Day 155…
It’s raining.
Drops are clattering on the air conditioning units and low rolling thunder is echoing off of the tall buildings all around us.
It looks like this is going to last all day. The cat, I am sure, is going to remain hidden for the duration.
Yesterday while it was clear, I walked downtown and, of course, got caught in a deluge. Luckily, I was able to stay dry under a restaurant canopy while it lasted, and I talked to a friend on the phone the whole time. Yesterday’s rain was a gully-washer. Today’s is just… rain.
A couple of weeks ago, friends of mine who have been sheltering outside the city came into town for the first time since the lockdown. They thought that midtown felt like it did in the seventies - bleak, unsafe and dirty. I noted what their reaction was, but honestly, I thought that it was a bit of an exaggeration.
Yesterday, though, I walked through Times Square and then headed west along 42nd Street and, I have to say, I thought much the same thing.
When retail stores reopened in New York City a short time ago, some people from the surrounding boroughs took trips in to see the city. Stores in Times Square were open, but they were still not getting the massive foot traffic that they had come to expect and rely on in the past. Even so, people had a bit of spending money thanks to the government’s weekly payments, so some shopped.
It’s only been two weeks since the extra government payments have stopped, but there is already a noticeable difference in the vibe of the area. Nobody out on the street was carrying a shopping bag.
There is trash on the streets. Food wrappers and old coffee cups blow back and forth in the gutters. Stores are advertising big sales to try and attract the few shoppers that might be out there.
Some of those stores have now closed.
The huge MacDonald’s restaurant on the south side of 42nd across from the New Victory Theatre is completely closed and all evidence of it ever having been there is gone.
The PAX restaurant next to the New 42nd Street Studios which was where all of us got coffee and salads when we were rehearsing shows there, is closed for good. Nothing, really, is open along most of the stretch.
As I walked towards 8th Avenue, I passed by a couple of guys leaning against an empty building. One of them spoke out and said, “Hey, you dropped your bag of marijuana,” and held up a bag of weed.
139 of the New York’s 700 hotels are now being used by the city to house the homeless.
13,000 people who would normally be accommodated in homeless shelters are now being housed in otherwise shut-down hotels throughout the area. The homeless shelters, where everyone is kept together, were all seeing spikes in virus cases.
The Mayor and the government of New York are refusing to release the full list of hotels they are making use of, and they won’t tell anyone how much it is costing. It’s not hard to figure it out though.
Near us on the Upper West Side, the Lucerne, Belnord and Belleclaire Hotels have been basically converted to homeless shelters. Just south of Times Square in the Garment District, the Kixby, Springhill Suites, Doubletree, Best Western and Hampton Inn have also been converted. A friend of mine who lives in Hell’s Kitchen and has become a vocal public advocate for reform says that thirty-one hotels in midtown are now housing the homeless.
The Daily Mail in the UK found out from an apparent inside source that this is costing the already strapped city about $2 million a night.
There are currently about 17,000 New Yorkers who do not have homes. This is already a problem. 4,000 of them aren’t even in the shelter system.
The hotels are sitting empty without tourists and business travelers to fill them so why not use them?
A 2016 study by the NYC Continuum of Care found that 24.3% of shelter residents suffered from some form of mental illness. The National Coalition for the Homeless found that 38% of the nation’s homeless were alcohol dependent and 26% were drug dependent.
The NY Post (I would take this with a grain of salt but there seems to be a lot of corroborative evidence) reported that at least six registered pedophiles were placed in one of the Upper West Side hotels (the Belleclaire) that is located on 77th Street near an elementary school.
Mayor DeBlasio says that there is a strong support structure in place to provide counseling services for all of these people, but interviews with residents belie that. There is also no visible police presence around any of these places.
About two weeks ago, Councilperson Helen Rosenthal emailed her constituents in the area and confirmed that all level 3 sex offenders had been removed from the Belleclaire Hotel. Level 3 offenders are those who are at the highest risk and need to register for life. She went on to say, “I am demanding that all remaining offenders be moved out as well.” That seemed to change, however, when she was interviewed on TV the next day. “This is very temporary, in the same way that we have to understand that COVID is temporary.” Is she saying that sex offenders near schools are OK because they will only be there for a few months?
Add to this that the city has also released some prison inmates early from Riker’s Island because of the COVID-19 situation there, and placed them in hotels around the city, too.
It is no wonder that the city is starting to feel like it did in the seventies.
None of this has been thought out. While it certainly solves the immediate problem of where to house the homeless during this health crisis, the unsupported and ill-thought out move is creating far more serious long-term problems.
Just look around the country. We have months of this ahead of us. There is no end yet visible to the pandemic and no plan from the Government.
There is a lot of wishful thinking around various vaccines, but nothing concrete. Vaccines in general are having a public relations perception issue these days. If a COVID-19 vaccine comes out too soon without proper testing and problems arise, that is going to be yet another disaster.
As the homeless presence increases in residential areas around the city, more and more people are going to move away. It is coincidence, I am sure, but Sam Domb, the owner of the Lucerne Hotel at 79th Street who had to take in homeless residents, has put his nearby townhouse on the market. Families are just not going to be willing to walk past tweaked homeless guys sleeping out in front of their buildings. They are going to take flight in the same was that they did 40-50 years ago.
Bloody used needles on the sidewalk were a common sight when I first started coming into the city. Where my ex and I lived in Hell’s Kitchen we were constantly having to get our landlord to repair the outer door to the building because addicts would push it open and shoot up in the tiny entrance vestibule. We’d come down in the morning to needles and scorched spoons and worse.
It took the city decades to change its image. People had started to think that it was a dangerous cesspit. A concerted effort slowly, over time, changed that perception to New York being a safe and vibrant place that visitors would want to visit and spend their money in.
If we aren’t careful, Mayor DeBlasio is going to undo all of that by not thinking through what he is doing.
It won’t take very long before images of violence and danger from here make their way out into the ether and entrench themselves in peoples’ minds. It won’t be easy to erase those.
I’m looking out the window and trying to decide whether or not to go outside. It’s sort of raining and sort of not. There’s a kind of hazy yellow funk over everything and it’s very humid indeed.
New York City will survive this. It’s nothing if not resilient. We seem to have managed to take everything that’s been thrown at us in the past and figure out what to do. I have no doubt that we will be able to do it again, but it would be nice not to have everything thrown at us at once.
There is an honest to goodness serious homeless problem in the City of New York. Nobody disputes that and nobody wants to see these people shipped off to somewhere. We can take the truth.
I think that we were so successful at flattening our curve in part because our Governor didn’t sugarcoat how serious the situation was that we were in. We got what was going on and reacted accordingly. I wish our Mayor had the same faith in us. You can’t pretend that you aren’t creating another just as serious a problem with how you are solving another problem.
Putting part of the proposed police funding into real and effective social problem solving would actually mitigate some of the need for police action. Put this out into the open and let the messy uncomfortable discussions begin.
In the meantime, despite the rain, I am, indeed, going to go out for a walk.
Walking through the streets of New York has always been something I enjoyed. These days it is one of the few things keeping me sane.
I intend to keep doing it in the city that I love for as long as I can.
the rain feels like our situation in the city
sorta being looked at and sorta not
Knot
Me too
continue to walk everyday in the city that was my first love
Helps me stay sane and in movement
Sad to think
sheltering the homeless is a solution
happy for them they have a place to go
home
to
but they still remain
less in health and well being
its a beginning
I just hope
the Mayor doesn’t
shut the door on something they can’t deal with or face
and pretend everything is ok
the only action here is makeing believe something is being done
when
nothing was truly being
seen for all that it is
you can’t change something unless you see it for what it is
not what you can handle it being
homeless people are children of God too
drug addicted, mentally challenged and have given up
We can’t give up
they will only continue to bleed on us all
even in a house