Homeless in New York

It was well below zero on Bleecker Street that night. As the sun went down, the wind came up. I had hitched a ride into Manhattan on a moving van, and I needed to find a warm place to spend the night. As I tramped the frozen sidewalks, crystalline snow and ice pellets swept over my boots.

The news ticker above Times Square displayed -6.

I had a five-dollar bill in my pocket, which I’d earned by helping unload the moving van earlier in the day. In early January, 1970, I had come to the East Coast following a blonde girl. The relationship had faltered, and I had come to New York to seek my fortune.

At twenty years of age, I had no real concept of what it took to find Fame and Fortune in The Big Apple, but I thought I’d give it a try. After I’d unloaded the van, I walked miles to Greenwich Village, to the offices of a publisher on Grove Street.

From Lightbulb Coffee:

I got to Bleecker Street, followed it south to Grove, climbed the stoop, and went into the warm office of Evergreen Magazine, the Grove Press periodical, just before closing time. The smartly dressed receptionist gave me a forced smile, and told me she would give my envelope to the Literary Editor. I must have looked awful, with my clothes smudged and frozen.

Back on the street, I started tramping the streets of the Village looking for a sheltered spot to sleep. It was too cold to snow. The wind whipped old snow into a ground blizzard, the particles of ice stinging my face as I searched fruitlessly for a spot out of the wind.

My fingers and toes were numb by now, and I knew that I had to find a place to warm up. Five dollars was not enough to rent any kind of room in 1970s Manhattan.

After poking around the streets and alleys looking for some kind of shelter, I remembered the construction shed next to Grove Press. Maybe I could break into it… I thought.

As it turned out, when I got back to Grove Street, the publisher was closed for the night, and I was able to squeeze into the construction shed, between the post of a fence and the corrugated steel wall of the shed.

Finding a pile of fiberglas insulation rolls, I spread pink scraps flat, unrolled my Army surplus mummy bag, and spreading more insulation over it, snuggled in, and after a few minutes, I started to warm up.

The next morning, I walked uptown to The Whitney Museum of American Art. To find out how I contributed to The 1970 Whitney Annual, read Lightbulb Coffee.

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