Rachel and Her Children (5 page)

What is life like for children in this building?

For many the question may be answered briefly, as their lives will be extremely short. The infant mortality rate in the hotel is twenty-five per thousand, over twice the
national rate and higher even than the rate in New York’s housing projects.
*
The term used by health professionals for the endangered status of an infant—a child of low birth weight, for example, or a child who does not gain weight after birth—is “failure to thrive.” We will learn more of the implications of this term in speaking with the residents of the hotel. There is one nurse present (daytime hours only) to meet all the health needs of the people in the building.

What of the children who manage to survive? Those who do not fail to thrive in their first hours of life will be released from the obstetric wards to rooms devoid of light, fresh air, or educative opportunities in early years. Play is a part of education too; they will not have much opportunity for play. Their front doors will give out upon a narrow corridor; their windows on a courtyard strewn with glass, or on the street, or on the wall of an adjacent wing of the hotel. The Empire State Building is two blocks away; if they are well situated they may have a lot of time to gaze at that. They are children who will often have no opportunity for Head Start. Many will wait for months before they are assigned to public school. Those who do get into school may find themselves embarrassed by the stigma that attaches to the “dirty baby,” as the children of the homeless are described by hospitals and sometimes perceived by their schoolteachers. Whether so perceived or not, they will
feel
dirty. Many, because of overflowing sewage in their bathrooms, will be dirty and will bring the smell of destitution with them into class.

They are children who write letters each December to a Santa Claus who sometimes has no opportunity to answer. If their mothers or social workers are attentive, they
may get a Christmas present from the fire department or the
New York Daily News
. They are children who receive used clothes from volunteers, emergency food from crisis workers, quarters sometimes from pedestrians in Herald Square.

If the children are awake at night they may hear their mothers pray. Some of these women pray a great deal more than other people I have met. There are Bibles in most of their rooms. Many, however, cannot read.

By December 22, two nights after I arrive in New York City, I have met about a dozen families living in the Martinique. I’ve been told that people here would be reluctant to confide in someone they don’t know. Perhaps they ought to be reluctant. But this doesn’t prove to be the case. I ask some questions to begin each conversation. How did you end up here? How do you manage? What do you long for? What may happen next? The mechanical matters are answered quickly. People in pain move to the heart of things more rapidly than I expect.

In a small room on the ninth floor there is a mood of resignation and a smell of unwashed clothes. There is no place to sit except the floor or beds. Gwen sits with her children on one of the beds. The baby is two. The older child is eight. I sit on the floor. There is another bed next to the window.

“I was the youngest child in my family. My father was a seaman, so he was away from home for many years. He died when I was a young girl. I was a serious student and I graduated from Jamaica High. I had worked since I was seventeen. I did private-duty nursing: taking care of chronically ill people. When I graduated I received a scholarship to Stony Brook. I wanted to become a surgical nurse.

“What I would have wanted, to be honest, was to be a
surgeon. I have dreamed of this for many years. I dream about it still. In my dream I see myself as I had hoped to be: wearing the green robe. But I did not think that I could go so far; it would have taken many years.”

She speaks in a beautiful voice about her interrupted dreams. “I had already had one child. I had done a year and a half at Stony Brook when suddenly my mother became ill. I was needed in my mother’s house. I nursed my mother. I could not accept that she was dying. I loved my mother. She was the entire world to me. And then she passed. It turned out to be cancer. In a month’s time she was gone.

“This was the hardest thing that I had known. I was grown, a married woman with a child, but I felt that I was drawn back to my childhood again. Oh, my mother was my idol. I was scared to go on in the world alone. I believe I had a nervous breakdown but I was too sick to understand. I did not realize what was wrong.

“My brothers took me to the priest. The priest said that my mother had been taken from me as a punishment because I loved her more than God. I believe I went into a long withdrawal. I did not know what was happening to me. The priest said they should bring me to the burial plot. It was very difficult for me. I had to see the tablet on the stone. I had to know that she was gone. So then I knew that she had passed.

“My husband and I had purchased a three-family house in Queens. We had tenants. It was our home. When I was ill I couldn’t work. We couldn’t meet the payments. They foreclosed.

“Being here, you fight against depression. You know that you are in a struggle and you know you cannot yield. This is what you have to tell yourself: This is your home.
This is home
. If it’s the Martinique Hotel, it is your home.

“I do miss my home in Queens. If you are from Massachusetts
I’ll explain to you what Queens is like. It’s like a neighborhood of Springfield, Massachusetts. You might say, serene. This room is costing $1,600. For this money, we could buy a house and live together. We could have another chance to have a home. Houses in Queens cost $80,000 to $100,000. If I had a home I would go back to work. I could work at night and save the money to return to school. When I first came here I believed that all these things were in my future still. I had a picture of my life. So all of this seemed real. After you’re living here awhile you begin to lose hold of your dream. You start to tell yourself that it’s forever: ‘This is it. It isn’t going to change. It can’t get worse. It isn’t going to get better.’ So you start to lose the courage to fight back.

“You do spend a lot of time in line. You spend a whole day at the washer. You spend another whole day at the welfare. You go there at 9:00 a.m. You wait sometimes until 5:00 in the afternoon. Then you get this check and then, of course, you know you won’t receive a dime. It’s written out to you and the hotel. When you have been living here two years, wouldn’t you think that they could have that check all ready when you come?

“Then you also have to look for housing. Being as I come from Queens, I go there on the train. I walk for hours. I am looking for a house I can afford. Welfare allows me $244. I look. I make appointments. I go out there every morning once my daughter goes to school. I take the baby with me. If it was $350 or $400 I’d be out of here by now. It’s not easy for $244.

“Doing laundry does take you a lot of time. I spend $35 every two weeks washing clothes. Across town, it would cost me $20, maybe $25. Pulling a shopping cart so far, my baby here at home alone—I cannot do it. I can’t go so far. They do charge an awful lot for those machines. I don’t like to say this—I am not the kind of person to call
somebody dishonest; but, to me, they are not dealing with an honest deck.”

Her husband, Bill, lives with her. Forbidden to live here openly, he lives here by the subterfuge imposed on almost every father by the welfare system. He’s earning a small salary. It’s not enough to pay prevailing rents in New York City and it wouldn’t be enough to handle the expense of food and clothes and health care for the children and for Gwen. If it’s known that he is here, however, Gwen may lose her welfare check, food stamps, and Medicaid; she may also be ineligible to stay here at the Martinique. Forced to sneak and lie, therefore, she and Bill feel soiled by the organized deception they must carry out in order to remain together as a family.

Bill and Gwen are on a list for public housing. What they do not know is that 200,000 names are on that list ahead of theirs. They believe that, if they do things right, they will soon be living in a project. What they do not know is that the waiting period is eighteen years. Driven by economic forces she cannot control and is not sufficiently informed to understand, Gwen obeys the rules, fills out the forms, goes each day to search for an apartment she cannot afford, diligently combing a diminished housing market in which minimal rents exceed the limit she’s permitted by at least $100. Like a well-conditioned animal within a research lab, she pursues each channel of improbability that is presented. Every channel she explores returns her to the place where she began.

While we’re speaking, her husband knocks and comes into the room. Heavily dressed against the cold, he removes a woolen cap, stoops down beside the bed, picks up the baby, and, while he holds him in one arm, reaches his other arm to shake my hand. After that one interruption, he defers to her and lets her talk. He takes the baby over to the bed beside the window, cradles him, and looks outside.

“Schoolwise, this is hard for her.” She gestures to the eight-year-old beside her. “She went to Head Start and parochial school in Queens. Here, she has thirty-three children in her class. I follow everything: her lessons, homework, and her grades. For these children I have the highest hopes. I tell the principal I want my son to go to college and become a doctor. I tell him that I want my daughter to become a nurse. He says to me: ‘Well, Mrs. Abington, certain children can adjust to this and certain children can’t.’ I do not know if they should adjust to something if it’s bad.

“That’s my Bible on the bed behind you. My daughter has her Bible too. I know the Bible very well. The Bible is what taught me how to read. When I read those ‘thee’s’ and ‘thou’s,’ I have this dream: God comes to me. He calls me ‘thee.’ I call Him ‘Thou.’ I tell myself that God is speaking to me. Yes. I do believe in God. I am a Catholic. There is a Franciscan church on Thirty-first Street. I go there when I’m feeling scared. On Sundays I prefer to go back to my church in Queens. It was my mother’s church and I was baptized in that church. My mother is buried in the cemetery there.”

G
wen’s voice lingers in my mind. For the money spent to keep her here she said that she could buy a home and lead a normal life. The room is costing almost $20,000 every year. Is it necessary for the city to spend all this money to keep families here?

City officials say that they are powerless to strike a better bargain with the hotel owners. “It is,” says the mayor, “a question of supply and demand.”

What is the power that the hotel owners hold? Research by the
Village Voice
and other New York papers has elicited some information. Total costs for giving shelter to the homeless families of this city are about $150 million. Almost half, $72 million, is spent to house over 3,000 families in hotels. Of this total, $14 million goes to a business partnership, identified with a man named Morris
Horn and several others, who own or operate seven hotels.
*

Some, but not all, welfare hotel owners make large contributions to political campaigns in New York City. Mr. Horn and his partners, who receive the largest business, make the largest contributions.

One of their hotels, the Jamaica Arms, was selected by the city to house ninety families with sick children. This building
belonged
to the city in 1982; it had been seized from former owners in default of taxes. Instead of keeping the site to operate a humane shelter, the city sold it to a private corporation for $75,000. It was then resold to its present owners for $200,000. “The city,” writes the
Voice
, “now pays about $1.2 million a year to house families in a building it owned four years ago.”

Since 1980, the owners of this building have contributed over $100,000 to the electoral campaigns of city officials, several of whom determine housing policy.

The sums of money paid to these and other hotel owners have been reported widely. The second-largest partnership—that of the Sillins family, owners of the Martinique—is reported to have grossed $11 million in the year in which this narrative takes place. The Martinique alone received at least $8 million. The owners of a smaller hotel, the Holland, grossed $6 million the same year. It is not known how much is paid to the Prince George Hotel. What
is
known is that this hotel, which houses more homeless families than any other in New York, is operated by South African investors.

Journalists in New York City have repeatedly unearthed reports of influence wielded by, or favors granted
to, some of these owners. These matters, while disturbing, are tangential to the housing crisis. A matter that is not tangential is that so much money has been paid to so few people to provide such wretched housing for poor children.

In 1970, when Mr. Koch was still in Congress, he was stirred by the death of a child in a hotel in his district. He sent a telegram to John Lindsay, then the mayor of New York City, demanding that the city stop assigning families with children to hotels that he called “fleabags”—on another occasion, he called one such hotel a “hellhole”—at what he described as “Waldorf-Astoria prices.” In that year the city spent $10 million to give shelter to 1,100 families in hotels. The city now spends seven times that much to house three times that many families in the same kinds of hotels.

A member of the New York City Council notes that universities which find themselves in need of dormitory space house their students in New York hotels for an average of $355 a month: about one-fifth the city’s monthly payments to hotels that house the poor.

Why, in view of all this published information, does the city keep on wasting public funds to shelter homeless people in such dangerous hotels? Neither private greed nor the potential power of the hotel owners can explain this. Better explanations are much less sensational. Perhaps for this reason, they are given less attention.