THIS WAS THEN

DOWN AND OUT IN AMERICA

In the 1980s, I was teaching at a NYC public school located in the midtown area of Manhattan, which received and enrolled many students from hotels which housed homeless families. 

Some of those hotels were: The Carter, The Prince George, and The Martinique. The conditions in those places were very terrible and the filmmaker/actor Lee Grant made a documentary called "Down and Out in America" which told the stories of some of those residents and families who lived in those shelters. 

Part 6 of the series told the story of Bruce and Kathy, who lived in The Martinique. That shelter was located on Broadway and West 32nd Street. The very old building went through changes: it was a Radisson for a while and now it is back to the name Martinique. Back then, it was total filth and squalor. 

I knew Bruce and Kathy. Their children attended the school in which I was a teacher and I had one of their children in my class and Bruce brought the children to school every day. Kathy was rather quiet but Bruce talked a lot. He had a great deal of issues and problems. Theirs was a situation where you hoped help would offer up some positive change but matters were so devastating for them that a conclusion seemed fairly evident and apparent. 

I remember one afternoon after school I was walking to Macy's and I saw him passed out in some seedy doorway... with one of his children sitting by his side on a step as another passerby ran to a pay phone to call for assistance. 

They were not the only ones with sad lives that passed through the hallways of the schools in which I taught. But their story is the only story that became one part of a documentary you can view at the link above.