The Front Lines: Poverty and Homelessness in Southwest Yonkers

THE FRONT LINES is a nonfiction assemblage of stories and photos detailing modern-day poverty and homelessness in southwest Yonkers, New York by MFA Candidate Rachel McCain. A police “ride-along” of gritty southwest Yonkers provides one of the threads in a collection of my encounters with homeless people, nonprofit employees, government officials, residents and others who work, live, support and represent the city.

Yonkers is hardened, like a person who has seen too much too soon. Tales of homicide and drugs, racism and prostitution are woven into the fabric of the City of Hills. It is the old street walker of 1980s Larkin Plaza, sagging and worn from turning too many tricks. It’s the 1990s white resident living on the city’s residential east side, who is vehemently against building affordable housing in his or her neighborhood, despite growing up in Yonkers’ southwest. Conversely, it is the black or Hispanic resident living in the southwest, anxious and scared about his or her move to Yonkers’ east side, in 1995.

It’s the single mother of three looking for a fresh start on one of the “tree streets” in 1999, unaware of their crime-ridden past and present. It’s the homeless man or woman, destitute and depressed, who walks the streets surrounding Getty Square. It is the high school kid who turned to heroin for instant gratification, in the ’80s and yesterday. Or maybe it’s the lifelong resident who grew up in Mulford Gardens, watching his or her childhood memories disintegrate when the complex was demolished in 2009. And it’s the politician taking bribes but still promising a better tomorrow, while standing on a platform of lies, in 1983, 2013 and beyond.

In some places, the city is antique–full of mystery and forgotten history: Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research. Longfellow Junior High School. Abandoned School 19 and the Herald Statesman Building. Other areas are new and full of life, completely divergent from the city’s past: Ridge Hill. 66 Main Street. The revitalized downtown waterfront. Many are unaware of Yonkers’ times of yore, uninformed about the demolished Sprain Ridge Hospital that treated tubercular patients until the 1950s, on the Ridge Hill site. They do not know what happened to Robin Lawn and the Glenwood Lodge, the Hollywood Inn Clubhouse for Workingmen. Most remain uninformed about Public Bath House No. 1, demolished in 1962 to make way for a housing project, located at 55 Jefferson Street in the southwest neighborhood. According to an article in the Herald Statesman, the bath house had a “solidly imposing façade of a miniature 13th century castle, complete with parapets.”

“White flight” to Yonkers’ east side following factory closings, the slow decay of the city’s downtown area and the condensed placement of affordable housing in the southwest, created an east-west division that gave birth to a stark identity that is still associated with all things west of the Saw Mill Parkway: The city’s highest concentration of poverty is in southwest Yonkers.

In The Park

Arthur Bell sleeps in one of the abandoned buildings near the Hudson River waterfront. He prefers to stay there when it’s cold, he says, and not in one of the shelters. You can get robbed—anything can happen. His friend, who usually accompanies him, is currently in jail. He won’t be released for another few months, so Arthur roves the neighborhood alone. According to Police Officer O’Brien, Arthur was once raped while living on the street.

Most of the vacant buildings in the area he refers to are burnouts–shells of single and multi-family houses still standing, post-fire. Their stability is questionable, but they are assumed to be unsafe and undoubtedly derelict. Some buildings have been boarded up with rotted wood. Some are surrounded by rusty chain-link fences with large manmade holes. Houses are missing roofs and windows; they have charred wooden beams, melted paneling. Yards are strewn with snow-covered debris. A few homes are padlocked shut, adorned with graffiti and No Trespassing signage. Sometimes, he sleeps outside.

“I got blankets,” he says to me through the police car window. “It’s warm. I was staying in St. Mary’s by the park, under the ramp. You know, that Vark Street Park.”

It’s January. Dangerous and deadly, the cold is an unforgiving, muted stillness that settles over the often-glacial concrete sidewalks. But Arthur is used to this.

He is young, under the age of 35. Caucasian with red facial hair and green eyes, a sturdy build. When we see him, he’s wearing brown Carhartt overalls and a black Carhartt jacket–expensive outerwear he says he got from doing side work. He is homeless.

Arthur often visits the Sharing Community homeless shelter, for lunch and other services, and usually is seen outside scouring for cigarette butts. But he won’t sleep there.

“Maybe it’s a bit of a mental problem, and he can’t conform to a 9 to 5,” O’Brien says. “He doesn’t seem like he’s that old, either.”

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The park where Arthur sleeps is behind a church and across the street from a large low-income apartment complex. Summertime brings activity to the park’s basketball courts, but in January they’re covered with layers of snow and ice, around six inches thick. With the winter wind and proximity to the frozen Hudson River, it’s about 15 degrees. Still, we slowly trek through the slush, walking by empty cans of Crazy Stallion—a cheap beer bought from local bodegas for under $2—in search of Arthur’s “home.”

Past the snow-covered courts in the far corner is a concrete ramp used for walking to an adjoining field. The low-lying ramp by the edge of the park has a crawlspace beneath it, reminiscent of openings found underneath bridges. On the dry ground under the overpass there are stones, dirt, and broken glass. Pieces of cardboard boxes have been grouped together, stuck in the terrain in a row. It’s a makeshift fence—a way to block the frigid January wind.

This is where Arthur sleeps.

“I used to play in this park when I was a kid,” O’Brien says, his voice trailing off. We stand in silence and stare at the space, as warm breath flows from our nostrils.

From the Saw Mill to the Hudson

Police Officer John O’Brien has been an officer for 18 years. Born and raised in southwest Yonkers, he is a middle-aged Caucasian man, in his mid to late 40s, about 5’9″ and around 160 pounds. For the last five years, he’s worked at the Fourth Precinct, manning a foot post in the downtown area.

It’s a foot post, but not in the literal sense, he says. He drives a squad car and stops frequently to walk around. His friendly demeanor garners many waves and hellos, and several people stop him to chat. We cruise slowly around Getty Square—the so-called “downtown” business district in the southwest—a major transportation hub dotted with 99 cent stores, empty store fronts and cheap variety shops not too far from the waterfront.

Yonkers, which is about 20 square miles, is served by only four police precincts. O’Brien’s patrol area is divided into six different patrol sectors that serve and protect the area’s 57,000 residents. Also within the Fourth Precinct are three of the city’s largest housing projects. Roughly 7,000 public housing units have been built throughout the city, with 6,644–97.7 percent–located in the southwest. The rest of the city–mainly the east side–is zoned for single-family homes. And because of zoning laws in the municipality, the high rises–low-income apartments–were only allowed in one portion of Yonkers: in the southwest.

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It’s mid-morning in January, and many people are on the streets waiting for buses and cabs, wearing hats and gloves, faces swathed with scarves. But not everyone on the cold city streets is waiting for a form of transportation.

O’Brien points out who’s homeless—or at least who he knows of. He points to a man in an electric wheelchair, in front of a restaurant in Getty Square—the downtown Yonkers business district. According to O’Brien, the man was hit by a car a few years ago and is in the wheelchair because his leg never healed properly. “But he steals,” he says. “We got a call when he was caught stealing cold cuts from the supermarket, in his wheelchair.”

Selling cigarettes is a usual hustle, O’Brien says. It’s not much, but it’ll keep a little money in one’s pockets. Some sell their urine in front of the city’s methadone clinics for about $5 a bottle. But many homeless people, he says, also sell heroin. “It’s sort of like a little day-job thing.”

He is very familiar with the homeless population in southwest Yonkers, and knows almost everyone we see by first and last name. O’Brien can rattle off their family histories, favorite music, jail records. He knows who has addictions and who’s prone to violence, who suffers from any mental illnesses.

“I don’t see it getting any better,” he says, shaking his head. “For me, I see more of an influx of people here. Folks are losing their jobs, getting divorced, ending up on the streets.”

Despite the arctic air, many homeless people still live on the streets. To keep warm, there are stairwells and abandoned buildings for sleep, a large library during the day. Alcohol keeps the body warm, O’Brien says, and the drinks of choice tend to be Crazy Stallion and White Cobra, Martin’s Vodka—all cost no more than $2.

Wintertime calls for creativity to stay warm. If proper clothing and heat are luxuries, hypothermia is a familiar constant. According to O’Brien, the corners of a local supermarket’s garage can offer places to sleep, away from the elements. He says a man was once found sleeping next to a slow plow that was parked against a wall. In the summer, O’Brien says, homeless people who stay in that particular garage sleep on cardboard boxes in the stairways.

“A lot of people don’t want services,” he says. “They stay in the library for the day, down by the waterfront.”

Over the years, O’Brien says, there have been various incidents at the library–though not recently. Fighting, smoking, doing drugs in the bathrooms. Inside the library, we meet an African-American man named Tyriq–a 28-year-old with a drinking and domestic abuse problem. Once, says O’Brien, he gave his girlfriend a black eye and several stitches for going back to live in a shelter without him. They were living inside a garage and he beat her up for leaving him, pushing her down a concrete staircase.

The City of Hills

12 p.m. traffic jam on New Main Street, downtown by Yonkers City Hall and Getty Square. Buses, cars–wintry, congested Monday hell. Over the past January, the northeast experienced the coldest weather in recent years. A Polar Vortex has caused temperatures in southern New York to drop below 0 degrees, with frostbite and hypothermia warnings becoming daily reminders.

A voice coming through the radio says it’s 24 degrees, as the squad car pulls up across from the corner of Ann Street. A sagging curb is covered in black snow—the same curb that sits in front of a parking garage a few blocks away from a homeless shelter. It’s the same garage where an elderly homeless man froze to death in one of the stairwells earlier that January. The man hung out at a nearby liquor store where he cut up boxes in exchange for a few dollars. There are no newspapers bearing his obituary. His name, says O’Brien, was Joe Tirelli.

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A call comes through the police officer’s car radio about a tripped alarm. It was lunchtime for some, so the call seemed strange. Probably an accident, the officer said, but it could really be anything. As it goes.

12:12 p.m. Another call comes in about an alleged shoplifter. We are driving away from the curb and the parking garage, away from the store with the tripped alarm–a customer had gotten loud with the cashier–to continue on my ride-along tour of the city.

“…Suspect on foot. Just knocked down an elderly woman…Suspect running north…”
And then another call:
“…Abandoned car dumped… Caller says it has no tags, no plates…”
And another:
“Hit and run on Locust…”

The slush of two-day old snow slips underneath the police car’s tires as we descend the steep Locust Hill Avenue toward Getty Square.

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“It’s a robbery because she pushed the owner and elderly woman,” says one of the responding officers, “over two lip balms.” He laughs.

After officers apprehend the suspect, we ride over to the scene of the crime to see if the older woman is hurt and wait for the Crime Scene Unit to arrive. The woman who was shoved says she is fine and refuses medical attention.

Disputed Territory

“As a 22 year old going into the force, you expect to deal with drugs, crime…not terrorism. You can’t plan for something like that.” Police Officer Michael Lewis was a first responder for 9/11. He’s close to six feet tall, with dark-brown hair lightly peppered with grey. Thirty-five, Caucasian and married—a plain gold band is on the ring finger of his left hand. A native of Yonkers, he was only 22 when he joined the city’s police force. Lewis initially worked in the Bronx, but for the past 10 years, he’s been patrolling the Fourth District.

“Police-wise, it’s about the same,” he says. “There’s a lot of bad things that happen here.”

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52 Yonkers Avenue, 1985. 82-year-old woman found strangled to death. Unknown as to how long she remained inside her apartment.

51 Linden Street, 1986. Drug kingpin Sami Annabi sentenced to 25 years and fined $100,000 for involvement in heroin ring. His wife and 12 others also arrested and charged.

August 2011. 65 alleged gang members are arrested and charged for drug, murder and firearm possession. The gang, led by 25-year-old Steven Knowles, is allegedly responsible for distributing crack in the Elm and Oak Streets vicinity.

April 2012. Gambling debt spurred a gang feud, which led to three shootings and a stabbing within one week in the southwest side of Yonkers.

April 2013. After a series of burglaries in the southwest, a Yonkers teen is arrested. He is believed to be involved in a bigger crime spree in the Bronx.

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Though Lewis maintains that the City of Yonkers is generally a safe place, he says there are still some unsafe areas. Around 2008, the Yonkers Police Department led a cooperative joint effort with the Federal Government to clean up the city’s streets—mainly in the southwest. “The waterfront’s a lot calmer than what it was,” he says. At the beginning of the 20th century, Yonkers was “the industrial part of Westchester County, with 129 factories counted in 1912.”

The city’s waterfront was once home to several of these factories, such as the Otis Elevator Company, the Yonkers Power Station. But once they ceased operations, life around the waterfront slowly deteriorated.

The closing, according to then-Chamber of Commerce President Joseph J. Harding, was “one of the worst catastrophes that has ever fallen” and would “deprive the city’s economy of a $170,000 weekly payroll.”

No money for residents of the southwest meant no customers for businesses, which created empty storefronts. Eventually, those vacant buildings were either demolished or left to rot, leaving skeletons of former commercial success and barren patches of land—later “garbage-strewn eyesores”—in their wake.

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The corners of Palisades Avenue and Elm Street are disputed gang territory. Bloods, Crips, Latin Kings. GMF and GMB. Most have music videos on YouTube. A small gas station, a pizza parlor, a parking lot and a fire station sit on each corner of the intersection. It is steps away from Getty Square, down the block from the William A. Schlobohm houses–a cluster of tall, low-income apartment buildings.

“A lot of drug activity happens around here. It’s a game of cat and mouse.” Police Officer Anthony Varela has only been working with the Fourth Precinct for three years. Before becoming an officer, he was an investment banker, down on Wall Street. The stress from that job, he says, became unbearable. Since many family members were officers, the career switch didn’t raise an eyebrow.

He is young–barely 30–and tall, around 6’4. He has clear olive skin and short, dark brown hair. Though familiar with Yonkers due to family residing in the city, he grew up in Northern Westchester. Varela discusses the area’s spike in crime during the summer months, changes in the downtown over the years–including a rise in gang activity. “There’s so many local gangs in Yonkers,” he says. “It’s hard to keep up.”

According to Varela, the two most dangerous and notorious gangs in the area are the Elm Street Wolves and the Strip Boyz, who at one point, were at war with one another—and literally were only one block’s distance apart.

He says that Elm and Oak streets are some of the highest crime areas in the city. They are amid the other “tree streets”–Oak, Elm, Spruce, Alder, Walnut, Beech, Maple, Ash, Poplar, Willow, Linden. These thoroughfares aren’t shaded by lofty green leaves—instead, extreme poverty is entangled in the neighborhood’s roots. They’re well-known battlegrounds by police and a source of cheap housing by those in search of a better life–often single mothers and their families—often through the Department of Social Services. Though the area falls into the Third Precinct, those in the Fourth Precinct are still familiar with the neighborhood.

It’s a tough area to patrol, Varela says. Still, according to him, not all of the southwest side is undesirable.

“The waterfront is nice. They’re really trying to fix it up. But it’s tough because trying to attract the middle class…” his sentence trails off. “When Getty Square closes up at night, there’s nothing really over here.”

The waterfront is home to luxury apartments, upscale restaurants. There is artwork installed along the boardwalk next to the Hudson River. A former parking lot site is a small park. All of this is within a four-block radius. Past those four blocks, however, the neighborhood has not been gentrified.

“They’re not paying New York City prices, but they’re paying a lot to live in southwest Yonkers,” Varela says.

Rent for the new waterfront apartments ranges from $1,650 to about $3,200, for one and two bedroom apartments. Conversely, a four bedroom apartment on Woodworth Avenue–a street close to the waterfront in an older neighborhood in the southwest–is currently advertised for $1,850.

Currently, you would need to earn at least $30.02 an hour to afford a two-bedroom apartment in Westchester County at Fair Market Rent, in order to avoid spending 30 percent of your gross income on housing. In other words: You would have to gross approximately $62,440 a year to comfortably live in the county. A household would have to work 166 hours a week earning $30.02 an hour–to avoid being “housing cost burdened,” as HUD puts it.

And if you receive public assistance, work a low-wage job, are unemployed or faced with any other financial strains, you are limited to only a small amount of affordable apartments.

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“The majority of homeless people we help typically don’t have mental illnesses,” Varela says, “but we see a lot who do.” Deinstitutionalization, or the decrease in long-term mental health hospitalization in the 1980s, allowed many people with severe mental illnesses to avoid extended hospital stays. Community-based mental health centers took the place of asylums; the effects and costs of continued hospital stays and the improvement of psychotropic drugs caused state and county facilities to shutter their doors. But those who weren’t able to find their footing amid this newfound exodus toward freedom wound up living on the streets.

Most of the homeless population stays in southwest Yonkers for a few reasons, Varela continues. For one, there are several nonprofits in the area, as well as the Department of Social Services and shelters.
“But after the programs close, people have to find somewhere else to go, something else to do,” he says. “And we’ve had a lot of… different things happen down here.”