COLUMN ONE : A Shelter for Rage, Fear, Crack : ‘The Fort’ in Manhattan is a vast and dangerous prairie of cots for homeless men that rivals the poorhouses of a century ago. Residents hate it and many who enter never leave.

Near midnight, the lighting is dimmed and the shelter gets dark enough so the thugs can throw a sheet over a man, beat him up and make off with his belongings before the staff in the booth is the wiser.

No one is likely to stop it anyway. The armory drill floor--huge as a soccer field--is a dormitory of 700 thin cots, each an arm’s length apart. Come night, the staff rarely walks amidst this catch basin of bodies.

The Ft. Washington shelter for homeless men in Upper Manhattan is a dreadful place of sanctuary, unknown to most in this great city but a notorious landmark among the thousands who are its urban casualties.

By reputation, “The Fort” is the worst shelter in a municipal system that serves 24,000 homeless people a day, more than any other. In 1981, as the result of a lawsuit, New York began providing shelter on demand. It remains one of the few U.S. cities to do so, something of a national experiment.

The shelters are a humane stitch in a tattered safety net, but many have also become a permanent set of human dump sites. A decade later, New York not only still has its enormous homelessness problem, it also has several shelters that rival the wretched poorhouses of a century ago.

These refuges are too scary to lure thousands of the neediest in from a soggy cardboard box or the hard plastic seats of the subway. At the same time, many of those who do come in do not get out. They adapt and stay years--a phenomenon some experts call “shelterization” and the homeless call “sitting on the system.”

People adjust, even to the fear of The Fort. They secure their sneakers under the weight of their bedposts. They put a few coins in stronger hands to buy some protection in the showers and a front space in the long meal line. To sleep, they learn to ignore the chatter and the coughing and the fights.

A boom box blares till dawn, which is the way that Muscles and Mikey and the other jawbreakers in the House Gang want it. This clan of toughs controls the shelter as much as the staff does. Security guards are armed with nothing but walkie-talkies. At a measly $6.25 an hour, they mind their own business.

Several in the House Gang carry on the crack trade in the bathrooms, but by most accounts a handful of the shelter staff are the bosses in control. Half the residents are addicts of some sort. Toilet stalls sometimes are so full of people beaming up on the pipe that biological needs have to wait.

Muscles, like some of the other enforcers, has coupled off with a ‘mo’--shelter slang for transvestite and a shortening of the word homosexual. About 30 of the ‘mo’s dress in the casual wear of women--jeans, T-shirts, earrings, barrettes. At night, they and their “husbands” push their cots together.

The ‘mo’s have their own section on the drill floor, as do the Dominicans and the Jamaicans. The psychotics have the 50 beds nearest the hallway. Many of them are afraid to lay their heads down. They shamble up and back--or sit on the ungiving chairs beside the central booth.

Round glass light fixtures hang down from the ceiling on extended cables. They come back up at 6 a.m. By then, the smell of disinfectant has faded. The old and the sick have urinated in bottles to spare themselves a walk in the darkness. There are spots of wetness on the porous wooden floor.

A few dozen street people, bused in late, are usually the first ones to get up. They wanted nothing more than a few hours’ rest, and they scram as soon as they gather up their cigarettes and spare underwear.

Then, a few at a time, the regulars stir from under their blankets. A small number hurry off to jobs, but the rest have no reason to rush. They are ill or drug-weary or knock-down depressed. They are thieves on the lam with phony names or beaten men who have ended up there like wind-blown pieces of paper.

Right off, they make sure their pockets have not been cut--and that their stuff is still tucked away under the mattress. A towel. A comb. A weapon. Then they look around at the bleak and overwhelming room where life has put them.

At midday, hundreds will still be lying on the same lumpy bed that is their only fragment of a home.

Comparisons to prison are often made, what with the dormitory-style layout of beds before an observation booth and the masses of men in front of a single TV. Guards are bribed for favors. A “prison without bars,” residents say.

The food is only so-so, except the chicken. On chicken nights, the cafeteria line is even more wild than usual. Only 10 men at a time are allowed to push through the door. Knots of flesh clog the way every few feet.

Rules forbid bringing food into the shelter. This is ignored. A man named Jay opens a kitchen every night on the drill floor, selling baked goods and pizza that restaurants have thrown away. He reheats them in a toaster oven.

Muscles’ real name is Alexander Cromer, and he is a customer. “I don’t eat shelter food because it irritates my stomach,” he said. His voice is throaty, and he talks without opening the left corner of his mouth.

Among the 700 residents--each one fallen into his own private quicksand--a few stories repeat: drugs, broken families, self-respect leaked away. People hate The Fort, and they hate themselves for hating it without escape.

Muscles, 29, was the oldest boy among eight children. His father left when he was 11. His mother went on welfare. He became a robber and a thug, and he has done time for assault. He is moody and a bully.

In prison, he saw that the powerful sometimes take other men for sex. At the shelter, it is the same. His “girl” is Bambi. “You get lonely, you like to have a little company, someone to talk to,” Muscles said.

Patrick Lawrence, 35, was once a fabric cutter, earning good money. Then he burned his feet in a motorcycle wreck. He soothed himself with alcohol, the pain ever thirstier and finally crippling.

He slept on the A train or paid $2.50 for a seat at the all-night porno movies. Three years ago, he moved to The Fort. “It takes a long while to get to this point, and it’s going to take me a long while to get out,” he said.

Eladio Mendez, 43, has lived in the shelter since 1983. He never leaves. He is schizophrenic, and the doctors have been unable to get him to take any medication. Some nights, he sleeps on the basement floor, under the red metal box that contains the fire hose.

He has a strong, intelligent face, but the mind behind it has leaped free. His sentences often lose their way before they end. Shelter lore has it that he saw his best friend shot dead. Either that, or his family was killed.

Mendez himself has no answer. He grew solemn at the pondering of it. “My mom must have moved,” he concluded. “Or maybe she died. I don’t know.”

Anthony Stafford, 38, smoked his way into homelessness. There are reasons he cannot give up crack. “I’m living in a drug-infested area,” he said without irony. “I mean, all you’ve got to do is go to the bathroom.”

Five years at The Fort, he has complaints. Guards demand $3 to let him in after the 10 p.m. curfew. The staff allows him to sleep away the day. “I realize a city shelter is not designed to make you happy, but c’mon.”

It is hell on earth here, he said. And as if to make his point, an angry drunk began tromping between the cots. His right hand grasped a long fluorescent light bulb, jagged at the tip like a saw.

“Look,” Stafford said. The nearest security guard had risen to his feet and walked the other way, disappearing into a tunnel where garbage is kept. The drunk began shouting. He was going to stick someone in the throat.

And he surely would have, but a man big as a Coke machine came up behind him and grabbed his wrist. “I’ll take that,” said Delbert Browne.

The person in charge at Ft. Washington has a staggering job, something like cleaning up a demolition site with a whisk broom. A half dozen have tried it in the last two years. The latest is a former social worker, Delbert Browne.

His bosses consider him a risk. A lot of the work is smiling for downtown and preparing forms in triplicate--and Browne is no button-down bureaucrat. At age 32, he wears T-shirts and jeans. He was a bodybuilder. He is blunt.

After four months, The Fort is still a “nasty and filthy place,” he said, only a lot less so. Residents mostly agree, though they would dispute Browne when he starts going on about how people need to get off their butts.

“People choose occupations, and if they choose to be respectable, they’ll be respectable,” he said. “I think homeless people choose the street life. These shelters are a part of that occupation; maybe they’re a hazard of that occupation. Some people are comfortable with it.”

He is not talking about the broken, the ones he calls the glass menagerie, the mental cases and HIV victims and disabled. Rather, he is referring to druggies and loafers and street criminals.

They are the majority here, he said. Two in five at The Fort have prison records. About half have been in the shelter system more than three years.

“Ninety percent of them could make it if they wanted to, but understand they’d have to make a decision to take care of whatever monkey is on their back, crack or alcohol or attitude,” he said.

“The shelter is too easy. Three hots and a cot. You don’t have to be responsible. If you want, you can (mess) in your bed and (urinate) on the floor and then go eat breakfast while someone else cleans it up. It’s no problem.

“If you’re addicted and your behavior is violent and you can’t get along with your family, this is where all that bad behavior has to be accepted without penalty. We maintain you.

“Choose your profession. Well, I want to be a (foul-up). What do you have to give up for that? Well, you have to give up your privacy and some of your pride. But that’s not so big a price for getting blasted.

“Things ought to be more rigid here. I don’t say treat people unhumanely. But four-five years in the system is too damned long. Guys have been here so long their minds have gone to ooze, to jelly.

“You need to make it more unattractive; if you come here, you’ll have to obey certain rules. You’ll have to produce. You’ll have to be in programs.”

He complains he has no leverage. “If a resident hits me in the face, and if the damage is not life-threatening, I can only put him out for seven days.

“And if the temperature is lower than 32 degrees, we can’t throw him out at all. Have you ever been spit in your face by a person who has active TB? Do you know how that feels? Do you know?”

A vast prairie of cots, the armory is an awesome sight at first. Then it is simply dreary. Night or day, the air above the drill floor seems a dull olive, an effect of the drab green walls and the surrounding rows of lockers.

The ceiling is enormously high. It is supported by six curving metal arches like the grid work on a bridge. Track meets used to be held here. There are rows of seats on a mezzanine, all of them dusty now and unused.

The staff numbers more than 120, most of them the institutional aides (IAs) who keep the place clean. Their boss, Browne, says many of them are addicts themselves. Or alcoholics. Or shake-down artists.

Some IAs borrow money from the residents, some lend. Some are aloof and some mix. Some go along to smoke crack on the grassy hills of Highbridge Park.

Some are resentful of the work. “You get street people coming in here, filthy and lice-infested,” said James Williams, one of the supervisors.

“You say: hey, take a shower. They tell you to drop dead. That’s when you need someone like Muscles. You can ask, but Muscles can enforce.”

Dave Solomon, 38, has two passions in life: drugging and whoring. “Don’t ever underestimate the thrill factor,” he said of his choices. “It’s fun to be irresponsible; it’s the only good thing about not finding a niche in society. Depravity is a thrill.”

He is something of a gentle intellectual with the earnest look of a poet and the wide eyeballs of a crack addict. He has a 25-year drug history. Sometimes, he talks of straightening up, but that is for when he is older.

Solomon works every so often as a dishwasher. Staying at the shelter allows him to avoid rent. He has been there four years. Each week, he gives a few bucks to Mikey, and the House Gang lets him jump the line at dinner.

He dislikes smoking crack in the bathrooms, where the house demands a cut. Instead he fires up on his cot: “But you can’t use a pipe. You have to put it in a reefer. You can’t dis’ (disrespect) the (staff) that much.”

Better yet, Highbridge Park is only a short walk. There are always some “skeezers” there, women who will do most anything for a taste of drugs.

There is Margie and Andrea and Tina and Candy and Candy’s mother.

Paul Walker is the name he uses, not his real name. He has dropped farther than most. “I can’t go no farther,” he said. “Farther down is death.”

He is 48 now, with a white tuft of hair and a full white beard. Each life has its own unstable trapdoor; to fall through his required cocaine and a bad marriage and a complicated untethering from a management job.

He only leaves the shelter for 90 minutes a week on Fridays. He has a friend who spots him $25, and another friend whose apartment he uses to smoke it up. Then he gets on the subway and returns to The Fort.

“There is a mental desolation rampant here,” he said, lapsing, as he does, into a scholarly vocabulary. “You find utter forms of hopelessness.”

His cot is near a man named Winnie. Each morning, Winnie jerks his hands around his head, trying to pull unwanted thoughts out of his mind.

Walker tells him a better way would be to burn those thoughts with a match: “That way, they won’t come back, I say. But he doesn’t listen.”

Downstairs are caseworkers. Early in the day, their office is busy with clients who demand free subway tokens. They say they need them for job interviews, but often as not they trade them for drugs.

The way the shelter system works, the homeless are sent first to an “assessment shelter.” If they are veterans or working steady or serious about drug treatment, they are likely to be placed in smaller, “specialized shelters.”

The rest--the residue--are sent to places like Ft. Washington.

William Bogiano, The Fort’s head of social services, says his caseworkers try to help, but it is a chore merely to figure out who is in the building.

“We try to see a client every three months, but there are some we haven’t seen in years,” he said. “A man hears his name on the loudspeaker and he knows a counselor is looking for him, so he leaves or he hides.

“We have people still on the books who are long gone. Then we have people who are here but who are not the person they say they are.”

He sighed. He grimaced. “You can’t really expect people who aren’t who they say they are to respond when a name is called.”

Somehow many do make it out. Jimmy is one. He does not want his last name used. Few employers want a man whose address is a shelter.

He shed drugs at The Fort, attending the Narcotics Anonymous meetings. Now he has a job. He wants to rent his own place. He remembers what that is like.

“You wake up alone,” he said. “You can take your own sweet time with a cup of coffee. You don’t have to share a bathroom with 200 guys.”

In shelters, the homeless are largely concealed from the city. Outdoors, they are conspicuous, their hands out, clerics of the street dispensing guilt or supplying absolution.

New Yorkers hurry past them. In their commonness, the unsheltered homeless become to the crowds like lampposts sunk into the sidewalk, something to sidestep and ignore.

Fifteen years ago, there were not nearly so many. The poorest of the poor stayed in Skid Row flophouses and single-room-occupancy hotels. Very few literally slept in the streets.

By the late ‘70s, and surely by the ‘80s, this was no longer true. Currents had formed an undertow. Some of it was the housing market--the stock of SROs upgraded for condos or torn down completely.

The labor market also changed, unskilled jobs evaporating or machines and immigrants scooping them up. Inflation gnawed at welfare benefits. Families disassembled. Mental asylums continued to shut. Cocaine went slumming.

Robert M. Hayes, a young lawyer in 1979, took up the cause. He was a founder of the National Coalition for the Homeless. He won a state court ruling that said the city was obliged by the state constitution to provide shelter.

Hayes is well known in New York for his three solutions to homelessness: housing, housing and housing. “It was a good sound bite, for when you were walking down the street with Tom Brokaw,” he said.

Of course, the answers are far more complicated than that, he now admits. The need for housing is only a common denominator. What about drug treatment? What about psychiatric care? What about jobs?

There are so many homeless people--and so many complicated problems. After all, who are “the homeless”? It is an evocative but maddeningly imprecise phrase. Homelessness is a symptom of a multitude of afflictions, the failures of a nation and the cruelties of life.

It is a great reflecting pool, the distorted likenesses of the better off. It is the abused, the feeble, the crazy, the restless, the drugged, the abandoned, the slow, the trapped.

It is lives with an errant pull, human wheels out of alignment.

After the court ruling, New York received the homeless into emergency accommodations as if they were hurricane victims. The shelters filled, new ones opened. It was an open door, never to close.

Over the years, the great rains of extreme poverty never subsided--and more and more people required help. Big as the system was, there seemed an endless supply who needed it.

Even now, parents with children make up 60% of the city’s shelter population, though tens of thousands of other families choose instead to live doubled and tripled up in apartments. The same goes for singles; maybe two or three times the number in the shelters prefer the meager comforts of the streets.

Pitifully enough, the main limit on demand is the system’s own awfulness. Bob Hayes, who helped win the homeless their shelter, said he would never have predicted that things would work out so badly.

“Shelter is a dirty word now, and we can thank New York for that,” he complained. “Shelter conjures up the image of massive, dirty, violent, drug-ridden institutions . . . . The shelter system is an absolute waste of money . . . .

“And do you know what is the worst thing about the New York system? The worst thing is it breeds dependency.”

Everyone--the advocates, the city--agree the shelters ought to be smaller. But where would the extra facilities be put?

Neighborhood groups consider a shelter worse than a jail. In the shelters, people are free to come and go. They walk the streets. They panhandle.

Angelo Castillo Jr., a city official downtown, said: “You tell a community there’s a homeless problem, and we want to put a shelter here, you get your ass kicked.”

The Fort is in Washington Heights, in a predominantly Dominican area. Much of it is rough territory. Streets are a flea market for crack. Some of the dealers are packing better armor than the cops.

Muscles once moved easily through this neighborhood. He had earned his nickname soon after coming to the shelter. Two residents tested him out with their fists, and he sent them skittering off like cockroaches.

But now even Muscles is wary of the streets. He does not go out much anymore, maybe just to the store and back for a quart of beer.

A few months ago, some Dominicans tried to give him a Colombian bow tie--where they cut your neck on two sides and yank out your windpipe.

He has a lattice of scars to show for it. He is sure he was set up. “I know who it was, and I’ll get them in due time,” he promised.

These days, he most often hangs out in the hall by one of the bathrooms, where he is near an IA who is his good friend, a man some here call Mr. Big.

Three or four of the IAs control The Fort’s crack trade. Confronted, Mr. Big said he was not among them, though he knew of the rumors. He said these owed mostly to his fancy car and the generosity he shows with cash.

Nevertheless, he made an offer. He was willing to discuss a shelter drug operation “in theory,” to use his term: “You would arrange your distribution system so you had a minimum of participation, understanding of course that there will always be difficulties where money is involved.

“Disputes arise. People must know--both the boss and the workers--that such things have to be settled one of two ways. Someone has to be let go or he has to be killed.”

When people explain their homelessness, they often point to one or two bad turns as if their future somehow got misplaced like a spare pair of glasses. The fault might lie with an uncaring landlord or a stolen disability check.

Marco Reyes, 28, attributes his problems to an auto accident. He had been doing OK, washing windshields at a gas station. Then a car ran him down. His left leg is held together with a metal bar and 12 screws.

He has been in Ft. Washington for 2 1/2 years. His plans to get out hinge on a lawsuit against the driver of the car, but he is not sure where the case stands in court or even if his lawyer is pursuing it.

This is not unusual. In the shelter, people always seem to be waiting for a distant ship to come in. They can glimpse it on the horizon, but never focus for long. They fear it will disappear.

During his extended wait, Reyes has become a popular figure. He has the gift of affability. He wears his hair shoulder-length, partially covered by a red stocking cap. Because of the hair people call him Jesus Christ or J.C.

“I know everything there is to know about this shelter,” he boasted, though one thing even mystifies him. “If Mr. Browne knows about the drug trade in the bathroom, why does he do nothing?”

Ft. Washington is the street come indoors. Guards and the metal detector stop little at the front entrance. Knives. Drugs. Rage. The street comes in.

Call 911, the police don’t want to hear it. They arrive late or not at all. Delbert Browne keeps an ax handle in his desk drawer.

“You can’t tell a drug dealer to get out; if you did that, you’ll get your head split,” he explained. “If they vandalize my car, who is going to pay? If somebody jumps me on the street, is the city going to bail me out? Hell no. If I call downtown, is anyone going to be up here? Hell no.

“The security guards aren’t worth a good goddamn. Half of them have their own drug problems. We’re talking about security! These are the guys who are supposed to guard my body.

“So you deal with your thugs; you forge a relationship, give them little jobs, give them extra food. All shelters have house gangs. They’re people who can control the flow of a lot of things.

“If you keep them in tow, you can handle the rest. It’s essentially us against 660 men. When that group gets bristled, talk about being scared . . . . That’s real. So you need to relate to your extremes.”

Relate to your enforcers: “Let them engage in their homosexuality; they learned that in prison. I tell them to be discreet. Don’t let me catch (you) . . . doing what you do. And if the ‘mo’s go out tricking, I don’t want them leaving the shelter in full dress. Dress outside.”

And relate to your dealers: “Yes, there are IAs who are buying and selling in here; this is paradise for them. They are chemically dependent themselves, and they are being paid a salary to come here. I know who they are.

“But it’s those same IAs who can go to the House Gang and say, ‘Why don’t you calm down?’ I need to utilize that. I can’t have all law-abiding, goody-goody IAs. I need those extremes too.

“I’m not saying I approve of this. I’m not saying I like people who bully and intimidate and deal drugs. I’m just saying that this is it.

“This is what we’ve got. This is Shelterland.”