Rachel and Her Children Read Online Free PDF Page B

large part by the many small children living there. These children share accommodations with a considerable cockroach and rodent population. The nearly 400 families housed at the Martinique are assisted by just seven HRA caseworkers, whose efforts to keep in touch with each family—at least once each month—often amount to no more than a note slipped under a door.”
    The report made by the city council offers this additional information: The average family is a mother with three children. Thirty-four percent of families became homeless after eviction by a landlord; 47 percent after being doubled up with other families; 19 percent after living in substandard housing. Fifty percent of heads of households report that they have once held full-time jobs. Seventy percent have seen at least five vacant units theycould not afford or from which they have been turned away by landlords who did not want children or welfare recipients.
    The city council describes a family living here more than one year: The family was originally forced to leave a city-owned apartment when one child, a daughter, became ill from lead-paint poison. In their next apartment the family’s son became ill from lead poison. “After six months of shuttling back and forth between hotels and EAUs,” the city council writes, “the family found itself at the Martinique, where lead paint peels from the ceiling of their room.”
    The city council makes this final observation: “On the day of the committee’s visit, just two elevators were operating…. The elevator on which the committee rode did not operate properly.” At the time of my first visit, six months earlier, one elevator was in operation.
    It is difficult to do full justice to the sense of hopelessness one feels on entering the building. It is a haunting experience and leaves an imprint on one’s memory that is not easily erased by time or cheerful company. Even the light seems dimmer here, the details harder to make out, the mere geography of twisting corridors and winding stairs and circular passageways a maze that I found indecipherable at first and still find difficult to figure out. After fifty or sixty nights within this building, I have tried but cannot make a floor plan of the place.
    Something of Dickens’ halls of chancery comes to my mind whenever I am wandering those floors. It is the knowledge of sorrow, I suppose, and of unbroken dreariness that dulls the vision and impairs one’s faculties of self-location and discernment. If it does this to a visitor, what does it do to those for whom this chancery is home?
    The city council tells us that the owners of the building are Bernard and Robert Sillins. The apparent manager (he is described as a consultant) is a gentleman, Mr. Tuccelli,whom some of the tenants view with fear. Mr. Tuccelli is consultant also to the nearby Prince George, but he maintains his office here.
    The lobby is long, high-ceilinged, vast. On the right side, as one enters, is a sort of “guard post,” where a visitor must either be signed in by residents or else present good reason to be in the building. Even the best reason (meeting with the social workers) does not guarantee admission. Residents must be notified of waiting guests by guards. There are fifteen occupied floors above the lobby. There is no bell system.
    In a recess on the left side of the lobby are two elevators and a winding flight of stairs. Again on the left, but farther back, is an alcove that contains a row of public phones. On the right side of the lobby, opposite the phones, there is a registration area—part of it original marble, part composed of plastic sheets and wooden slats. Though the wood and plastic give it the appearance of a temporary structure, it has been like this for several years. In this, it is suggestive of the total situation: a temporary shelter that has now been home to many children for two years and in some cases three. At the end of the lobby, on the left side, there