The post office does not deliver to Linda McLean’s home. “It’s between the eighth and ninth bench, the fourth lamp post over,” said the 43-year-old Hoboken native Monday with a wink, pointing to the small park next to the Erie Lackawanna Terminal. For the last five months, McLean has been homeless, ever since she slipped on her way to her Census-taking job and broke her arm. While she waited for her disability payments to come through, she says that she ran out of her savings, forcing her to take to the streets on May 15.
“I went straight for the park,” said McLean who, despite the milquetoast nature of her profession, has picked up her share of street smarts in a life spent bouncing all over Hudson County and Long Island.In the park, McLean had some rough times. She has been arrested once after stealing a bag of trail mix from a convenience store – “I was hungry,” she says – and she has to seek shelter in the Exchange Place PATH station when the weather gets bad. But she said she always came back to the park.
Part of what drew her back was a small band of mostly students who call themselves “Food Not Bombs,” a loosely affiliated national vegetarian group that seeks to help the hungry and the homeless. Every Saturday for the last six months, the group has set up a table at the edge of Pier A Park and handed out food to people who needed it.
“They always used to bring bagels,” said McLean. “You have one of those. Get your carbs and you are good until at least 2 p.m. every day.”
While McLean was happy to see the students, whose web site explains that they are a “revolutionary movement” dedicated to fighting poverty, city officials were not so enthusiastic. The group was told recently that if it wanted to continue to hand out food to the homeless, it would have to register with the city like other food distributors.
“If anyone wants to distribute food in town there is a mechanism to do that,” said Business Administrator George Crimmins recently. “We ask them to register so that residents know that if they see an operation it is not bogus. The only requirement for registration is to show that you do not have a criminal record. People do this all the time and do not have a problem with it.”
But the leadership of Food Not Bombs said they did have a problem with having to register and they complained that “registering” seemed to be a cumbersome, unclear process.
“When we asked more about that, they were saying you need a license and that we would need to write a proposal,” explained John White, a 19-year-old Columbia University student, from his dorm room Wednesday. “We were told that we would need the City Council to enact new laws.” Crimmins says they misunderstood.
Rather than fight it out in the City Council chambers, the group decided to take its issue to the streets. Last Saturday afternoon a few dozen homeless people met group organizers in front of City Hall to wave signs and protest.
In the midst of the protest one homeless man who seems only to be known as “Charlie” apparently began feeling so poorly that a park bench had to be cleared so that he could lay down. Group organizers reportedly asked the police to call for an ambulance to assist him, but according to McLean, who was there, “the cop said `bring an ambulance, but there is no need to hurry,’ into his walkie-talkie.”
Whether this actually happened or not is a subject of some dispute. Many of the protesters say that it did and they argue that it is indicative of the sort of attitude that the police and many of the town officials have adopted towards the homeless.
“People would rather push homelessness out of their minds,” said White. “Its something that they would rather not think about.”
Not making it difficult
City officials reacted strongly to the suggestion that the city is trying to make it difficult for its homeless residents to stay.
“We have a resident homeless population who have been here for years,” said Crimmins. “You can see them specifically by City Hall and by [the downtown] CVS. As a matter of fact many of them come in to see the city clerk regularly and he gives them food.”
“With respect to Charlie,” he continued, “the police arrested an off-duty Jersey City police officer who beat him about two years ago. Charlie is well known around here. He can get very abusive. I think he is treated well considering the way he sometimes abuses people. We are talking about a man who has a problem. I have seen him taking his clothes off in the street.”
Eventually, an ambulance did come to whisk Charlie away to St. Mary’s hospital.
Though Crimmins did not attend the event himself, he said he was concerned that it seemed to be orchestrated by people who did not live in Hoboken. “I heard that many of the people who participated did not even know what they were protesting against,” he said. “These were outside people who came in with their own agenda and their own pre-printed signs.”
One of the principal coordinators, a man who said only that his name was Sean, told a reporter that he was from New Brunswick. But White, who now lives on Columbia’s campus on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, grew up in Hoboken.
The group’s future plans are uncertain, which leaves homeless people like McLean uneasy. Though there is a shelter in town offering food and lodging, McLean says that she prefers to fend for herself. “They act like food is a privilege in there, when it should be a right,” she says.
Representatives from the Hoboken Clergy Coalition Shelter for the Homeless say that is an attitude that they sometimes encounter, but that they have to follow the rules in order to make the shelter work.
“We get people here who know that we have rules and a lot of them can’t deal with that,” explained shelter employee Delores Longo Tuesday. “There are people who think that whether they obey the rules or not – you know small things like rules that say they have to clean up after themselves – they should be fed anyway.”
When asked what the winter will be like for her if Food Not Bombs can not pass out food, McLean was upbeat. “I’m going to get my food stamps, my disability and my social security,” she said with a nod towards a stack of papers four inches thick that account for about 25 percent of her possessions. Suddenly, she brightened and added, “then I am going to buy my condo and volunteer all of my time for Food Not Bombs.”
The local group can be e-mailed at foodnotbombs_hoboken@hotmail.com or phoned at (973) 357-0917.