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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.
    * One reason for discrepancies in estimates derives from various ways of counting. Homeless advocates believe that all who ask for shelter during any extended period of time ought to be termed homeless. The government asks: “How many seek shelter on a given day?” If the HUD study, cited above, had considered those who asked for shelter in the course of one full year, its upper estimate would have exceeded 1.7 million.
    * Half a million families, of course, were not evicted in one year. Many of these legal actions are “repeats.” Others are unsuccessful. Still others are settled with payment of back rent.
    * For many years, the best known and most feared of these barracks was the Roberto Clemente shelter in the Bronx. The Clemente, housing over 200 people in a large gymnasium, was ordered closed in early 1986 by state officials. The city resisted the state’s order. After a suit brought by the Coalition for the Homeless, the Clemente was closed in September 1986. Several other barracks shelters continued to operate. The city’s policy on congregate shelters may be changing somewhat at the present time.
    * At the time of my first visit (December 1985) there were over 1,400 children in 389 families in the Martinique. By June of 1987, according to the city, there were 438 families in the Martinique.
    * The WIC program—reduced by the Reagan administration by $5 billion from 1982 to 1985—reaches about one third of those who need it nationwide.
    * Rent allowances in New York City will rise an average of $35 in 1988.

PART ONE
Christmas
at the
Martinique
Hotel

 
     
     
    For nine months the infant grows and grows in the womb…. At the end an x-ray shows the small but developed body quite bent over on itself and cramped; yet so very much has happened—indeed, a whole new life has come into being. For some hundreds of thousands of American children that stretch of time, those months, represent the longest rest ever to be had, the longest stay in any one place
.
    —Robert Coles
, Uprooted Children

1
A Mood of Resignation
    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 saysthis: “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