Face Death on the Streets : Icy Cold Sends Homeless Streaming into Shelters

The nation’s homeless began streaming into shelters or faced frostbite and death on the streets Monday as a mass of arctic air set record low temperatures in many eastern and southern cities.

City-run and private shelters added beds and extended operating hours to accommodate the increased demand for refuge from temperatures that plunged below zero in many locations. Over the weekend the temperature reached 27 below zero in Chicago, the coldest level in the city’s history, and the windchill factor was 62 degrees below zero in Detroit.

“It’s just unbearable out there for them,” said Donald Burch, assistant supervisor of the Center for Street People, a storefront shelter in north Chicago. “We’ve had people coming in who have never heard of this place before.”

In New York, 7,400 persons were quartered in the city’s 19 municipal shelters, and 11,800 spent the night in specially arranged family shelters, hotel rooms and in churches.

“It is the highest number of people being sheltered (in the city) since the Great Depression,” said Tony Vargas, a spokesman for the city’s Human Resources Administration.

Police and housing authority personnel in several cities fanned out searching for indigents huddled at subway stops or in building entrances. In Philadelphia, 49 persons were rounded up on the orders of Mayor W. Wilson Goode and taken to a nursing home for physical and mental examinations.

Paterson, N.J., Mayor Frank Graves ordered police to pick up the homeless and house and feed them in the city’s new jail. Most cells were empty because “in this bitter cold weather, crime is at its lowest,” Graves said.

The chances of surviving the bitter cold without shelter plummeted with the temperatures.

Two homeless persons died of exposure on the streets of Minneapolis. William Cairnes, 56, was found “frozen stiff” Monday in an Atlanta parking lot, where he had apparently been living in his car, authorities said. He was wearing two sweaters and no coat.

Frostbite Victims

In Chicago, the Cook County Hospital emergency room, which normally sees 30 to 50 patients a day, had 38 cases by early Monday afternoon, almost all of them frostbite victims.

“There’s a whole lot of people still out there on the street,” said Antonio Rosario, a homeless man at the Chicago Center for Street People. “Those that don’t find their way here are in big trouble.”

“Even the diehard homeless who are the last to come in have admitted to me that they couldn’t stay out this weekend,” said Ellen Celsi, a social worker with the Salvation Army in Des Moines. All the missions for the homeless were full in Des Moines on Monday, and two churches were handling the overflow.

Overcrowding at shelters in Chicago is a severe problem, said Wayne A. Sigelko of the Community Emergency Shelter Organization. “It would not be unrealistic to say there have been 12,000 homeless people turned away from shelters of the weekend for lack of space,” he said.

300 for 150 Beds

In St. Paul, Minn., the 150-bed shelter had 300 overnight residents. Boston’s Pine Street Inn shelter had filled its 350 beds and had 200 persons sleeping on the floor, assistant director Randy Bailey said. Atlanta officials planned to open the city’s Civic Center auditorium to ease the pressure on shelters.

Detroit’s emergency shelters are equipped with only about 300 beds, but the city’s homeless population is estimated at between 5,000 and 9,000.

“We’re not just getting street people--we’re also getting families, young women with children who can’t pay their utility bills and who need some place to keep warm,” said Dennis Delor, program coordinator for COTS, a Detroit emergency shelter organization.

But bad weather can be a blessing for some hard-pressed people, said Fred Banks, director of the Metropolitan Hall shelter in Columbus, Ohio.

Put Up in Hotels

“In some cases, the people who would be homeless have been reconsidered by their landlords,” he said. “In other cases, social service organizations have made special arrangements to put people up in hotels until the weather breaks. On Wednesday, they’ll be homeless again.”

Mitch Snyder, director of a shelter in Washington, said that “all the shelters (here) are pretty well crammed now” with persons who normally sleep on heating grates or in abandoned buildings. Secretary of Health and Human Services Margaret M. Heckler arranged for the Pentagon to send 300 blankets to the shelter early Monday morning.

In some areas, shelter space was still available. In St. Louis, where three persons died of exposure over the weekend, 600 beds remained available for the homeless. The Salvation Emergency Lodge in Detroit also reported empty beds.

Some indigents do not seek assistance from organized shelter organizations. “Some of these soldiers of the street, as I call them, are fiercely independent,” said Don Carpenter at the Jimmy Hale Mission in Birmingham, Ala. They have gravitated to other forms of refuge, including libraries and other public buildings.

“It’s not a pretty picture,” said Felix Bunn, a security guard at Chicago’s Cultural Center, a downtown landmark used for art exhibits and concerts. “I’ve seen quite a few more homeless in the past few days in here and quite a mix of men and women.”

At the Chicago Public Library, on the banks of the iced-over Chicago River, about a dozen homeless persons, still in hats and coats, were reading newspapers and magazines Monday.

Detroit Receiving Hospital allowed street people to stay warm in its emergency waiting room.

Arlin Guess, director of emergency room nursing at the hospital, said that “unofficial people are crashing our waiting room, and when you are a humanitarian you don’t throw them out when it’s 15 degrees below zero.”

Times Staff Writers Scott Kraft in Chicago, James Risen in Detroit, John J. Goldman in New York, Robert A. Rosenblatt in Washington, Peter Boyer in Atlanta and researcher Wendy Leopold contributed to this story.