He would probably end up inside the subway system or a 24-hour fast food restaurant, Muwakkil said. A year ago he might have slept inside the Bowery Mission, one of New York City’s oldest and best-known homeless aid organizations, where he had just finished dinner.
“A night like this, the chapel would’ve been open,” he said. “It wouldn’t have been eat-and-get-out.”
He was referring to the mission’s chapel, which, for years, was opened on cold nights so that scores of men could sleep indoors, on the floor, beneath a stained-glass window illustrating the Christian parable of the return of the prodigal son.
But just before the start of winter, the chief program officer at the mission announced a new policy in an internal email.
“The Bowery Mission will NOT be offering Code Blue Shelter at Bowery, Tribeca or Newark campuses this winter,” the November message read, referring to a term used by city officials when the nighttime temperature drops to 32 degrees or below, including wind chill.
Last winter, from November 2018 to April 2019, the mission offered Code Blue shelter on 118 nights.
Some advocates for the homeless were surprised. Mary Brosnahan, who was a longtime leader of the Coalition for the Homeless, a Manhattan-based aid organization, said the change was “very significant.”
“On those bitterly cold nights,” she said, “it’s about life and death.”
James Winans, the mission’s interim chief executive, said the decision to discontinue its Cold Blue program had been made after long deliberation, partly because it was meant only to supplement shelter offered by the city and partly because those seeking shelter would be better off in a setting with beds and other amenities.
“The Bowery Mission is always making decisions about how we offer the most excellent care to the most people,” he said. “This is a space in which we felt perhaps that we weren’t offering the most excellent care and that there were other options.”
Winans did not provide a figure for how much it cost to offer Code Blue shelter. Asked if finances were a factor in the decision to end that program, he said: “We are always adjusting our plan according to our resources.”
He added that the staff had discretion to provide overnight shelter on an ad hoc basis to individuals who could not safely be outside. They had done so this winter, he said, but the mission did not keep track of how many times that had occurred.
The Bowery Mission has long been a presence on the downtown street with which it shares a name, even as the neighborhood has moved beyond its old reputation as a notorious skid row.
Time and gentrification have erased much of that grit. The flophouses and nickel-a-drink saloons have given way to nightclubs and luxury condos. But some of the old Bowery remains.
A grim reminder of that reality came last October when four homeless men were murdered while sleeping on sidewalks in Chinatown, not far from the mission.
The Code Blue policy change at the mission, coming against the backdrop of gentrification, has prompted questions about how the mission sees its role at a time when a record number of people in New York City are homeless.
The Bowery facility — the organization has seven locations in the city — provides free meals three times a day, free medical services three times a week and access to showers for nonresidents twice a week.
Although it no longer offers Code Blue shelter, the organization still offers people places to sleep more regularly: Its Tribeca location has 194 shelter beds, and the mission provides residential programs in several of its facilities, where hundreds of men and women live each year while receiving counseling and job training or while recovering from addiction. Additionally, it operates a children’s summer camp in Pennsylvania.
The privately funded mission, which was founded in 1879 and is housed inside a former coffin factory, has for years been seen as one of the Bowery’s leading institutions. President William Howard Taft spoke there. New York City mayors have taken part in the mission’s annual coat drives and Thanksgiving dinners.
It was created to minister to the generations of men who gravitated toward the Bowery, long seen as a desolate, end-of-the-line outpost where the minutes were often measured sip by sip.
Michele Campo, a photographer and artist, moved to the Bowery in 1971, attracted by the low rent and generous spaces. She said she considered the Bowery men, as they were sometimes called, her neighbors.
As the area gentrifies, Campo said, it has saddened her to watch the mission — “the last vestige” of hope for some people — appear to roll back a bit of its compassion.
“It seems harsh,” she said recently. “When the mission closes its doors for Code Blue, that’s as cold as it gets.”
The mission has faced recent budget shortfalls and is looking for a new president to replace David P. Jones, who stepped down just before Thanksgiving.
(STORY CAN END HERE. OPTIONAL MATERIAL FOLLOWS.)
During the nearly five years of Jones’ leadership, the mission doubled the number of people enrolled each year in its residential recovery programs, absorbing the Goodwill Rescue Mission in Newark, New Jersey, and the New York City Rescue Mission in Tribeca.
But as it expanded its footprint, the Bowery Mission also cut back on some efforts. For example, a program that distributed food four times a week in the East Village, Chelsea and Bushwick was phased out.
The Code Blue email sent by its chief program officer, Cheryl Mitchell, was one of the latest changes.
“Guests in need of Code Blue shelter will be referred to partnering agencies and shelters,” she wrote, adding that the mission would provide “overnight warming centers” when subway and bus service is suspended because of extreme weather or when travel is too hazardous.
Previously, the mission’s website had said that up to 150 nonresident men could sleep in the chapel and cafeteria whenever the temperature dropped below 40 degrees, stating: “By providing a warm place to sleep, we are preventing victimization, illness and possibly death that sometimes comes with winter exposure.”
Flyers distributed at the mission now refer men seeking nighttime Code Blue help to a main portal into the city’s shelter system on East 30th Street, a drop-in center on East 32nd Street and a warming center at West 28th Street. All are about 2 miles from the chapel.
Recently, homeless men who had just had dinner at the mission discussed the end of Code Blue nights there.
“You’re going to see more people in the subways, more people in the street,” said Lance Smith, 43, as he stood near the mission, both hands shoved into his jacket pockets.
Some said that while they appreciated the free meals offered at the mission, it sometimes felt daunting to step outside to face wintry conditions.
“You’re on your own, out in the cold,” said Aaron Johnson, 37. “And the cold can definitely be dangerous.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times .