Serving Homeless New Yorkers in an Age of Sweeps
Tompkins Square Park has again become a focal point for housing strife as the city sweeps encampments.
Whether Alex Lawrence, director of the soup kitchen at Trinity Church by Tompkins Square Park, is managing state grants, the egos of neighbors or the needs of guests, many of whom are homeless, his job involves a lot of politicking. But when Lawrence moved to New York City in 2006 from the pastoral San Joaquin Valley in California, he was a political naif.
Fresh out of Fresno State, a college not far from where he grew up, he came in pursuit of a dream to work in theater. He spent his first years in the city working at a Macy’s, a yoga studio and a talent agency for theater performers. One out of three jobs in a theater-adjacent role isn’t the worst outcome for a fresh-eyed New York City transplant, but it wasn’t quite what he had hoped for.
Lawrence was in a sensitive period of transition, entering the workforce in a new city, when the 2008 financial crisis hit. He had close proximity to the crisis, not only as a vulnerable millennial with little job security, but also as a New Yorker watching the economic fallout change his new home. In this turbulent milieu, he was politicized, and he made his first foray into civic life by volunteering for the Barack Obama campaign.
The night of Obama’s victory was also the night that Proposition 8, a ban on gay marriage, passed in California. Lawrence’s now-husband had proposed to him a month earlier. Both Lawrence and his husband grew up in California, and election night left them with mixed feelings. “It was this amazing moment, kind of like now, where all of this progress is being made but at the same time all of these setbacks are happening,” said Lawrence.
As Obama’s presidency unfolded, that progress started to feel farther away. Concessions made during the battle over Obamacare felt especially disenchanting, as Lawrence struggled to get adequate health insurance in his various jobs. “That hope was so short lived,” said Lawrence. “I wanted to make a difference.”
Lawrence wasn’t seeing the change he had hoped for politically or movement in his own life toward the goals he had set out for himself when he first arrived in the city. For both of these stagnations, he sought the same remedy, a job in which he could make an immediate difference. After just a handful of days volunteering at Trinity’s Shelter and Food for the Homeless (SaFH) program in 2010, he applied for a job there.
Now, he runs the place. Monday through Friday, Lawrence, a team of five staff and however many volunteers are available go to work serving lunch, mostly to unhoused New Yorkers who live in and around Tompkins Square Park. During the lockdown at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, SaFH was one of the few soup kitchens that stayed open, moving the tables from the dining room to the courtyard in an attempt to social distance. “A lot of these places, it’s truly run by a handful of grandmas in church basements,” said Lawrence. “During something like that, grandpa should stay home. So these places shut down.” Operations have mostly returned to normal at the church, though they still host lunch outside. Even now not everyone is comfortable sharing an indoor space with hundreds of people.
Feeding the hungry is a simpler way of doing politics. You never have to watch the homeless man you fed sign a bailout bill you oppose a year later. But that doesn’t mean Lawrence is liberated from the drama of a political life.
A few years back, he got caught up in a reign of terror exacted by East Village residents trying to do something about the trash cans in the park. The bags weren’t being changed enough, and trash was spilling onto the ground, spoiling the lovely tree-lined quietude of the neighborhood. A small group of locals developed a plan of action and set about enforcing compliance in their garbage regime.
“We would have to tie the trash bags a certain way and put them next to the trash cans. And emails would go out if we weren’t doing it,” said Lawrence. “Obviously it’s real — trash is trash. But it was done in such a controlling way.”
The petty authoritarianism familiar to anyone participating in a homeowners association, a co-op board or a neighborhood Facebook group slowly turned Lawrence into a trash bag partisan. He stopped refilling the caches of bags and ignored the pestering emails.
“I’m not actually fighting for trash on the street. I don’t want that. We operate with food. I do not want rats around,” he said. “But the sort of attitudes around it and the policing of our behavior became too much to participate in.” It’s not just about the trash bags. Lawrence worries unhoused people — his clients — are getting caught in the crossfire of crusades to turn the East Village into an idyllic neighborhood.
Some cleanliness complaints hint at a resentment of SaFH’s presence and the clientele it works with. For Lawrence, this is reflective of a new spirit both in the East Village and in Eric Adams’s New York City more generally.
“Newer, upper class residents don’t necessarily like seeing all the people who are unhoused,” said Lawrence. “We try very, very hard to keep our sidewalk clean. Because I know that if we don’t, we receive a lot of complaints.” Usually, Lawrence said, these came in the form of anonymous voicemails about bringing “dirty things.”
The East Village has for decades been a locus of debates and activism around homelessness in New York City. East Village manufacturing and shipping jobs left the area as mass transit, bridges and tunnels made the outer boroughs more accessible in the 1920s. The erosion of industry in the neighborhood continued as garment employers sought cheaper labor in southern and western states in the 1940s and 50s, and then overseas in the 60s.
Chinese, Italian, Jewish, Indian and Puerto Rican immigrant enclaves filled the vacuum in the post-industrial East Village with commercial districts. The diverse restaurants, bars and retail shops attracted bohemian youths to the area, and a flourishing art scene took root in the late 60s.
As the city went into a fiscal crisis in the 1970s, the East Village was left to fend for itself. Renee Schoonbeek, an urban planner and housing activist, used to call the area east of Avenue A “the warzone.”
“There was dire need. The place looked bombed,” she said. “Half the housing was burned out, falling apart, disbanded, empty. It was awful.” Among the destruction, people lived in a Tompkins Square Park shanty town or squatted in abandoned buildings.
In the 1980s, New York began its recovery. “There was a rapid expansion of well paid jobs in the sectors of finance, law, insurance, information and administration, as headquarters of major firms continued to centralize their control functions in the New York region,” Janet Abu-Lughod writes in “From Urban Village to East Village,” her analysis of gentrification in the neighborhood. “This fed a revived center-city real estate market which… led to escalating housing prices.” Those who had survived the disinvestment of the 70s saw their rents rise, and even more New Yorkers lost their housing.
The East Village slowly began to attract a different sort of resident. A burgeoning and young professional caste, known at the time as Yuppies, wanted to live near their jobs in law or finance, but also somewhere cool. They emerged from the arson fires to buy up cheap housing converted into luxury residences.
The new residents created problems for the old ones. Much of the tension focused around Tompkins Square Park. In the late 1980s, the park was home to hundreds of people living out of makeshift structures. Punk musicians had also claimed the park as a venue, holding shows and parties overnight. Newcomers to the neighborhood complained of noise, drug use and prostitution in the park. It was in this ferment that the city sought to reassert control of Tompkins. In June of 1988, the Parks Department greenlit a 1 a.m. curfew with enforcement from the NYPD, and the stage was set for a showdown.
On July 11, police cordoned about 150 unhoused residents of the park into the southeast quadrant and prepared to enforce the new curfew, according to the New York Times. Hundreds of protesters gathered to resist. One group carried a banner reading “gentrification is class war.” Some blocked traffic. Others shouted and threw bottles at cops. An NYPD report would later acknowledge there was a breakdown in the chain of command during the protest. The city would describe what followed as a “police riot.”
“Officers wore no badges or hid their badge numbers, clubbed and kicked bystanders for no apparent reason and without arresting them, and streamed through the streets of the East Village in uncontrolled rage,” the New York Times reported. “Officers, on foot and horseback, repeatedly massed, advanced, retreated and then charged into the crowds, often running past superiors who called vainly for them to stay back.”
Officials said 44 people were injured during the riot, including 13 police officers. The city tried 14 cops for brutality, but none were convicted. In the wake of the riot, Tompkins continued to see protests and arrests.
In December 1989, at the tail-end of Mayor Ed Koch’s final term, police raided the park in an attempt to clear what the New York Times called a “tent city.” Koch said he was responding to complaints of drug use and prostitution. In 18-degree weather, police swept unhoused residents. A group of activists set a handful of the cardboard shelters on fire in protest. The cops carried out their work trashing ramshackle shelters in a haze of smoke.
Some of the displaced residents set up tents in a vacant lot owned by Trinity Lower East Side Lutheran Parish at Ninth Street and Avenue B. That lot would one day become the building in which Alex Lawrence serves lunch to unhoused residents of the park.
Two years later, Mayor David Dinkins closed the park for renovations in a move aimed at driving the unhoused population out of the park. “This park is a park,” said the mayor at a press conference, according to the New York Times. “It is not a place to live.”
The new Tompkins Square Park featured winding pathways lined with gates and gardens to prevent the kind of open-space congregation that might be seen in a protest, a riot or a homeless encampment.
“The reason why the park exists the way it does with so many fences is because of that,” said Lawrence. “It’s not really a park. It’s actually a series of paths with a bunch of fences. You’re not allowed to go on the grass. You’re not allowed to go to any garden. You’re not allowed to actually assemble in any sort of way in this park now.”
Like Napoleon III widening the streets of Paris to prevent dissidents from erecting barricades in another French Revolution, Dinkins turned Tompkins from a public square to a garden maze to stop another tent city. Neither Napoleon III nor Dinkins got their way. The last emperor of France was deposed in 1870, and unhoused people moved back into Tompkins Square Park after the renovation was complete.
Following Koch’s lead, the sweep became the city’s signature response to homelessness.
Under Dinkins, “unauthorized persons” were barred from public spaces. Under Rudy Giuliani, police swept unhoused people from areas with tourists to less scrutinized locales. Michael Bloomberg continued the sweeps and police issued summonses for panhandling and other “quality of life” violations associated with homelessness. Between 2016 and 2021, Bill de Blasio carried out almost 1,000 sweeps.
The sweeps have accelerated under Mayor Eric Adams, who has made them a key pillar in his approach to homelessness. In just six months in 2022, his administration carried out an astonishing 2,405 sweeps of homeless encampments. Their stated purpose was to get people off the streets and into shelters where they could eventually secure permanent housing with the support of the city. In fact, according to New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, the sweeps “failed utterly” to do this. An audit by Lander’s office found only three people secured permanent housing after a sweep over a year after the program started.
In March 2022, police first swept an encampment at the intersection of 9th Street and Avenue B, across from both Tompkins Square Park and Trinity Church. The encampment residents were incensed by the sweep. Housing activists helped them replace their belongings, and the group rebuilt in the same place as an act of civil disobedience. Determined to take a stand against the city and the police, Johnny Grima, one of the encampment members, drew an A with a circle around it on his tent and dubbed the encampment Anarchy Row.
Thus started a game of tug of war between the city and the camp. During some sweeps, activists attempted to block the eviction, linking arms around the encampment. Cops would carry out arrests and sanitation workers would trash belongings. Once the sweep team left, it was time to rebuild. Sometimes Lawrence would see the sweeps from their window overlooking the encampment and come down to offer support.
In 1991, the year Dinkins renovated Tompkins, the Los Angeles Times estimated about 80,000 homeless people lived in New York City. The Coalition for the Homeless, a group advocating for the rights of unhoused people since 1981, estimated almost 88,000 unhoused people lived in New York City in September 2023. After more than three decades of sweeps, there are still people sleeping in Tompkins.
On a recent Tuesday morning, Alex Lawrence left the cluttered paperwork of his second-floor office to join employees and volunteers in their preparations for SaFH’s lunch service. The smell of onions, garlic and adobo wafted from the kitchen, where Delores Rodriguez, a great grandmother who serves over a thousand meals a week, presided over three massive stainless steel pots of beans. She chatted with her co-chef in Spanish while Descarga Boricua, a New York Salsa band from the 2000s, played over tinny phone speakers. A group in the dining room, a room that no one has dined in since SaFH moved lunch to the courtyard during the pandemic, chatted idly while moving bread and bagels donated by local shops from a large plastic bag into small plastic bags. One volunteer, an older woman, enthusiastically tried her limited Spanish vocabulary out on her colleague, who doesn’t speak English — “pan delicioso, pan muy delicioso.” Lawrence donned the uniform worn by all staff: A purple apron, a hair net and a pair of plastic gloves snatched from a cardboard box.
Lawrence knew everyone working that day. One young woman was volunteering for the second time, an auspicious sign that she might become a regular. Other volunteers have been coming for years. Lawrence warmly greeted Ken Craig, a retired longshoreman and lifelong punk rocker who’s been living in the East Village for 29 years. He’s a fixture at SaFH. When Lawrence asked him what he did for Thanksgiving, he said he spent the day volunteering at a different church nearby. The neighborhood was changing, but there were still a lot of places to get food or spend the night, if you needed them.
After making the rounds chatting with staff, Lawrence got to work sorting produce donated from Trader Joe’s and Wegmans for the pantry that runs after lunch service. He grimaced while making the call to toss dozens of boxes of raspberries that had devolved into a red-pink slime with a sickly sweet smell. The strawberries were in slightly better shape, so Lawrence set about examining each berry one-by-one to ensure none were rotten.
“This is yeoman’s work, to go through this thing of strawberries, but people are already in a precarious situation asking for food,” he said. “We want to provide them with food that isn’t rotten.”
As he sorted, Lawrence explained that the staff were ramping up the amount of food they were making that day. The day before, the city had commandeered the defunct St. Brigid Catholic school two blocks away to issue one-way tickets out of town to migrants. People waiting in line slept outside on the sidewalk as temperatures dipped into the 30s. The migrants, most of whom were not seeking a ticket but rather a shelter bed to sleep in, flocked to SaFH for lunch. The city hadn’t warned Lawrence that hundreds of additional hungry people would be in the area. His team ran out of food and had to turn people away. They were determined that today, everyone would eat.
When it was time to open the doors from the dining room to the courtyard and start serving lunch, Lawrence warned the staff to brace for one of the first wintery days of the year, and everyone bundled up in anticipation. One team packaged rice, beans and salad into cardboard to-go boxes. Paul Conlan, a retired FDNY Battalion Chief who grew up in the area, acted as a runner bringing the boxes to the courtyard for service. A duo checked guests’ names as they passed through the line and handed the boxes out; some people on the list were allowed several boxes for family members. Lawrence distributed water and apples.
“Days with chicken are busier,” remarked Craig as he took over the water station from Lawrence. While rice and beans might not draw as heavy a crowd, the courtyard was still packed. People young and old, of all races, many speaking Chinese or Spanish, lined up around the block and huddled against the cold in the courtyard. One young man arrived in a reflective vest, possibly on break from work. Another man eating quietly at a plastic, circular table poured dressing he brought with him in his backpack over the salad. “I’m getting younger every day,” said a woman named Rose as she leaned on her cane to grab a box of food.
Melvin Bermudeg moved through the line with his belongings on a Citi Bike. He was wearing a heavy jacket, the kind one might find at an army surplus store, and bright blue, floral pants. He was raised in the East Village in the late 80s. As a kid, his father warned him never to go in the park. Now he lives outside nearby. He lost his home a few years ago, when his mother died and his work cleaning houses started to dry up. He tried selling his belongings on the street to make ends meet, but he was shut down by police. When he first lost his home, Bermudeg tried staying in a shelter, but after he was robbed there, he decided he prefers the street. His property is still at risk sleeping outside, though now he’s worries about city officials instead of shelter residents.
“Sanitation takes my stuff all the time,” he said. “In the street you lose stuff too, but in the street you learn not to have stuff. I’ve lost everything over and over again.”
Lunch was relatively calm, but Lawrence said that when sweeps are particularly active, it puts everyone on edge. “People were angry. A bump against somebody would throw people into a fit of rage, and people were very animated speaking to us about police,” he said. “A couple days there were police parked right outside of our gate which kept half of our people away from eating.”
When Mayor Eric Adams launched his sweep program, he branded the removals “encampment cleanups.” When the time came to sweep, it was sanitation workers who tossed the possessions of unhoused New Yorkers into garbage trucks.
The association of unhoused people with garbage is a longstanding one among Americans that is part of a broader pattern of dehumanization. A 2006 study by Lasana Harris and Susan Fiske that used neuroimaging to measure prejudice demonstrated a dehumanizing revulsion response to unhoused people. When the subjects viewed images of unhoused people, the same parts of their brain were activated as when viewing images of vomit or an overflowing toilet. Disgust was the only emotional response of the four the researchers identified that could be elicited by objects.
“Disgust is unique among the emotions predicted by the [stereotype content model] because it can target either humans or nonhumans, making people functionally equivalent to objects,” wrote the researchers. They went on to describe disgust as the “most extreme form of prejudice, simultaneous dislike and disrespect.” This dehumanization makes it easier to marginalize unhoused people. By conflating a man sleeping in Tompkins Square Park with garbage, his removal becomes a cleaning measure.
Dr. Nyssa Snow-Hill, a social psychologist who developed a methodology for measuring attitudes toward unhoused people, said many are capable of compassion for homeless people in the abstract, but revert to revulsion and stereotyping when encountering an unhoused person in their day-to-day life.
For the most part, Americans are able to recognize that societal factors and policy decisions in the U.S. make homelessness inevitable, according to Snow-Hill, but at the same time perceive individual unhoused people as lazy, dangerous and undeserving of shelter.
“They’re able to blame the individual but also are able to blame society,” she said. “Research says when you use societal causes, that you are more likely to have better attitudes. You’re more likely to have pity on a population. Whereas if you view somebody as responsible for their condition, you’re more likely to have contempt for them or anger.”
A 2006 study that examined attitudes between the years 1993 and 2001, found people had become more open to providing services in this period but still had negative perceptions of individual unhoused people. Most participants said they felt compassionate when thinking about homeless people, felt angry that people were homeless in such a rich country and were willing to pay higher taxes to help them. But they also said they would be careful not to touch a homeless person, that homeless people shouldn’t be allowed to sleep outside, and that they believed homeless people make money illegally.
It is this dichotomy that allows otherwise compassionate people to have empathy for unhoused people in the abstract but respond with hostility or indifference in person.
Besides stigma, she identified perceived threat as a driver of negative attitudes toward unhoused people. This included both symbolic threat, like discomfort felt when seeing an unhoused person, and concrete threat, like fear of housing property decreases due to the presence of unhoused people.
These fears loom large in the East Village, where many residents are old enough to remember the blighted neighborhood and conflict brought about by housing instability. Some now live in fear of the bad old days. Gayle Gaddis, who has lived by 12th Street and 2nd Avenue for almost 30 years in a rent stabilized apartment, said she’s seen more encampments in the neighborhood and signs of poverty in the park recently. “It feels like it’s reverting back a bit,” she said. “Whatever the city’s approach is, it’s not working.”
On Nov. 27, Lawrence arrived at Trinity Church as police and sanitation workers wrapped up yet another sweep on the corner where the church meets Tompkins Square Park. Coverage of the program has died down, but the sweeps are still very much alive.
Eduardo Ventura lives in a new encampment set up by the old Anarchy Row residents on the other side of the park. He said he likes the spot because it’s not in front of any residential buildings or businesses. When he’s tried to sleep near entrances in the past, people have called the police on him.
“You’re always going to have a problem. If I went to the subway, I’m going to have a problem with the MTA and police. If I’m in front of the stores, I’m going to have a problem,” he said. To Ventura, the sweeps are just the problem that comes with this location.
Ventura said police are sweeping his encampment two to three times a week, and that they’ve trashed bedding, clothes, phones, bicycles and more. Like Anarchy Row, the residents of the new encampment are setting up in the same location after every sweep with the help of some local activist groups.
The sweeps at the new encampment have given rise to an activist response from groups like Rent Refusers Network. On Nov. 22, a police officer tased and then arrested an activist who goes by the moniker Deep. Police said the officer only fired his taser after Deep grabbed his jacket while interfering with an investigation into a burglary in progress nearby, amNY reported. Video that purportedly shows the incident tells a different story. In the video, Deep approaches an officer and says “stop harassing homeless people” without making physical contact. The officer then appears to shove Deep before pointing his taser at him. The other officers then wrestle the man to the ground while the person filming pleads with them “Please don’t touch him.” The officer can be seen pointing the distinctive, bright yellow taser at Deep, who is on the ground, though the actual firing of the weapon is hard to make out in the shaky video.
The ongoing sweeps are a reminder for Lawrence of the tension around housing that has plagued the neighborhood for more than 35 years. Each conflagration, whether it be a riot, an eviction or a sweep, is not felt in isolation. Like scar tissue accumulating with repeated cuts, these crises change the park and its inhabitants. For Lawrence’s part, he is going to continue serving lunch.
“I just can’t get over the cruelty of it all,” he said. “These people truly have nothing, and to throw it in a garbage truck is so crazy.”
