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are two more elevators and two flights of stairs. On the right side is a laundry room for use by residents.
    On the first floor above the lobby there are two connected rooms, once used for banquets, one of which is used for the lunch program. A year from now, this room will have been painted and it will be heated. Two years from now, it will be divided to create a space for preschool. For now, it is a ghost of 1910. The other room is sometimes used for gift distribution (Christmas and Thanksgiving), tutoring, women’s groups, and other similar activities run by the city or by volunteers.
    Next to these is a third room in which crisis workersand a nurse have desks and phones. This room feels like a safe haven in a number of respects (emergencies of every kind are handled here) but chiefly because the people in this room include some of the most hardworking and devoted souls whom I have ever known. Two of the men who work here have become my friends. They are, I have no doubt, two of the most overburdened people in New York; but they dispense good cheer and absolutely unrestricted love to people in despair with a reserve of energy that I have rarely seen in twenty years of work among poor people.
    I go out of my way to mention this because the general experience of homeless people with the city workers they confront is anything but benign. Harsh words will be heard within this book; I have no doubt that they are frequently deserved. But no one in the Martinique Hotel has spoken without gratitude of these extraordinary men. Robert Hayes spoke of the saints and martyrs in the homeless cause. Not all of them are radical activists or volunteers; some of them work for the city of New York and two at least are here.
    If “Crisis,” as the families call this center, puts a visitor in mind of a safe haven, it is nearly the last haven one will find. Above and beyond are all those rooms, some as small as ten feet square, in which the residents do what they can to make it through the hours and the years. Although I have spent a great deal of time in recent years in some of the most desolate, diseased, and isolated areas of Haiti, I find the Martinique Hotel the saddest place that I have been in my entire life. Why it should seem worse than Haiti I cannot explain.
    What is life like for children in this building?
    For many the question may be answered briefly, as their lives will be extremely short. The infant mortality rate in the hotel is twenty-five per thousand, over twice thenational rate and higher even than the rate in New York’s housing projects. * The term used by health professionals for the endangered status of an infant—a child of low birth weight, for example, or a child who does not gain weight after birth—is “failure to thrive.” We will learn more of the implications of this term in speaking with the residents of the hotel. There is one nurse present (daytime hours only) to meet all the health needs of the people in the building.
    What of the children who manage to survive? Those who do not fail to thrive in their first hours of life will be released from the obstetric wards to rooms devoid of light, fresh air, or educative opportunities in early years. Play is a part of education too; they will not have much opportunity for play. Their front doors will give out upon a narrow corridor; their windows on a courtyard strewn with glass, or on the street, or on the wall of an adjacent wing of the hotel. The Empire State Building is two blocks away; if they are well situated they may have a lot of time to gaze at that. They are children who will often have no opportunity for Head Start. Many will wait for months before they are assigned to public school. Those who do get into school may find themselves embarrassed by the stigma that attaches to the “dirty baby,” as the children of the homeless are described by hospitals and sometimes perceived by their schoolteachers. Whether so perceived or not, they