The Homeless Hilton
Mayor Bloomberg has announced plans to shut down the city’s largest homeless shelter, the 335 unit Carlton House in South Ozone Park, Queens. The mayor claims that there just aren’t enough homeless people to fill the former luxury hotel. The City’s Department of Homesless Services’ website brags, “This is the first time in DHS history that a facility has been closed solely because the capacity is no longer needed.”
Is the homeless population going down? “Oh certainly not,” protests Jeff Rabinovici, my good friend and comrade who is an outreach worker for Partnership for the Homeless, “According to the DHS’ latest accounting, it’s going up.” The number of families living in long term shelters is on the decline, due to a number of factors, including strong-arm tactics by the city. But the number of families checking into “drop-in” shelters (the nightly, first come, first serve shelters, where many of those who get a roof for the night don’t actually get a bed) is on the rise. And, of course, single homeless men are still the shelter system’s last priority, which is why you still see so many of them sleeping on the streets.
Obviously, Mayor Mike is playing an election year numbers game so that he can brag, “By investing in cost-efficient solutions, and bringing accountability and focused management attention to an issue many believed unmanageable, we have made unprecedented headway in relatively short order.” Yes, our CEO mayor has employed Arthur Anderson-style accounting in order to make the homeless problem go away!
There is an additional wrinkle. The Carlton House is operated by the city through a sub-contract with the Salvation Army. Apparently, the Salvation Army is losing many of its homeless outreach contracts with the city. The Bowery Residents Committee has been picking up many of those contracts and more by submitting low-ball bids to the city. The BRC pays its outreach workers, on average, about $5 an hour less than most other agencies (like the Salvation Army). This is the same Bowery Residents Committee that’s trying to evict CBGB’s. The BRC’s single-minded devotion to serving those who are most needy in our society is commendable. It would disappointing if such good work comes at the cost of further gentrifying the Bowery and denying their devoted, hard-working outreach workers a living wage.
There is no public word on what comes next for the Carlton House. The building began life as the Hilton JFK in the 1970’s. It turned out that people don’t want to pay for a luxury hotel room so near the roaring jets of an international airport, and so the hotel was re-christened a Best Western. The steady decline in business continued unabated, until its owners announced plans to cease operations in early 2002. The Carlton House holds a special place in my heart because the Hotel Employees union was planning to strike it (and a sister hotel) when I joined the staff. It was my first almost strike. At one point, we were going to physically occupy the building to prevent its closing. “Are you ready to get arrested?,” my boss asked me as she cackled with delight at the thought of being dragged out of there herself. Of course, I was, but it was unnecessary. The company settled, and gave the laid-off workers a massive severance package (not unlike the recent Plaza settlement).
Every time I’ve driven past the building, I remember the excitement of that fight, but also the sadness of all those lost jobs and dashed hopes. The construction of a luxury Hilton hotel in southwest Queens was the product of overly ambitious development plans, not unlike the Olympic dreams for Long Island City, or Ratner’s stadium-city of towers. The depressing site of this run-down and near-vacant hotel should serve as a warning to think twice and have a contingency plan before building more towers out yonder.
THe Carlton House should remain a homeless shelter. There is still a pressing need for such long-term housing for our city’s homeless families, and it makes the symbolism of the Homeless Hilton that much more potent. The big building plans at LIC, Atlantic Avenue, Williamsburg and elsewhere must include more affordable housing now, less those towers be relegated to homeless shelters years from now.
Board of Education Layeth the Smacketh Down
Although they were generally good guys, I don’t recall my high school history teachers making a big impression on me. Of course, they couldn’t piledrive me into my desk. My old high school, Benjamin N. Cardozo, apparently corrected that shortcoming by hiring professional wrestler Matthew Kaye (a.k.a. Matt Striker, Matt Martel, Hydro, or Hot Stuff) to teach European history.
Unfortunately, he has resigned after getting caught wrestling in Japan while calling in sick. After copping to the “mistake,” he’s offering to pay back the days and is hoping to get another job in city schools, which an investigator has recommended against.
“I would have been better off beating a kid, because those teachers always seem to keep their jobs,” Kaye told the Daily News. (Those teachers, I would venture, don’t document their malfeasance on the web). I don’t think the Board of Education should give up on hiring professional wrestlers. Next time, I recommend hiring Dr. Cube for the Science department. He has a PhD…in Evil.
Lawnguyland
Long Island is full of surprises. I’ve been doing house visits for a certain union on Long Island. I’ve been working in Lindenhurst, a town that is mostly known to me from those hypnotic station announcements on the Long Island Railroad (“Making station stops at…Wantaugh, Seaford, Massapequa, Massapequa Park, Amityville, Copiague, Lindenhurst and Babylon; Change at Babylon for the train to Montauk…”), which are stored in the same place in my brain as parts of the Nicene Creed and the pledge of allegiance. I’m not in the habit of spending time in Suffolk county, and it’s easy to forget that we live on an actual island that’s surrounded by water and docks. Lindenhurst feels like one of Maine’s lobster towns, but without all that pesky tourism.
When you get far enough south, these modest, working class houses have dock slips for backyards. When I don’t get an answer at the front door, I nervously look around back to be sure that no one’s escaping by sea. After all, in my rolled-up shirt-sleeves and tie I look a fair bit like a Jehovah’s Witness, and who wouldn’t take the opportunity to put some ocean between themselves and evangelicals at the door?
The great thing about working in a seaport town is the ready availability of fresh, delicious seafood. I finally satisfied my summertime hankering for fried clam strips at Southside Fish and Clam on the Montauk Highway. I momentarily disregarded concerns about a “red tide” and enjoyed the thick, meaty and delicious strips found there. I also enjoyed the terrific, honest-to-goodness oldies radio station heard there. B-103 is now the last oldies station in the New York Metro region after CBS101 was switched to the hated “Jack” format by its evil corporate parent. Unfortunately, its signal won’t even reach to Queens.
What I’ve noticed most often are the strange living situations that Long Islanders are forced into by low wages and high housing costs. Brothers, sisters, cousins, great aunts, grandmas and in-laws all under the same roofs (actually, some are in the garage, others the basement; more, I bet, are living on those boats in the backyard). Most of the Islanders that I meet who are in their 20’s plan to leave New York entirely. This jives with the experience of most of the people I grew up with on the edge of the world, and other people I’ve met along the way.
Long Island, as a housing development and a society, is scarcely 50 years old. Any society that cannot provide jobs, homes and schools for its young is a failed society. If only narrow-minded voters realize this as they vote down school budgets and lobby against apartment developments.
Jackie Robinson Park vs. Snapple Apple Stadium
The recent, long-awaited announcement of plans for a successor to the Mets’ Shea Stadium opens the chilling possibility that New York City will be stuck with one of those stupid corporate-sponsorship name venues. From the Staples Center in Los Angeles to the MCI Arena in Washington, DC and, in between, those poor bastards in Houston who were stuck with Enron Field, corporate-sponsored naming rights have blighted our nation’s sporting venues.
This frustrating trend has reached as close as New Jersey where the naming rights to the Brendan Byrne Arena were sold to Continental Airlines (while the poor old man was still alive to see it), and…well, what the hell was the PNC Bank Center before it became a corporate ho? (How the hell is one supposed to find the stadium if the name keeps changing?)
With the impending demise of Shea Stadium – which is owned by the city – and it’s replacement with a privately funded stadium, there is a real risk that fans will be saddled with the “Snapple Apple Stadium” or the “Always Tampons Arena.”
The current stadium was named for William Shea, a lawyer and civic booster who attracted the expansion National League franchise to Queens in 1962. That precedent leaves fans with the unfortunate alternative of riding the 7 train to the “Doctoroff Dome.”
There’s really only one true alternative name for the Mets’ new home: Jackie Robinson Park. Jackie Robinson was, of course, the first black player in the major leagues, a superstar who led the old Brooklyn Dodgers to six National League pennants and one World Series Championship. Fifty years after Robinson broke the color barrier, all the teams in the major leagues retired his jersey number. New York went a step further and gave him the dubious honor of renaming the Interboro Parkway, the two lane death trap that runs from my beloved Kew Gardens to East New York (past Robinson’s grave in Cypress Hills), the Jackie Robinson Parkway.
A true honor would be naming the new home of Da Bums’ spiritual successors, the New York Mets, after one of our proudest heroes. Mets fans had better jump on the campaign to name our new mecca Jackie Robinson Park before the Citibank Coliseum makes us ashamed to be New Yorkers.