Note: There Will Be More About the Bellevue Men's Shelter

I have met another man who was at the Bellevue Men's  Shelter, in his case in 1999 ( I was basically there in 1994)....

 In about 1996 I was on a bus and met a guy who remembered me from the shelter--he was now carrying a computer laptop with him-- who told me that friends had informed him that there had been big changes there after I had left.

A Daily News expose on the place had helped, as had also a surprise visit by the then new Mayor Giuliani, who didn't like a lot of what he saw and heard.

First of all, the idiot head of the place ( I saw him on one occasion, he was a middle aged bureaucrat who had more of the vegetable about him than a human being as he sauntered past all these WEPS workers who had been forced to wait two hours and more for their measly pay one week, with the money having disappeared somehow...because someone had forgotten all about it there, which was typical ( these men were waiting for such small amounts of money away).

Giuliani had also made sure that a lot of the key "social workers" there had been fired, including one notorious awful light skinned Haitian woman who looked so white it was a little eerie-- the guy on the bus joked that she would have gone back to Haiti and come back under another name and would soon be working for the city again probably.

Also, the drug dealers had been shut down with their turf in Manhattan closed off to them-- most of them going to New Jersey, and so on.

SSI benefits had been cut off from a lot of people who really did not qualify for them ( including the gang members and drug dealers often).

I have shown my story to this man who was there in 1999 and asked him to give me notes on what it was like when he was there. I think it will be interesting...

Finally, he, like me, slipped into homeless even though he was getting help from his family...as he noted " it got to a point where I was beyond help," which is the same thing that happened to me.

I am surprised he was at Bellevue at all because there had been a deal with the community while I was leaving that the place would only house older men and homeless families ( he being much younger). 

But we will find out soon and I will post here on what had happened, and then in the future do more updates on what happened up to that until the present day as best I can.