Nobody’s Park : In New York City, It Was Residents vs. the Homeless and Everybody Lost

For Donna Ryan, the string snapped three months ago as she watched her child in the playground of Tompkins Square Park. On the other side of a fence surrounding the play area, a young derelict walked up to where she was sitting and defecated through the iron bars.

It wasn’t the first time that Ryan and other middle-income residents had been harassed by some of the 200 homeless people living in a shantytown at the other end of the park. The 31-year-old mother says she had grown to expect abuse from them--but this was the last straw.

“I mean, he did it in front of us, and when I asked him to stop, he told me to go live on Park Avenue if I didn’t like it,” she says angrily. “So I told myself, ‘That’s it. How much more do we have to put up with in this town? Why doesn’t the city do something?’ ”

On June 3, after years of looking the other way while Tompkins Square Park deteriorated into a no-man’s land of homelessness, drug abuse and violence, New York City finally did something. Early in the morning, 350 police officers swept through the area and forced a small army of homeless men and women to evacuate the Lower East Side park with all their belongings.

Days later, city officials barricaded the area and put up an 8-foot chain-link fence around an existing iron gate to prevent anyone from entering. Mayor David Dinkins announced that the troubled, 10-acre park would be renovated over the next year or so, at an estimated cost of $2.3 million.

“This park is a park,” Dinkins said firmly, brushing aside objections from advocates for the homeless. “It is not a place to live. I will not have it any other way.”

In a city where an estimated 80,000 homeless people roam the streets, the problems of one beleaguered park might seem a drop in the bucket. But in recent years, Tompkins Square has come to symbolize the intractability of homelessness in New York, and the inability of city government to respond effectively--even to waves of violence.

Indeed, the scruffy swatch of grass and concrete has been the site of three riots since 1988, with homeless people and political activists battling police over curfew regulations and drug busts. The last clash took place on Memorial Day, when 18 cops were injured by people throwing Molotov cocktails, bottles and other debris.

It was this last melee that finally prompted Dinkins to act. But as the dust settles, New York’s pre-dawn raid on Tompkins Square seems like an admission of failure. To save the park, the city had to close it. To remove the homeless, the city merely scattered them to vacant lots two blocks away, where they continue to live in tents and cardboard boxes.

If Dinkins has a long-range plan to ease the problem, he is keeping it to himself. Meanwhile, the battle has raised larger--and more troubling--questions about New York:

How could the city have allowed vagrants to occupy a park for nearly three years? Why did police and politicians fail to enforce a midnight curfew that applies to every other city park? And at what point did well-meaning liberals become victims of their own ideology?

Such questions are being asked more frequently, because to live in New York in 1991 is to experience homelessness as a permanent crisis. The sheer number of people begging or passed out on the street is staggering, a condition that has prompted the New York Times to call the city “Calcutta on the Hudson.”

Unlike some cities, New York’s homeless are not separated from affluent neighborhoods by vast distances or boundaries. They are everywhere, and they are impossible to ignore. Given these claustrophobic conditions, a time was bound to come when patience with the homeless began to wear thin. To some, the raid on Tompkins Square Park is a reflection of changing times--and diminished compassion--in the Big Apple.

“I’m no fool. I know that they wouldn’t let us live in the park forever, even the people who said they were our friends,” says Justice Robles, 41, who had been living in a tent in Tompkins Square Park since 1988. “They didn’t solve nothing here. They just swept us under another rug. They failed. And this neighborhood still faces a world of trouble.”

Ever since it was constructed in 1834, there has been something contrary about Tompkins Square Park. Tucked away in a corner of Manhattan’s teeming Lower East Side--a haven for Jewish, German, Russian and, later, Latino immigrants--it never developed the cool elegance of Gramercy Park or the immaculate grandeur of Central Park.

Instead, the small patch of green between Avenue A and Avenue B became a magnet for political activists, rabble-rousers and labor leaders. In 1874, for example, about 7,000 unemployed people seeking “work relief” battled police in the park. In 1877, it was the site of a huge demonstration in support of the nation’s first railroad strike.

During the Depression and the 1950s, radicals made fiery speeches in the park’s historic band shell and organized large political demonstrations. In the 1960s, Tompkins Square was a rallying spot for East Village leftists and the site of Vietnam War protests.

Today, the streets around the park are a hodgepodge of newer apartments, Ukrainian storefronts, head shops, old clothing stores and boarded-up buildings. Residents in other areas might talk about urban renewal, but people here worry about preserving community values.

“We’ve always had a fairly diverse, progressive tradition,” says Barbara Ingram, who runs the Children’s Liberation day-care center several blocks from the park. “It’s something that everybody has tried to protect, because this community is different. In this neighborhood, people try to show concern for one another.”

But beginning in the 1980s, two new groups appeared who would dramatically transform Tompkins Square. Inside the park, a group of homeless men and women took up permanent residence in 1988, adamantly refusing to leave. Outside the park, a wave of young urban professionals snapped up real estate at bargain prices and began gentrifying the neighborhood.

From the start, the newcomers did not get along. Young couples who had expected to enjoy the grassy park were reluctant to walk near the often filthy shantytown. The homeless, who feared violence and other abuse if they went to city shelters, were convinced that yuppies wanted to kick them out of the park, even if they had nowhere else to go.

“We’ve had an ongoing battle between the people who believe they are going to be displaced here and the people who are moving into the area,” says the Rev. George Kuhn, the activist pastor of St. Brigid’s Church, which borders the eastern side of the park.

“When you spend thousands of dollars on a home, you don’t want to overlook a park where there are 200 homeless people. It’s not a pretty sight, yet homelessness is not a pretty sight anywhere. The problem just wasn’t being addressed by the city, and that’s why tensions here finally boiled over,” Kuhn adds.

Even now, with the homeless banished from the park, tempers still run high in Tompkins Square. Neighbors are bitterly divided, some feeling guilt-stricken and others saying New York should have acted earlier. All believe that City Hall let them down.

As she pushes her young daughter in a stroller past the park, Maryann Williams, 34, says she had high hopes after moving here with her husband, a computer technician. But the presence of so many homeless in the area angered her.

“I sympathize with the homeless. I consider myself pro-homeless,” she says. “But people don’t have a right to live in the park. Isn’t it supposed to be for everyone? Or am I crazy?”

Nearby, a young political organizer wearing a ponytail and denim jacket hands out leaflets protesting the city’s crackdown. Reluctant to give his name, he effusively backs the homeless.

“I didn’t have any trouble with them staying in the park, because at some point you have to draw the line and say, ‘We can’t ignore this problem any longer,’ ” he says. “They shouldn’t have been carted off, and a lot of activists are going to be demonstrating here this summer.”

Just who the activists are, though, is a tough question to answer. To be sure, there are scores of serious, articulate people concerned about the homeless in Tompkins Square. But there are other, more disruptive forces at work in the community, and many critics believe that a crowd of “anarchists” and skinheads are chiefly to blame for the crime problems.

Some of the militants are squatters in nearby buildings, police say, while others drive in for rallies from as far away as New Jersey. Most are in their 20s and have a profound disrespect for authority, as well as the bureaucrats who try to lure the homeless into city shelters.

“Let me tell you, this trouble in the park has been great ,” says 24-year-old Tom Calley, an artist and self-described anarchist who lives in the neighborhood. “It’s been a rallying point for people who once fought, like blacks and whites, and it divides the liberals.”

Calley explains that “the liberals living in $500,000 cooperatives can’t stand this place. But those in $400-a-month flats here think it’s the rebirth of the 1960s. They’re ecstatic.”

The best thing, he adds, are the police riots. On Memorial Day, Calley says he was chased by cops after a man next to him threw bottles at a police van. “I ran so fast, it was great. I got away OK. And I’ll be back again,” he vows.

On the other side of the park, a young police officer raps a baton in his palm, watching pedestrians stroll past the new chain-link fence. The so-called anarchists have been a royal pain, he says, but the real problem has been the city’s reluctance to enforce its midnight curfew in Tompkins Square. For years, he says, politicians just sat on their hands.

Long before Dinkins took power in 1990, Mayor Edward I. Koch grappled with the problems of Tompkins Square. He vowed to clean up the area and restore the park to a more normal state. But even Koch--who won so many political dogfights in this town--eventually gave up.

“You had gridlock in the community,” he says with a shrug. “There were too many people who backed the homeless, and they’d fight if you tried to clean up the area. If you tried to move them out, they’d resist. And you don’t get far in this town bucking community power.”

Koch, who is a bitter critic of Dinkins, congratulates his successor for finally taking action in the park. But there is no shortage of community leaders who blast the mayor for his move. As they see it, Dinkins sold out the very people who helped elect him.

City Councilwoman Miriam Friedlander, who represents the area, blames yuppies for raising tensions. Asked why taxpayers should put up with such conditions in the park, she answers that “these are obviously people who aren’t one paycheck away from homelessness. . . . They wanted to move into an area and make it sterile. But there ain’t no such animal in New York City.”

The battle of Tompkins Square is likely to continue, with scores of demonstrations planned for the summer. Many residents are worried, but for others there is only sweet relief.

Antonio Pagan, who directs the Lower East Side Coalition for Housing Development, says the ugly reality of the park exhausted people’s patience--and their compassion for the poor.

“The morning after the police swept through the park,” he says, “I felt like a Frenchman after the liberation of Paris. I felt we could breathe again.”

Does he feel any concern for the homeless? Pagan dismisses the question and poses his own:

“Can’t we finally tell the truth? The park looked like hell. It was a stinking mess, right under our nose, and it took us years to admit this. Why?”