Rachel and Her Children (4 page)

It is worth adding also that this book is not about the “lifestyle homeless”—young people, for example, who leave home out of the wish to drift and wander for a time, much as children of the counterculture might have done in the late 1960s. Such people, if they are in danger, need protection. They are not the subject of this work.

Finally, the emphasis is not on those who were confined in mental hospitals and were deinstitutionalized ten years ago. The emphasis, if anything, is the reverse: It is the
creation
of an institution that makes healthy people ill, normal people clinically depressed, and those who may already be unwell a great deal worse. Few of the people in the Martinique were inmates of those institutions that were emptied prior to the 1980s; but all are inmates of an institution now. And it is this institution, one of our own invention, which will mass-produce pathologies, addictions, violence, dependencies, perhaps even a longing for retaliation, for self-vindication, on a scale that will transcend, by far, whatever deviant behaviors we may try to write into their pasts. It is the present we must deal with, and the future we must fear. These, then, are the subjects of this book.

I
t is possible to picture what a cheerful place this might have been at Christmas in the years when Woodrow Wilson was alive and Edward was the king of England and there was a tsar in Russia and fashionable musicians entertained the patrons in the ballroom of the Martinique Hotel.

A faded brochure from 1910 contains this information: “The Hotel Martinique is located at the intersection of Broadway, Sixth Avenue and 32nd Street, and the plaza thus formed is termed Herald or Greeley Square…. One block east is Fifth Avenue, the great residential street of New York. Within a radius of three blocks are to be found the greatest of the city’s retail stores, making it an ideal headquarters for shoppers. The best theaters are centered in this vicinity, and the two great Opera Houses are within easy walking distance.”

Of the hotel’s less formal restaurant, the brochure says
this: “The Gentlemen’s Broadway Café is a veritable architectural gem.” The walls and columns of Italian marble “give to this room a richness which is completed by Pompeiian panels of unquestioned merit.”

More elegant, it seems, was the Louis XVI dining room: “The wainscoting and pillars are of Circassian walnut, enclosing panels of gold silk tapestry, producing a result described as the most refined public dining room in the city. No better evidence as to the quality of the cuisine can be given than that the restaurants are filled daily with a patronage of the very highest order. The food is invariably good, the wines of exceptional excellence, and the attendance unobtrusive.”

The building is said to tower over all adjacent structures, “furnishing views and a degree of light seldom secured in a city hotel. The sanitary precautions, plumbing, etc., are the most complete.” Prices for rooms, according to the brochure, were $3.50 a day for room and bath, $6.00 and up for bedroom, bath, and parlor.

Prices are higher now. The patronage has changed. The Louis XVI dining room with its Circassian walnut and silk tapestry is gone. The Italian marble, however, is still there. The attendance remains unobtrusive.

December 20, 1985: Heavy chains secure the doorway of the former ballroom. They are removed to let a dozen people enter at a time. The line of people waiting for their lunch goes back about 200 feet. In the semi-darkness I see adults trying to keep children at their sides. Some of the kids are acting up, yelling, racing back and forth. A few are sitting on the floor.

This is the lunch program of the Coalition for the Homeless. Meals are served to residents five days a week.
The program is organized by a young man named Tom Styron. He has enlisted the help of several women living in the building. Because I have come with him today, he has enlisted my help too.

One of the women sits by the door and checks the names of those who enter. Another woman helps to serve the food. The room is so cold that both keep on their coats. One has a heavy coat. The other has an unlined army jacket. She is very thin, a Puerto Rican woman, and is trembling.

I watch the people coming to the table. The children don’t avert their eyes; nor do the women. It is the men who seem most scared: grown men in shabby clothes with nervous hands. They keep their eyes fixed on the floor.

The meal is good: turkey, potatoes, raisins, milk, an orange. It would be enough if it were one of three meals to be eaten in one day. For many, however, this will be the only meal. For an adult who has had no breakfast, this is at best a pacifier to fend off the hunger pangs until late afternoon.

Many of the children have on coats and sweaters. After they eat, some of them come back to the table, timidly. They ask if there are seconds.

There are no seconds. Several families at the back of the line have to be turned away. In my pocket I have one enormous apple that I bought in Herald Square for fifty cents. I give it to a tall Italian man. He doesn’t eat the apple. He polishes it against his shirt. He turns it in his hand, rubs it some more. I watch him bring it back to where he’s sitting with his children: one boy, two little girls.

The coalition buys the lunches from the New York Board of Education. The program therefore does not operate when school is not in session. Christmas, for this and other reasons, may be one of the most perilous and isolated
times for families in the Martinique Hotel. Christmas is a difficult time for homeless families everywhere in the United States.

It will be 1986 before these people are assembled here again. As they get up to drift into the corridors and cubicles in which they will remain during the last week of the year, some of them stop to thank the people at the table.

The Martinique is not the worst of the hotels for homeless families in New York. Because its tenants have refrigerators (a very precious item for the mother of a newborn), it is considered by some residents to be one of the better shelters in the city. In visiting the Martinique, one tries to keep this point in mind; but it is, at first, not easy to imagine something worse.

Members of the New York City Council who visited the building in July of 1986 were clearly shaken: “People passing by the hotel have no sense of the tragic dimensions of life inside. Upon entering the hotel, one is greeted by a rush of noise, made in large part by the many small children living there. These children share accommodations with a considerable cockroach and rodent population. The nearly 400 families housed at the Martinique are assisted by just seven HRA caseworkers, whose efforts to keep in touch with each family—at least once each month—often amount to no more than a note slipped under a door.”

The report made by the city council offers this additional information: The average family is a mother with three children. Thirty-four percent of families became homeless after eviction by a landlord; 47 percent after being doubled up with other families; 19 percent after living in substandard housing. Fifty percent of heads of households report that they have once held full-time jobs. Seventy percent have seen at least five vacant units they
could not afford or from which they have been turned away by landlords who did not want children or welfare recipients.

The city council describes a family living here more than one year: The family was originally forced to leave a city-owned apartment when one child, a daughter, became ill from lead-paint poison. In their next apartment the family’s son became ill from lead poison. “After six months of shuttling back and forth between hotels and EAUs,” the city council writes, “the family found itself at the Martinique, where lead paint peels from the ceiling of their room.”

The city council makes this final observation: “On the day of the committee’s visit, just two elevators were operating…. The elevator on which the committee rode did not operate properly.” At the time of my first visit, six months earlier, one elevator was in operation.

It is difficult to do full justice to the sense of hopelessness one feels on entering the building. It is a haunting experience and leaves an imprint on one’s memory that is not easily erased by time or cheerful company. Even the light seems dimmer here, the details harder to make out, the mere geography of twisting corridors and winding stairs and circular passageways a maze that I found indecipherable at first and still find difficult to figure out. After fifty or sixty nights within this building, I have tried but cannot make a floor plan of the place.

Something of Dickens’ halls of chancery comes to my mind whenever I am wandering those floors. It is the knowledge of sorrow, I suppose, and of unbroken dreariness that dulls the vision and impairs one’s faculties of self-location and discernment. If it does this to a visitor, what does it do to those for whom this chancery is home?

The city council tells us that the owners of the building are Bernard and Robert Sillins. The apparent manager (he is described as a consultant) is a gentleman, Mr. Tuccelli,
whom some of the tenants view with fear. Mr. Tuccelli is consultant also to the nearby Prince George, but he maintains his office here.

The lobby is long, high-ceilinged, vast. On the right side, as one enters, is a sort of “guard post,” where a visitor must either be signed in by residents or else present good reason to be in the building. Even the best reason (meeting with the social workers) does not guarantee admission. Residents must be notified of waiting guests by guards. There are fifteen occupied floors above the lobby. There is no bell system.

In a recess on the left side of the lobby are two elevators and a winding flight of stairs. Again on the left, but farther back, is an alcove that contains a row of public phones. On the right side of the lobby, opposite the phones, there is a registration area—part of it original marble, part composed of plastic sheets and wooden slats. Though the wood and plastic give it the appearance of a temporary structure, it has been like this for several years. In this, it is suggestive of the total situation: a temporary shelter that has now been home to many children for two years and in some cases three. At the end of the lobby, on the left side, there are two more elevators and two flights of stairs. On the right side is a laundry room for use by residents.

On the first floor above the lobby there are two connected rooms, once used for banquets, one of which is used for the lunch program. A year from now, this room will have been painted and it will be heated. Two years from now, it will be divided to create a space for preschool. For now, it is a ghost of 1910. The other room is sometimes used for gift distribution (Christmas and Thanksgiving), tutoring, women’s groups, and other similar activities run by the city or by volunteers.

Next to these is a third room in which crisis workers
and a nurse have desks and phones. This room feels like a safe haven in a number of respects (emergencies of every kind are handled here) but chiefly because the people in this room include some of the most hardworking and devoted souls whom I have ever known. Two of the men who work here have become my friends. They are, I have no doubt, two of the most overburdened people in New York; but they dispense good cheer and absolutely unrestricted love to people in despair with a reserve of energy that I have rarely seen in twenty years of work among poor people.

I go out of my way to mention this because the general experience of homeless people with the city workers they confront is anything but benign. Harsh words will be heard within this book; I have no doubt that they are frequently deserved. But no one in the Martinique Hotel has spoken without gratitude of these extraordinary men. Robert Hayes spoke of the saints and martyrs in the homeless cause. Not all of them are radical activists or volunteers; some of them work for the city of New York and two at least are here.

If “Crisis,” as the families call this center, puts a visitor in mind of a safe haven, it is nearly the last haven one will find. Above and beyond are all those rooms, some as small as ten feet square, in which the residents do what they can to make it through the hours and the years. Although I have spent a great deal of time in recent years in some of the most desolate, diseased, and isolated areas of Haiti, I find the Martinique Hotel the saddest place that I have been in my entire life. Why it should seem worse than Haiti I cannot explain.