THE NEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 16, 2020 21
“Dancing in the Midst of Nothing,”
said, “Whatever Sam says is going to
happen, it’s going to happen. I remem-
ber when I was having problems with
my roommate and I had to move to a
single room. Sam said, ‘You’re going to
have the same river view,’ and, to make
a long story short, it happened. The
river view is a nice view. That it was a
little thing didn’t mean he thought it
was nothing.”
The residents recognized the diffi-
culty of Rivera’s role. “I’m aware of the
stresses on him,” Webb said. He de-
scribed a man trying to get into the
building, and screaming at Rivera. “Sam
was talking back to him in this very
mellow, in this Zen way,” Webb went
on, “but I noticed that he was holding
a radio, and it was physically impossi-
ble that he could have tightened his
hand on that radio any harder than he
was. Knot-tight! I couldn’t have stood
there with this guy spitting in my face
saying the things he was saying. Yet I
know that Sam wasn’t afraid, and hetion programs at its Long Island City
offices, with the Castle offering its own
approach to social services. “It’s valuable
that Sam has lived experience,” Page
said. “He knows prison faces. He can
tell the difference between someone who
looks tough and someone who’s a threat.
And most of the people coming home
will see somebody in that room they did
time with. That changes everything.”
The residents of the Castle admired
Rivera for being as reliable about small
things as he was about big ones. E.,
the longtime resident with the basso-
profundo voice, put it bluntly: “Sam is
the difference between leadership and
leadershit. If you have leadershit, ev-
erything’s going to be shit, and that’s
the primary reason why the shelters
are such hellscapes. Sam watches the
simple things that improve the out-
look, improve the humanity.” Hilton N.
Webb, Jr., another long-term resident,
sixtyish and intensely serious, who
is studying for a master’s degree in so-
cial work, and writing a memoir titledtion as not homeless, so no HUD-funded
program can take them in. They have
to be sleeping under a bridge before
they can officially be classed as home-
less.” In the late nineteen-nineties, Page
came upon the empty Catholic girls’
school. “The city took it from the nuns
and left it vacant, with the idea that it
would become a TB hospital, but they
gave up on that idea, and instead it be-
came a magnet for drug dealing.” In
1998, Fortune bought it for $1.2 million.
Page emphasizes the society’s “open
doors” policy. “We’re bound by laws about
sexual offenders and proximity to schools,”
she said. But applicants are screened for
“current risk of violence, not a history of
violence. We have some of the people
with the worst records in New York City
coming for active services, but no metal
detectors. We offer people something
they really want, and the condition is
that they have to behave peaceably if
they want it.”
The Fortune Society holds most of
its job-training and vocational-educa-