By CHARLES BLOW, NY TIMES
Around the corner came a little golden ball of sunshine named Madison, dressed head to toe in pink, hair arranged in Afro puffs, one wrist covered in turquoise beaded bracelets, arms opened wide. She wrapped those arms around a teacher’s legs, hugged them close and looked up with the kind of smile that sets the world right.
Madison is 4 years old. She is happy and thriving. This is her second year of Head Start in the basement of a building that houses the poor and homeless in one of Manhattan’s poorest neighborhoods.
I met Madison and 50 other little rays of hope at the Dorothy Day Apartments on Riverside Drive in West Harlem. The building is the sixth in the neighborhood run by Broadway Housing Communities, and the first to include a day care center serving both the building and the community. This former drug den is not only beautiful, but it also pulses with pride and hope and happiness.
It’s just what I needed to see. Writing about children and the poor and the vulnerable these days, there aren’t very many bright spots — but this is one.
The children are bathed by natural light that floods into the basement through skylights. The floors are covered by beautiful green ceramic tile made to look like slate. The walls are painted a sunrise yellow, lined with thick wooden moldings and covered with well-framed pieces of art — some by the children, some donated. The courtyard, which had been filled with six feet of garbage, is covered with mats and used as an area where wee little legs that barely have kneecaps can be folded into funky shapes for daily yoga.
Above the day care center are six floors of housing for 190 people, more than half of whom are children and all of whom were either homeless or in extreme poverty. Many of the adults are the hardest cases: those recovering from drug addiction, those with chronic diseases like H.I.V. and those with mental disabilities. In fact, most of the adults suffer from some form of disability.
And on the top floor is an art gallery that opens onto a sweeping veranda, lined with flowering plants and with some of the most magnificent Hudson River views in the city.
It is easy to forget that you’re in a low-income housing building. The administrators joked often when I was there about the chic woman who had jumped out of a cab and inquired about rents because she wanted a river view, only to be told to her befuddlement that the building was for the poor. “She was shocked,” they chuckled.
There are no security guards. There is no commotion. There are no signs of institutional living like names above doors. There isn’t even so much as a crayon mark on any of the walls. This is an oasis of civility and tranquility and culture inhabited — and to some degree, self-policed — by people whom the world would rob of those dignities.
So why so much emphasis on beauty and art, I asked?
One administrator responded resolutely: “You don’t just give a person four walls to live in. You give them something to be inspired by.”
Ellen Baxter, the founder and executive director of Broadway Housing Communities, an unassuming woman whose braided ponytail swept the middle of her back, chimed in that “art and nature show the other side of poverty.” She continued, “Poverty denigrates people and dehumanizes people.”
Another administrator said that the environment helped to “stabilize the parents to provide a platform for the children.” And those children, she said, can create “pathways out of poverty” for the whole family.
As Lady Bird Johnson once famously said, “Where flowers bloom, so does hope.”
The administrators talk a lot about community and citizenship and the building being a village of people supporting and protecting each other, and it strikes me how apropos the village metaphor is.
They have taken the most extreme cases, given them a warm, safe, stable and, yes, beautiful place to live, while treating them with dignity and respect. And the transformations of the adults, and, more important, the outcomes for the children have been incredible.
The Dorothy Day Apartments have been open since 2003, and they have had no arrests and no teenage pregnancies, unless you count the girl who was pregnant when she moved in.
Most of the children went through the Head Start program in the basement, which now mostly serves the surrounding community. None of the children have dropped out of school. A handful have even earned scholarships to the city’s better private schools. Of the 10 children who have graduated from high school, eight have gone on to college and one has just graduated from college. (None of the adults in the building have ever been to college.)
The building runs mentoring programs and literacy programs and English as a second language programs. It maintains a computer lab and this week launched a partnership with what is essentially an international, Internet-based book club for boys in the building. (The girls’ group will begin next week.) It’s fantastic.
I know what you’re asking now, because it’s the same thing I asked: how much does something like this cost, because it sounds too good to be true?
Well, the cost of the building plus renovations was $17 million. So if it houses 190 people, that works out to about $89,500 a person, not including most of the children served by the day care center.
But let’s put that into the context of prison construction, for instance. According to the New York State Commission of Correction, 1,000 new jail beds will have been built between the end of 2007 and the end of 2011 in the counties of Albany, Essex, Rensselaer and Suffolk at a cost of $100,000 per bed.
Furthermore, as Broadway Housing Communities points out on its Web site, “permanent supportive housing for an individual costs taxpayers $12,500 annually, compared to annual costs of $25,000 for an emergency shelter cot; $60,000 for a prison cell; and $125,000 for a psychiatric hospital bed.”
In the long run it’s a bargain and builds more productive citizens — starting with little girls like Madison who bring the sunshine into the basement.
