hot plates when inspectors from the city came around. The management cooperated with the tenants by providing them with
garbage bags to cover up the hot plates on inspection days while, at the same time, it pretended not to know that this was going on. When mothers were reluctant to provide the guards who were hired to protect them with the favors they expected, the guards could use the cooking scam or other scams much like it as a way to break down their resistance.

Children, of course, observed the humiliation of their mothers. The little ones, too young to go to school, might perhaps be sent out to the corridors; but most of the mothers would not dare to let them wander too far from the bedroom door. Even the kids who never witnessed these activities first-hand could not fail to be aware of them. I used to wonder what enduring influence all of this would have upon the capability of children in the building to believe in
any kind of elemental decency in people who have power over their existence. Would they later find it hard to trust the teachers in their public schools? Would they develop an endemic wariness about investing faith in any older person of authority? Would they love their mothers all the more for having done the best they could to protect them from this nightmare, or would they harbor a resentment that their mothers were not able to avoid this situation in the first place?

One of the social workers who befriended me that year, a sensitive man who had studied early childhood development as an undergraduate at Yale, spoke of the Martinique in unsparing language as “New York City’s midtown death camp for the spirits of poor children.” He knew that I was Jewish and he asked me later if this choice of language had offended me. I told him it did not. I thought it was justified.

Two years later, I published a
book about the Martinique Hotel. It appeared first in two successive issues of The New Yorker magazine, and this, in turn, attracted interest from the other media. The Nightline television program, moderated at the time by the journalist Ted Koppel, asked me to go back into the Martinique with a camera crew and do a documentary on the families I had known. The social workers and some of the mothers helped to get the camera crew and the producer past the guards and up into the building. The camera itself was hidden in a baby carriage by one of the mothers, who rolled it through the lobby without attracting scrutiny and brought it with her on an elevator to the floor where she was living. She then accompanied us into other bedrooms whose occupants had told me they were not afraid to answer questions.

By the time we had finished with the final interview, however, a guard on an upper floor had become suspicious, banged at the door, which we did not open, then notified the management. The manager, an unpleasant character by the
name of Sal Tuccelli who carried a pistol in an ankle holster, confronted us with several other guards and insisted that the cameramen hand over the material they had just recorded. When they refused, the manager and guards reacted in the same way they routinely did with residents who defied or disobeyed them. I was slammed against a metal wall. One of the cameramen was seriously injured. The TV producer, an unintimidated woman, removed one of her high-heel shoes and used it to defend us. By this point, the police had been alerted. The cameramen got out of the building with the video.

I knew, of course, that
journalists were not welcome in the building and that the social workers who had made my visits possible were taking risks in doing so. But until this time I had never witnessed so directly the extremes to which the management would go in the interest of concealment. It reminded me more vividly than ever that the city and the owners of the Martinique, with whom the city had contracted to sequester homeless people at a price tag of $
8 million yearly for those 400 families, were determined to discourage any troublesome exposure of the social crime in which they were colluding.

It also left me with a visceral reminder of the terror mothers and their children would experience when the guards or, more frequently, the manager would hammer at their doors early in the morning if, for example, the rental check paid by the city, through no fault of their own, had not arrived on time. “Six a.m.,” one of the mothers told me. “He bangs on the door. You open up. There he is in the hallway with his gun. ‘Where’s your rent?’ ”

This is the way that one of the richest cities in the world treated the most vulnerable children in its midst a quarter century ago.
When these hotels were finally closed in 1988 and 1989, not for reasons of compassion but because of the enormous damage the visibility of so much desperation was
doing to the image of the city and its elected leaders, most of the several dozen families I had come to know, all but two of whom were black or Latino, were shipped en masse into several of the most impoverished and profoundly segregated sections of the Bronx, far from the sight of tourists and the media. These were communities that already had the city’s highest rates of HIV infection, the greatest concentration of drug-addicted people, of people who had serious psychiatric illnesses, women with diabetes, women with undiagnosed malignancies, and
among the highest rates of pediatric asthma in the nation.

The misérables, although they were no longer homeless, would continue nonetheless to live under conditions of physical and psychological adversity that were only incrementally less harmful than the ones they had endured in the preceding years. In one of the neighborhoods in which the largest numbers of the homeless were resettled, the only medical facility was a city-run institution known as
Lincoln Hospital, which underwent the loss of its accreditation more than once because of errors by the staff that led to the deaths of at least a dozen patients, two of whom were infants. For the mentally unwell, psychiatric care of the thoroughgoing kind lavishly available six subway stops away in the costly and exclusive Upper East Side of Manhattan was all but impossible to find. Children, meanwhile, many of whom had had their education interrupted or repeatedly disrupted during their homeless years, found themselves consigned to public schools that, in the absoluteness of their racial isolation, resembled those of Mississippi fifty or one hundred years before.

So this is where they sent them. And this is where I followed them, invited by their parents to visit them on weekend afternoons or in the evenings during a school holiday, to keep alive the friendships we had formed when they were in the shelters. I went to their schools. I got to
know their teachers. I went to their churches. I got to know their pastors. I went to their hospitals, sometimes at their own request when they were ill because they thought that it might win them more attention. So I became acquainted with a number of their doctors, many of whom were selfless and devoted individuals who did everything they could to compensate for scarcities in the basic services that doctors elsewhere know they can depend upon.

I did this, off and on, for more than fifteen years. Then, beginning in 2005, I lost track of some families for a time when my father, who’d been ill for several years, entered an acute phase of his illness, and, within the same two years, both he and my mother passed away. It took another year before I could regain my sense of equilibrium. At that point I began returning to those neighborhoods again and meeting once more with the families I had known. Some of the children were still in their teenage years. Those whom I had met when they were in the Martinique were already in their twenties. We had long talks. We took long walks. Sometimes we would spend an evening having dinner in the neighborhood. When I was home we kept in touch by phone and mail, and by e-mail in the case of those who had computers. In these ways we rebuilt our friendships.

What happened to these children? What happened to their families? Some prevailed, a few triumphantly. Most survived, even at a rather modest level of survival. Others did not. This will be their story.

One of the nicest but most fragile people that I knew who was in the shelter system at the time when I was visiting the Martinique was a shy and gentle woman whose name was Victoria.

Vicky had been shunted through a number of the shelters from 1984 until the end of 1989. Her longest stay was in a place known as the
Prince George Hotel on West 28th Street, four blocks from the Martinique.

When she came into the shelters, Vicky had been suffering from clinical depression and periodic seizures, for which she had been treated at a hospital on Roosevelt Island, which is in the midst of the East River. Her husband, who was caring for their children at the time, had not been well for many years, the consequence of a degenerative illness that, as best I understood, he had contracted as a young man growing up in Georgia. He passed away a short time after Vicky came out of the hospital.

At this juncture in her life, with no money in her pocket, and no prospects of a job, and with two young children who had no one else to care for them, she began to make her way into the less-than-friendly channels of the shelter apparatus, moving at first, as was the case with all homeless families, from one so-called “short-term shelter” to the next. The psychological and physical exhaustion families underwent when they were moving constantly tended to have a predictable effect. It undermined whatever capability for good clear-headed thinking might still exist within the spirits of the stronger women while, in the case of those like Vicky who were not strong at all, it simply added to their pre-existent instability.

Vicky, as she told me later, fell into a “zombie-like” condition—she felt, she said, “like I was walkin’ in my sleep”—a condition that continued when she was living on a “permanent placement,” as the city termed it, in a room at the Prince George.

The building, which was owned at the time that Vicky moved there by one of the two owners of the Martinique—it was later taken over by another owner with a record of illegal operations who subsequently served a lengthy term in prison for defrauding creditors of $100 million—was less depressing physically, at least on the lobby floor, than was the Martinique, but it made its claim to notoriety for other reasons of its own. Although the manager of the Martinique had some degree of governance over the
Prince George as well, the day-to-day administrator was a man who’d been convicted of abusing his own daughter, beating her and leaving her locked up at home, “alone and without food,” according to the New York Daily News. His daughter had been taken from him by the city to protect her from additional endangerment.

The city, wrote the columnist Bob Herbert, who was then a writer for the Daily News, “takes one child out of
[his] care and then hands him over 1,000 more.” There were at least 1,200 children in the Prince George at the time.

Children were endangered in other ways as well. Fires kept on breaking out—at one point,
four or five times in a week. A three-year-old was burned to death while Vicky’s family lived there. The fires were alleged to have been caused by arson, but tenants told me some of them resulted from the carelessness of drug abusers who were cooking crack cocaine right there in their bedrooms—a not-uncommon practice in those days when crack was just emerging as a drug of choice among the very poor.

This, then, is the setting in which
Vicky and her children found themselves at a time when Vicky was already ill and loaded with anxiety. Her daughter, who was named Lisette and was only seven when all of this began, suffered less than did her brother, Eric, who was four years older. As in the case of many of the other children in the building who were nearing adolescence, he was very much aware of the sordidness of his surroundings, the unscrupulous behavior of the governing officials, the open market for narcotics, as well as the various semi-legal or illegal strategies other children of his age had inventively developed in order to pick up a little money that they sometimes, but not always, used to help their families. It would be another four years from the time that Vicky’s family came into this building until the day when they got out.

When I met Vicky and her children in the Bronx in 1993, they were living in Mott Haven, which was then, and remains today, the single
poorest neighborhood in the poorest borough of New York.

Vicky’s home, although it was on a street that was a well-known center for the sale of drugs—heroin, specifically—was two blocks from a church on St. Ann’s Avenue,
an Episcopal church called St. Ann’s, that was a place of safety for children in the neighborhood. The church, a beautiful old stone building with a tall white spire at the top of its bell tower, had a large expanse of lawn on a pleasant hillside where there were swings and slides and a sprinkler for the younger children, and a court where older kids played basketball.

I spent a good part of the 1990s visiting St. Ann’s because it ran an excellent and innovative afterschool, in which I was able to talk at length with children and was sometimes asked to help with their tutorials. Naturally, it wasn’t long before I also grew acquainted with some of their parents and with other adults who gravitated to the church for the sense of solace that they found in the inviting and informal atmosphere the pastor had created.