New Tabloid Puts the Homeless to Work

Cleveland Blakemore, who quotes Nietzsche, lived for six months in a plywood shack under a highway bridge.

Anthony DeCandia lost his job and home when a mugger slashed his hand so badly he could not make a fist.

Jan Goldstein was on the streets for three years before he was set on fire one night by nameless thugs.

But these three--out of thousands of New Yorkers who live on subways, in alleys and city parks--are the lucky ones.

Now, they say, they make up to $500 a week as roving vendors for the city’s newest tabloid, Street News. All three say they have found permanent shelter for the first time in years.

“When Street News came out I don’t know what else I would have done,” Goldstein said. “I’d given up on myself.

The sporadically published 75-cent newspaper cannot be mistaken for a daily, or even a weekly newspaper. Paul Newman writes in a recent issue about filming “Blaze,” actress Lisa Bonet is credited with a piece about her biracial upbringing, and Donny Osmond lashes out at record censorship.

“We don’t want it all to be about the downtrodden,” said co-director Wendy Koltun, a former ballerina.

“You’re not supposed to buy it because you’re helping some homeless guy. You’re supposed to buy it because it’s something you enjoy reading.”

If the paper seems top-heavy with celebrities, she said, that’s to assure buyers that it’s legitimate.

Indeed, the paper’s prominently displayed board of advisers includes such names as Danny Aiello, Bill Blass, Christie Brinkley, Darryl Strawberry and James Taylor.

None of them have any real power over content--that rests with Koltun, executive editor Hutchinson Persons and a six-member board of directors.

“We never said we could help everyone,” said Koltun, 31. “This is for those who are able to work and those who want to work.”

Persons, 33, doesn’t give interviews, but Goldstein likes to remember Persons telling how he was struck by his brainstorm while walking through crowds of homeless people in Grand Central Station.

“He said to himself, ‘Hey wait a minute, a homeless person can sell newspapers,’ ” Goldstein recalled.

Persons contacted Koltun, who a year ago was running her own small charity organization, and the pair hit the swankiest executive suites in town.

In short order, Koltun and Persons extracted promises of financial support from old-line organizations including the New York Times.

“I got turned on by participating,” recalled Times President Lance Primis. “It’s given the homeless a chance to do something. At least it certainly beats stepping over bodies on hot sidewalks.”

In the six months since, Koltun said, 200 men and women have made enough money to find some sort of housing.

More than 1,000 vendors, many of them sporting Street News aprons, bags and caps, converge on a converted Blimpie’s restaurant near Times Square.

Inside the tiny warehouse, walls plastered with movie posters, they wait patiently in line, some clutching fistfuls of cash to buy their bundles.

Then they head for the subways, competing for space already crowded by the city’s vast corps of panhandlers.

On one recent Tuesday, Goldstein picked up his daily allotment and cadged a token from a reporter to board the first subway car of his seven-hour workday.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I am not a panhandler, I am not a drug addict,” he told the passengers. “This is a newspaper designed and produced for the city’s homeless. A portion in the proceeds helps find permanent shelter for homeless men and women.

“Please buy one.”

A hand flashing three quarters snakes out of the crowd.

“Thank you,” he says. The woman unfolds the newspaper he proffered and doesn’t even smile.

“A lot of people look at me like I’m some sort of nut or something,” he said later, standing in a passageway. “But it beats being on the street.”