october 12–25, 2020 | new york 47(“There have been a lot of questions about
what to do when folks encounter—and I’m
sorry I’m using words that I never thought
I’d use in a community-board meeting—
they encounter people masturbating,” board
chair Mark Diller said at one point.) By the
end, the meeting had coalesced into a single
thought, lobbed in various forms: What was
the timeline? When would these men be
gone? It was as though everyone were really
asking, When will this pandemic be over?
The Lucerne—and the men living in it—had
become a stand-in for a city going through a
once-in-a-generationcrisis.
it all reminded Curtis Sliwa of the bad
old days. As founder of the Guardian Angels,
Sliwa made a name for himself in the ’80s as
a vigilante crime fighter, a man who took to
the streets to make them safer, often target-
ing people of color. But he was discredited
after he boasted about muggings and fights
with rapists that never in fact took place.
Now Sliwa was living on the Upper West
Side with his fourth wife, still wearing his
signature red beret, still patrolling the
streets, and looking to stage a comeback
with a run for mayor next year.
Every morning, Sliwa would goout and
get breakfast, cat food, and a copy of the
paper. Suddenly, in the midst of the battle
over the Lucerne, local residents were com-
ing up to him and sharing their concerns.
“People never had two words for me up
there,” he said. “So I said, ‘Well, you know,
I’m your neighbor. Let me look into it.’ ”
Sliwa was in his element. He no longer
needed to head to midtown, to what he
called the “Corridor of Doom,” to hand out
hand sanitizer to homeless people“so as to
prevent, hopefully, the transmission of
coronavirus.” He could just put on his beret
and walk out his front door. Soon, flyers
seeking new recruits to the Guardian
Angels littered the neighborhood. When
the group held two open calls inCentral
Park, hundreds of people showed up. Being
highly educated consumers of political
activism, they pressed Sliwa on the details.
“I’ve never been questioned so much about
Guardian Angels patrols and what we do
than I have been on the Upper West Side,”
he said. “And I’ve been all over the world.”
By the end, Sliwa enlisted about70 new
Angels. Not one of them was Black.
Allison Eden, an artist who haslived on
the Upper West Side for two decades, was
one of those who signed up. “covid made
everything weird,” she said. “Therewere all
these agg ho ed
into the ele at
seemed very different and unsafe.” She
saw “hookers and pimps” on the streets
and almost stepped on a needle while
wearing flip-flops. She didn’t understand
why residents who wanted to relocate the
homeless men were being called racist.
“Up until, like, June, everybody seemed to
get along just fine,” said Eden, who is
white. “I mean, I never saw any racism at
all. I feel like New York City is a bubble—
you don’t live here if you’re going to be
carrying a Confederate flag.”
Never mind that a certain lifelong New
Yorker now serves as America’s white
supremacist–in–chief. Liberals who
opposed the homeless felt unjustly accused
of racism. Perhaps, Morpurgo thought, it
was just a matter of finding the right
words. “Maybe some people—including
myself, being almost 50 years old—don’t
have the language my teens have to say all
this the right way,” she said. “Not everyone
is there yet. And even if they have woke
ideas, maybe they’re not articulated right.”
As the battle over the Lucerne raged on,
WestCo began to shift its rhetoric. The
issue, as they now framed it, was less about
their own safety and more about“getting
this vulnerable population the services
they so desperately need”—something that
could not happen in a converted hotel,
WestCo argued.
The city, for its part, only made things
worse. In the first week of September,
Mayor de Blasio took a ride through the
Upper West Side. “What I saw was not
acceptable,” he declared, sounding more
like Carlson than the man who had vowed
for years to “turn the tide on homelessness.”
It was hard to know what de Blasio had
seen. The outdoor restaurants brimming
with diners? The crowds in Central Park?
The kids happily racing around on public
playgrounds? The mayor announced he
would be moving the men from the
L e to armonia, a temporary
s on st Street. “He’s always
been very sensitive to the ‘good liberals’ on
the Upper West Side,” said a former senior
de Blasio staffer. “He likes to do that sort ofstuff to show we’re being responsive to this
voting, rich, influential area.”
But a week later, de Blasio abruptly
backed away from his pledge, saying he
would instead defer to officials in charge
of social services. By that point, 17 home-
less families had already been moved out
of the Harmonia to make way for men
from the Lucerne. The mayor, critics
charged, was engaged in a game of “dom-
ino displacement.”
On September 25, after a protracted
struggle, the city announced that the men
would be moved to an empty Radisson
Hotel, in the middle of an empty Wall
Street, in the middle of an increasingly
empty city. Morpurgo, for one, was happy.
Sure, it was another hotel, but there were
already plans to convert it into a shelter. It
wasn’t a long-term fix, but residents on the
Upper West Side had won. The homeless
would be gone.
The men at the Lucerne were resigned
but angry. Da Homeless Hero was “dev-
astated” when he heard they would be
moved. “The mayor said we’re notaccept-
able,” he fumed. “He targetedus. He
dehumanized us.” Advocates say that
shuffling people from shelter toshelter
only adds to their misery. “Being home-
less and being in a shelter—that alone is
going to have a detrimental effecton your
mental and physical health,” said Giselle
Routhier, policy director of the Coalition
for the Homeless. “Repeated experiences
of instability while you’re homeless just
add more trauma on top of that.”
The group Morpurgo helped found is
now a fixture in the neighborhood. Resi-
dents in other neighborhoods where
hotels are being used as shelters have
even reached out to WestCo for advice. A
new group, in fact, formed shortly after
the move to the Radisson was announced.
It calls itself Downtown NYCers for Safe
Streets. Within a week, it had more than
2,000 members. ■