Homeless
New York
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"Digging
beneath the depressing statistics and grinding poverty,
Emmins' is a more than human portrait" Dazed &
Confused
"An absolutely fascinating book!" Robert
Elms - the BBC
"Emmins’ portraits are tender and offer an
often wince-inducingly detailed account of the physical
hardships and casual cruelties [that] shake his self-confidence
to its core." the Metro (UK)
'Cutting edge reportage - Alan Emmins sees the world
with such a fresh eye!' William Shaw
Alan Emmins survives 31 Days of homelessness on the
streets of Manhattan in this humorous, tender and tragic
portrait of invisible New York City.
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31
Days - Prologue
Two years ago, in New York City, I walked into a train
tunnel with my friend, the photographer Michael Sofonski.
We hopped up onto a small concrete wall and shimmied
between two sections of fence. Once on the other side,
we walked down a precariously placed plank of wood
until we were back on somewhat uneven ground. We were
working on an article about urban exploration - about
the city explorers who explore abandoned buildings,
bridges and tunnels. Three well experienced urbanites
were taking us into this tunnel to show us some artwork
that had been painted deep inside. But as soon as
we jumped the fence a homeless man stepped out from
his makeshift house and positioned himself in front
of us.
Holding out his hand he said, “Halt! Who goes
there?”
He was an elderly man. His hair was grey, as was the
beard that came down to his belly. He was also slim,
which reduced the garden gnome quality that the beard,
rosy cheeks and green fishing hat lent him.
We explained that we were going to look at the murals
on the tunnel walls. “People live in there,”
he told us. “Don’t touch anything.”
Then, as we shuffled away, he called out, ‘But
enjoy the art. It’s very good!”
He was an edgy character with a touch of menace in
his voice. His twitching and fidgeting gave the impression
that he could change his emotional standpoint at any
time. He represented the stereotype of what the homeless
man is: dirty, smelly, a little crazy and living in
a shack put together of society’s discarded
matter.
We walked on through a landscape polka-dotted with
the tennis balls that had made their way over from
the nearby tennis court. Our eyes were drawn to the
odd rat, the drip, drip of water from above and the
darkness that loomed ahead of us. We were alert and
nervous.
But then, just before the darkness, caught in the
light that poured in from the grates in the highway
above, was a pirouetting figure.
Something altogether less obvious.
We moved nearer and, as we did, a young girl came
into view. Her long black hair was tied with a piece
of gold lamé. At her feet, you couldn’t
help but notice, was a dance floor.
The tunnel floor was uneven earth. It was rutted and
scattered with odd bricks, broken buckets, odd shoes,
hats, wires, shopping carts and tyres. The dance floor,
roughly twenty feet by twenty feet, was made of plywood.
And there she danced - in a train tunnel, on a dance
floor.
Michael and I were no longer focussed on our urban
exploration story. Our minds were with this dancing
girl. Who was she? Where did she come from? Why was
she dancing in the tunnel?
As we passed her I cut away from the group and approached
her.
As unassumingly as I could I said, “Excuse me?
I’m sorry to bother you...”
She stopped dancing and gave me a hard stare as the
music, playing slowly due to the flat batteries in
her portable stereo, whined on in the background.
Her full lips were compressed, not in a pout but in
determination, as a show of strength.
“What is it?” she asked with an unmistakeable
French accent and attitude.
“We were just going into the tunnel to look
at the murals. I was wondering if I could ask you
some questions on the way out?”
“No. I am leaving now; I will not be here when
you come out.”
With that she picked up her little portable stereo
and walked away. She had however answered one of my
questions at least.
She was French. She was a French girl dancing in a
train tunnel in New York City, with a homemade dance
floor beneath her feet.
I walked back and joined Michael and the urban explorers.
Michael asked eagerly, “What did she say? Did
she say anything?”
“Yes,” I told him. “She said she
was leaving.”
Further into the tunnel we stood in front of the murals,
each around three meters high. They ran connected,
in a long line like a cartoon strip, maybe forty metres
in total, although there was no direct theme or relation
between one and the next. The murals were placed in
the tunnel, known thereafter as the ‘Freedom
Tunnel’, by artists ‘Freedom’ Chris,
Smith and Sane. In one mural an angular faced man
in a beige rain mac, held the wrists of an invisible
somebody who was holding a gun, and saying, by way
of a speech bubble, ‘DROP THE GUN MOLE!’
While his would-be attacker, in a cowardly grimace,
says simply ‘AK!’ This scene ran into
the next frame, a title frame that stated: ‘There’s
no way like the American way.’ Another frame
is styled after the branding for Coca Cola, but only
shows half the logo, the ‘Coca’ half.
But the really powerful image is of red and white
horizontal stripes, over which is written the text,
‘In December 1995 the forgotten men of the tunnel
received city housing. They’ve just begun to
move.’
One of the things that made these murals so special
is that the only people that got to enjoy them were
the few remaining homeless living in the tunnel and
the urban explorers who were brave enough to risk
the unknown and the third rail to come here to see
them. It was a very personal exhibition, but while
Michael and I felt honoured to be taken there, our
minds kept drifting elsewhere.
She was French and she had a dance floor beneath her
feet.
As we left the tunnel we stopped in a sectioned off
area that looked as if it was once a platform. It
was about sixty metres long and consisted mostly of
rubble. The spaces between the pillars were piled
high with debris, apart from in one section where
there were five televisions, a radio and a dining
table. Looking cautiously over our shoulders we went
to investigate, making sure not to touch anything.
On one shelf there was a saltshaker and a bottle of
ketchup.
We quickly moved on. We were, after all, in somebody’s
home. There was no sign of the French girl as we ambled,
past the dance floor, not really wanting to leave,
but we did see, sitting in a chair with another man,
the Guardian Gnome who had accosted us upon entry.
“Did you like the murals?” asked the man
that we hadn’t seen before, letting us know
that they had been talking about us. Or was it something
else?
“Yeah I saw you in there. You went into my house,
and I was watching you.”
“We didn’t touch anything!” we all
sang in unison.
“I know you didn’t,” he said taking
swig from a bottle. “Like I said - I was watching
you.”
Unlike Michael and myself, the urban explorers knew
what they were talking about. They stood chatting
about the history of the tunnel and the artists who
had painted the murals with the two homeless men.
When the opportunity arose I asked, “Do you
know the girl who was here dancing earlier?”
The man, who had introduced himself as JR, was grinning,
“Yeah,” he said.
“Who is she?”
“That’s my girlfriend, V.”
“V?”
“Yeah, V.”
I didn’t want to push him for more information
about V, but the fact that she went by a single letter
just intrigued me more. What is this V for? Veronica?
Valerie? Vera? When we left, I asked the two men if
it would be OK to come back and talk to them another
day.
They said, “Sure, just don’t go poking
your noses into people’s homes without an invitation.”
We said, “No, no, no, we wouldn’t do that,”
even though, in reality, we already had.
Three days later Michael and I ventured back into
the tunnel. We knew what we wanted; we were journalists
and we thought we had stumbled into what could be
the most intriguing, beautiful and untold story of
our careers thus far.
And in the distance, bathed in the light that poured
in through the grated highway above… There she
was.
She wasn’t as cold as before: “Ah, it
is you again?”
“Yes, it is us again.”
“I do not want to do… what is it, a speak
with you. I know nothing of the paintings inside,
so I do not know why you come back here:”
“We came to see your boyfriend.”
“He invite you here?”
“Well, yes.”
“Well he is not here. But maybe he come back
soon, it is up to you if you will wait for him.”
“OK, we’ll wait if that’s OK with
you?”
“I do not care.”
“How long have you been dancing?” I asked.
Not wanting to talk to us she said, “I don’t
know.” Then, feeling rude, she said, “Maybe…”
Then, remembering she was French, said, “I don’t
know.”
“My wife is a dancer too.” I mentioned
my wife only to try to help her relax, as if by having
a wife I had already been accepted by the female fraternity
and that she could now feel safe. It was a stupid
notion, but she did brighten at the mention of another
dancer.
“She is a dancer? Here? In New York?”
Now I couldn’t get V to be quiet if I wanted
to. She kept firing dance questions at me, questions
I didn’t have the knowledge to answer, though
this didn’t seem to worry V.
JR never arrived and, not wanting to push our luck
by telling V that we would like to write a story about
her, we left and said that we would drop by again
in a few days.
“Maybe I could take some pictures of you next
time?” Michael asked as we said goodbye.
“Yes, this will be OK, but you must bring batteries
for my radio.” She showed us her radio and opened
the battery compartment so that we could see which
kind of battery was needed.
The next time we visited V we were armed with batteries
and a dance magazine that my wife had brought back
from one of her classes. V looked happy to see us
and when Michael handed her the batteries she could
barely contain her excitement. She tore at the packaging.
V danced for an hour that afternoon while Michael
photographed her.
We returned a few days later and met V and her boyfriend.
Michael gave them some prints from his shoot. Eventually
we asked V and JR if we might write a story about
them, about the French ballet dancer who lives in
the tunnel. They thought it was interesting, but weren’t
overly enthused.
Then V said, “But if you really want to write
about homelessness, you need to come and live with
us for a while. You can’t write about it properly
without trying it.”
That was the summer of 2002. A few days after that
last conversation I returned to Europe via San Francisco,
vowing to return to New York to do the story very
soon. But the day I flew to California my wife told
me she was pregnant. It wouldn’t have been right
to live on the streets of New York while my wife was
pregnant with our first child. We returned to Europe
and the story was shelved indefinitely.
It was a great regret that I never went back to write
that story. V was always at the back of my mind. Whenever
I read something about the homeless, some stereotypical
portrayal of a thieving crack addict capable of eating
a child or a rat in ten seconds flat, I would get
annoyed - annoyed because I had had a chance to show
that the homeless don’t all eat babies, the
homeless are not all doped out and trying to rob passers-by.
There was another side to homelessness. I believed
there was a story where those sensational headlines
could be replaced with beauty, character and honesty.
V was always there, pirouetting in my mind as a reminder
that I could have demonstrated this. The more I read
accounts of the ‘mole people’ scurrying
about in tunnels after a rat supper, the more angry
I got that I hadn’t written the story about
V. I found myself pacing around my living room, outraged,
until it occurred to me: there was nothing stopping
me from actually going and writing the story. It would
be worth it just to quell my indignation.
My wife wasn’t immediately taken with the idea.
“Couldn’t you do something else?”
she asked, and listed off a few of the other ideas
I had been toying with. But as we spoke about the
homeless project I became more animated by it. I simply
had to do it.
My plan was to document, as plainly as possible, the
lives of the homeless people of New York City. Not
just where they slept and where they ate, but who
they were. I wanted to meet the personalities behind
the cardboard signs and I knew I would fail if I clocked
off at six and went home for dinner. I knew too that
if I had money and bought stories with cigarettes,
food and drink, people would basically tell me anything
they thought I wanted to hear. I would get nothing
but mythology and drama.
I set myself some rules: I would not try to explain
or judge or analyse. I didn’t want to delve
into anyone’s background. People would tell
me what they wanted to tell me and I would reproduce
the information as I received it. I also decided that
I would tell everybody I met that I was a journalist
and that I was writing a book about homelessness.
This was a simple decision: I couldn’t just
steal their characters. I decided that I would start
this project with $10 in my pocket. I didn’t
know how long it would take to adjust, how I would
raise money or gather food. This $10 would allow me
a short transition period while I found my bearings,
but once it was gone I was on my own.
I also had to allow for some practical measures. My
wife agreed to me undertaking the project on the condition
that I call in every five days or so to let her and
my daughter know that I was alive and well, so I allowed
myself a $20 phone card. I also needed some kind of
safety net, in case I got hurt or arrested, so I dropped
my passport and my Visa card at the office of a friend
in case of emergency. That was basically it: my rules.
Once I got out there I realised pretty quickly that
I would not be making all the decisions about how
this book would be written. Many characters insisted
on giving me their background information whether
I asked for it or not. Sometimes background is all
they gave me.
“Oh you’re a journalist, what do you want
to know? Ask me anything.”
“Well actually I’m not really…”
“I been homeless for…” and out would
pour long, ranting spews of dialogue that couldn’t
be interrupted. Often the dialogues were random and
messy, jabbing at my brain as I tried to make sense
of the meaning and the rhythm. They threw me off guard
and took me completely out of my comfort zone but
still they managed to be beautiful and incredible
and intriguing.
My days and movements were mixed. On some I would
find myself marching up and down town, across and
back and forth all day long, tiring myself but needing
to chase food or make it to soup kitchens on time.
The areas I spent most of my time were Union Square,
Penn Station and the Upper Westside from Westside
Park to Central Park. Other days due to sore feet,
tiredness or slight depression I would just sit in
parks, watching other people live their lives and
wondering what my own family were doing at that moment.
But the nature of the characters I met and their bearing
on my behaviour led to a very nomadic experience.
At first I used them as shelter, barely brave enough
to leave their side. Eventually, as I grew more accustomed
to sleeping on the streets, I would branch off on
my own. But I wasn’t prepared for the solitude
of life on the streets and very quickly I found myself
missing not just particular characters, but general
and friendly contact. A meaningless chinwag was what
I often sought and without the option to call and
ask, “Hey, how’s it going?” I would
find myself marching in their direction. Desperate
as I often was just to talk, to hear my own voice
When I embarked on this project I was hoping that
I might find V, and with her in mind I stepped off
the bus at Port Authority in midtown New York in the
midsummer of 2004. Inside my rucksack I had two pairs
of clean socks, two pairs of clean boxer shorts, one
clean T-shirt, a can of deodorant, a toothbrush and
toothpaste, a large scrapbook and a pen and pencil.
I stood for a minute or two on the busy sidewalk of
8th Avenue with the Port Authority Bus Terminal looming
over me. I looked around at all the madness: that
melting pot of race, temperament and attitude. I watched
large crowds scurry like ants over the crossings,
daring the cars to mess with them. I soaked in all
the noise, the different voices, the smells, the cars
driving over metal gratings, the taxis honking. This
was to be my home for the next thirty-one days; a
city where the people actually are larger than the
gargantuan buildings that fail to pen them in.
With the sun raising a sweat on my brow I fell instantly
into a blinding, shaking panic.
What on earth did I think I was doing?
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