Manhattan's Martinique
Hirschfield, Robert
HOUSING THE HOMELESS MANHATTAN'S MARTINIQUE PORTRAIT OF A HOTEL The name of Manhattan's Martinique Hotel might suggest tropical warmth, sea breezes, and affluent vacationers. But it is a cruel...
...Robert hirschfield (Robert Hirschfield is a free-lance writer who has contributed both articles and poetry to Commonweal...
...And Ms...
...Between them, the two mothers have five teenage daughters, on whom the crowding is most cruel...
...The privacy they need so badly is to be found only in the bathroom...
...A welfare mother of five, receiving a monthly rent allotment of approximately $300, would be hard-pressed these days to find an apartment in any of the city's five boroughs...
...I keep to myself...
...The families that live in the Martinique are predominantly single-mother families, black and Hispanic families...
...Jackson says the teachers often find one of her daughters asleep at her desk...
...They must use hotplates, which according to hotel regulations are forbidden...
...Should she happen to lose her low-income apartment, or be put out of the apartment of a friend or a relative, or* arrive in Manhattan homeless, she would have little choice but to seek emergency assistance from the city...
...That could mean winding up in the Martinique or in one of the other hotels used to temporarily house homeless families, of which there are an estimated 4000 in New York...
...The city pays the owners of the Martinique from $2,000 to $3,000 a month per family...
...72: Commonweal...
...The number of children here exceeds 1500...
...But that takes time...
...Still others try their luck at different hotels, but the problems of one are usually the problems of all...
...they try their best to help each other out...
...It's bad here," concedes Bob Behr...
...A family's stay at the Martinique may range anywhere from a few months to four years...
...A loud river of traffic separates the America of the consumer from the America of the consumed...
...Drug-dealing going on...
...But after two years of living here, she is able to put the hotel into perspective...
...Across the street from the Martinique stands Macy's and the now moribund Gimbels...
...Others find apartments that are terrible and have to return...
...A year ago, the apartment she was 13 February 1987: 71 living in was destroyed by fire...
...One often-mentioned solution to the homelessness problem is for the city to renovate abandoned buildings and rent the apartments at low cost...
...To make matters worse, the children complain that teachers refer to them unflatteringly as "Martinique kids," which serves to further alienate and infuriate the youngsters...
...Green relates that the reading score of her eleven-year-old has dropped two grades in the two years she has been living at the Martinique...
...Huddled with her children in their two rooms, she dreads the fights in the corridors and the rock music that blares at all hours of the night...
...Wilma Jackson, a soft-spoken black woman with seven children, lived in the blighted Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn where she worked as a nurse's aide until her fourth and fifth children (twin girls) were born, forcing her to quit her job and go on welfare...
...Where there is no privacy, there is no dignity...
...In that cramped space the younger children have no place to play...
...After a restless night of doubling up in bunk beds and being awakened by the din in the hotel, the children are ill-prepared to study...
...By far the biggest problem is the overcrowding...
...School buses come for them as early as seven in the morning...
...The mothers meet every week to discuss their problems...
...The mothers receive food stamps, but they have no stoves on which to cook their food...
...In contrast, Azalee Green, also black and the mother of five who has been living at the Martinique for two years, moves among the other mothers with the ease of a woman who was once a social worker...
...But after a while, you begin to see it as a community...
...The children do not suffer from malnutrition," says Bob Behr of the Coalition for the Homeless who works with the children at the Martinique, "but they do feel anxiety about food which makes them try to steal food and hoard it...
...Rents in mid-Manhattan make no distinction between misery and luxury...
...Some find apartments that are reasonable and never return...
...Jackson both have two rooms for their families...
...But it is a cruel misnomer for a hotel that has as its clientele over 400 homeless families...
...And where there is no dignity, anger festers — particularly in adolescents...
...Unable to find another, she was sent to the Martinique...
...There is a bitter irony to the poverty here that sets it apart from poverty elsewhere...
...But it's better than those other massive shelters the city operates where row after row of cots are lined up, and you don't even have a room of your own...
...The overcrowding affects the children's schooling as well...
...Also from Brooklyn, she hates the Martinique...
...They must wait for an older brother or sister, or for their mother, to take them to a park or for a walk...
...It's not all bad like people think...
...I am a Baptist," she says, "and I am afraid of what I see here...
...They are also alloted $2.13 per person a day in restaurant money, an amount that makes restaurant going an all but futile excursion...
...At first, you see it as a prison, and you think everyone here is a criminal except you...
...She greets the disoriented new arrivals, advises those who come to her with problems, and does it all with a light touch that belies her background as a battered woman...
...People acting in loose ways...
...Green and Ms...
...They are the victims of batterings, burnouts (both literal and figurative), plain bad luck, and perhaps more than anything, the lack of low-income housing in New York City...
...One cuts through bureaucratic red tape slowly, while the number of homeless families in the city is growing rapidly...
...They seem to rise up all around one like shrill vegetation, the kind of vegetation one expects to find in third-world refugee camps, not in a mid-Manhattan hotel...
Vol. 114 • February 1987 • No. 3
