Hotels for the homeless

One of the things a reporter learns early in life, especially if he/she is a reporter for a morning paper, is to be wary of the headlines in the previous evening's paper, in any evening paper, to be wary to the point of total disbelief, simply because all that an evening paper has to go on is the news that happened in the morning and it won't do ever to admit that nothing much, especially in government, happens at breakfast time. So they have to grab something that might happen, that might be lurid and blow it up as an exciting or frightening probability in the early evening headlines.

There was one headline last Monday, however, that expressed in four words a warning already proclaimed in the early morning television and radio news programmes. It said, 'Get Ready for Charlie'. Now nobody along the north-eastern seaboard, all the hundreds of miles from Virginia to Maine, had any need for an explanatory subheading.

Charlie was the third of the tropical storms which are brewed at this time of the year in the Caribbean. There had been two that amounted to nothing. Andrew, the first and then I think it was Barbara or Betty – anyway it would have to be a woman's name. In the long-gone days before women's liberation, the weather bureau, to be exact, the Hurricane Watch Center in Miami, Florida, had always given female names to the hurricanes. I can remember with no affection whatsoever the disastrous assault on our coast 40 some years ago of Diane, followed within a week by the outrageous Edna, but women's lib put paid to that obnoxious, sexist custom. Now, hurricanes are officially named alternately by male and female names.

So, last Monday, the warnings went out that Charlie had started innocently enough way down there somewhere off Haiti or Cuba as a big blow which once it got out to sea turned itself into a whirling dervish, a spinning wind, rotating round a huge, invisible doughnut. At sea, as happens to these things, it picked up more moisture and more rotary speed and would go on getting faster and faster and wetter and wetter, no matter how deceptively slow was its forward movement.

On Sunday night, Charlie was, as we say, upgraded from a tropical storm to a hurricane. The difference is simple. A hurricane is a tropical storm that develops rotary winds of more than 73 miles an hour. By the time Charlie was off the coast of North Carolina, it was whirling of upwards of 75 miles an hour and the national weather service predicted that if it stayed on course, just offshore and heading north-east, it might get up to a hundred. Very dangerous, is what the service called it.

Any storm, however mild, that moves north-east from the coast of the Carolinas will, if it stays on land, hit Long Island which is a hundred-odd miles strip that juts out from New York City almost due east into the Atlantic. Well, this time the headline boys could print their warning in solid black type with little fear of unduly scaring people because last year, at the end of September, there'd been a similar warning about the seventh seasonal storm and the first to be officially labelled 'very dangerous'. And while several hundred thousand people from the Carolinas up beyond Virginia were evacuating seaside houses and cottages and motels, Long Islanders didn't pay too much attention until there came the deadly graveyard calm that always precedes these tumults.

In particular, the Long Island Lighting Company which owns the electric power that feeds, lights, heats or cools Long Islanders was a little tardy in mobilising repair crews. By the time we were guessing whether Gloria would skirt Long Island and move on towards Cape Cod, Gloria turned and tore through the middle of the island itself. The accompanying wreckage from the central thrust and the thrashing of her skirts felled many thousands of trees, many of which, of course, broke the power lines. The immediate result was that something like 200,000 homes on the island were without power and light, no flushing toilets, no running water, the food going bad in every home refrigerator, not to mention in all the supermarkets, for anywhere between five to ten days. The Long Island Lighting Company had to recruit repair crews from as far away as Ohio, about 700 miles to the west.

Well, the poor old LILCO, as it's called – once affectionately – came in for a pitiless beating from the people, from the government of New York City, of the two Long Island counties and the threat of a state investigation by the governor of New York, Mario Cuomo, the vigorous, engaging and eloquent governor who is, he says, not running for president, but doesn't appear either to be standing still. Maybe he's standing for president.

At any rate, the people of Long Island had no more outraged champion last fall than Governor Cuomo and for a while the state threatened to take over the lighting company. So this time, LILCO couldn't have been more concerned for the safety and the comfort of its customers. It put out radio warnings to everybody to get equipped at once with flashlights, candles, battery-run radios. It put repair crews far from Long Island on the alert. It declared a hurricane watch even when Charlie was mooching along the Virginia shore. Its spokesman, or rather spokeswoman, this time, was one Gail Pennypacker. Ms Pennypacker announced on Sunday night that LILCO has been tracking the storm very closely and 'the first stage of our storm preparedness plan is now in effect'. Emergency management teams were recruited at all the substations and power centres of good old LILCO.

So, wouldn't you know, nothing happened! That's to say, Charlie moderated his wrath, limped off out to sea. The eastern tip of Long Island got a bucketful of stair rods and Charlie was officially reduced in rank to a storm and expired somewhere out in the Atlantic AND, wouldn't you know, a charter boat captain howled, 'The weather bureau and the media pressed the panic button too soon.' He lost $500 in trade. If Charlie had shattered his boat, he'd have complained that they didn't press the button soon enough. As they say in Lancashire, there's nowt like folks!

On the front page of the tabloid that carried the fateful 'Get Ready for Charlie' warning, there was an extraordinary picture, a photograph of an Indian prince or rajah wearing a garland of roses, I guess, but it wasn't an Indian prince, it was the inimitable, rotund, cheerful, mayor of the Big Apple, Mayor Ed Koch, wearing on his bald head a Nehru-style cap. It's safe to say that this was the first time anybody had been moved to think of him as Pandit Koch. It was the first time for the occasion itself.

It was what I suppose is now to be an annual event, the India Day parade. It marked the 39th anniversary of India's independence. I don't know where the pressure came from for this colourful event which was led by a dazzling brunette, Vidya Chandra Sekhar, Miss India, but I imagine that the main pressure was the new pressure of Hindus on the city population. They're not obviously the most visible of the new breeds of New Yorkers and they won't be so long as the city contains or tries to contain a seething population of close to a million Puerto Ricans. But Indians have been pouring in for the past ten years or so and now constitute a substantial part of the population of the borough of Queens and throughout the city, they have very visibly taken over the running of the stationery stores and newsstands.

For most of the past 50 years, New York City held three main what we used to call 'immigrant' and now call 'ethnic' parades. The second Monday in October, Fifth Avenue was and is given over to the Italians for Columbus Day. On St Patrick's Day, plainly, the Irish take over the town and he would be a daring or pathologically forgetful mayor who did not deck himself out in emerald green.

Pulaski Day is one of the oldest New York festivals. Casimir Pulaski was a Polish soldier whose campaigns against the Russians made him a hero in his own country. In 1776 in Paris, he was introduced to Benjamin Franklin, was fired by the colonials' cause, sailed off to America, was made a general by the first Congress and fought and died, defending Charleston against the British in 1779. He was 32 but his memory is green among Polish Americans.

So, we already have a Puerto Rican Day parade and now an India Day and pretty soon I shouldn't wonder a Cuban Day. Maybe a Nicaraguan Day, if the Contras throw up a hero on the American side.

Mayor Koch looked, as always, blithe wearing his Nehru cap. No waving, no grins, the perfect temperament for the second, most powerful executive office in the United States, the mayor of New York City. The day he posed in his Indian cap, he had to deal with problems arising from overcrowded jails, with crack (the new and terrifying street drug), with the emergency plan, police, firemen, dustmen, for coping with Charlie.

And he also had a letter proposing a bill from a city councilman. What to do with the city's 4,000 homeless families? The councilman did a sum in arithmetic: 28,000 of the city's hotel rooms are vacant every night. Put the homeless in the hotels! In fact, 56 not-too-humble hotels already do it, but the councillor has worked out that it costs the city $72,000 a year to house one family of four in a city-run shelter and that, says the councillor, is the exact amount it would cost to put a family of four into a double-bedded room at Fifth Avenue's Plaza. Why not close down these seedy and expensive city shelters, rented properties requiring renovation, maintenance, paid help etc. and put those 40,000 street people as permanent residents in the Plaza, the Waldorf, the Hilton, the St Regis, all the best places?

The mayor is pondering this plan. Not, I'm sure for long. It was put up to several of the poshest hotels. 'So sorry, we're booked for the rest of the year' or, 'Well, the manager is on duty only Monday through Friday and today he's unavailable anyway.'

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

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