In Merciless Cold, the Subway Becomes a Haven for the Homeless

NEW YORK — Early Sunday morning, with temperatures in the single digits in the city, the subway became the shelter of last resort for some of New York’s homeless. On just one E train at about 2:30 a.m., 45 homeless people had sought refuge from the longest spell of freezing days in New York since 1961.

Seven people were counted in a single train car. They were stretched out on the seats, using backpacks for pillows, curled up beneath blankets with tattered suitcases by their side. A similar scene unfolded on car after car.

There was a man with a trash bag filled with cans, and another man dozing next to a pizza box. It was quiet and warm, and everyone was sleeping. A man with a cane had taken off his soaked boots to dry his socks, and he briefly woke up.

“Help for the homeless?” he said.

There are an estimated 3,900 unsheltered homeless people living around New York City, according to the latest figures from 2017, a 40 percent increase over the previous year. In normal weather, they sleep on the streets, in tunnels and overpasses, and in the subway. But during extremely cold weather more than usual descend into the subway, open and heated 24 hours a day, and transform its trains into rolling shelters.

There is no exact count of how many more people took refuge in the trains during the recent cold spell, but the E line is a good marker. For decades it has been one of the train lines most used by homeless people to sleep, mainly because it stays underground as it makes its 50-minute transit between Jamaica Center in Queens and the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan, insulating riders from the cold.

Just after midnight on Sunday, Shanaira Hobgood was stretched out facedown on an E train, a slight figure in a blue parka. “This is my first time doing the train thing,” said Hobgood, 25, sitting up. She had been homeless on and off since she left her mother’s home seven years ago, she said, and though she had her GED and had completed some college courses, she couldn’t find work. After a monthlong stint in the shelter system last summer, she ended up in the hospital for suicidal depression. “I was sobbing for days,” she said.

She had been staying with a friend she met in the hospital, she said, “but I wore out my welcome mat.” She started sleeping on the train two weeks ago, after she noticed her hands starting to turn purple from the cold.

Other favored lines include the A and 1, since longer lines offer more time to sleep between cleaning crews. “Each line has a culture,” said Muzzy Rosenblatt, the president and chief executive of the Bowery Residents’ Committee, a nonprofit organization contracted by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the city to send outreach workers through the subway system and major commuter rail stations.

“The mentally ill develop survival skills, and they know their best bet is the E,” he said. “We find more drug- and alcohol-addicted on the 1 because they are less conscious of the weather.”

During the recent cold spell — two weeks when the temperature didn’t rise above freezing — officials ramped up efforts to get people in shelters. The city’s Code Blue protocol was in effect, with the public encouraged to call 311 to get the homeless off the streets, and more than 100 outreach workers in orange parkas canvassing subway stations and transit hubs. They waited at the World Trade Center station, where they approached people during the roughly 15 minutes when the train is held in the station before it heads back uptown. “It gives us a small but significant window,” Rosenblatt said.

Workers do not approach people while the train doors are closed, he said, because they do not want them to feel trapped. “Many are obviously homeless and other people are less so, but these are fragile people,” Rosenblatt said. “They’re fearful, they’re distrusting. They’re struggling with mental health issues.”

He added: “It’s a different world at that hour. People erect structures in there.”

Officials said that the usual rules for subway riders applied to homeless people — they can’t impede movement or lie down on a seat — and were enforceable by the police. But they reiterated that this nocturnal population had a right to ride the trains. “Being homeless is not a crime,” said Jaclyn Rothenberg, a spokeswoman for the mayor’s office. She listed ways in which the city was working to reach the unsheltered homeless on the subways, from making shelters safer to adding more temporary shelters known as Safe Havens.

Isaac McGinn, a spokesman for the city’s Department of Homeless Services, said: “It can take extensive, repeated contacts with those living on the street to build up the trust it takes to convince them to come to shelter. That mission becomes all the more critical during extreme weather.” The year-round subway population includes people like Deborah Dorsey, a 57-year-old woman whose belongings were heaped on a wheelchair on the E train, who said that she had slept underground for about seven years, only emerging in the summer.

She was dressed all in white, her oversized parka hood almost concealing her freckled face. Her legs were swaddled in a blanket, and on her feet were shoes with Velcro straps that she had worn since she went through a surgical procedure. “My disabled shoes,” she called them.

“They always come and ask me,” she said of the outreach workers. “But I don’t go.”

It also includes people like a trumpet player in Pennsylvania Station, who gave only his first name, Jean. Jean, 39, said he was diagnosed with schizophrenia as a young man and was now on medication. He spends his days playing gospel music on his pocket trumpet in a corridor between the train station and the subway. On very cold nights he goes to his parents’ home in Newark, New Jersey, he said. But usually he sleeps on the E, which he said was thought to be warmer and safer than other lines. “A lot of them go through bad neighborhoods,” he said. “They steal your stuff while you’re sleeping.”

As the E passes through Manhattan, it stops at some of the major hubs for the homeless — the Port Authority Bus Terminal and Pennsylvania Station. The homeless may spend much of their time in those places, but they are not allowed to sleep in them. They say they are often rousted by the police if they lie down.

So, sometime after midnight, they begin making their way to the subways.

On Sunday, it was so cold you could see your breath on the underground subway platforms. The National Weather Service had issued an advisory warning of wind chills as low as minus 20. Signs of the nighttime homeless population had accumulated in the subway — little liquor bottles, a hospital wrist band, piles of tissue.

Every line had a homeless contingent. An older man on the A train had tied a luggage cart with some of his belongings to a pole while he slept. On the E, the motley crew of 45 slowly assembled: The man with the bag of cans, men who muttered and smelled bad, but also young people — a bearded man in baggy jeans holding a kitten, a young woman in thin tights with a ratty suitcase.

Slowly, they all claimed a seat on which to sleep.

“This whole train is homeless people,” said Christopher Mendoza, a field supervisor for a security company working an overnight shift on Sunday. He said he often saw homeless people sleeping on the E. But that night, there were more.

As the train rolled into World Trade Center, a recording came over the loudspeaker: “This is the last stop on the train. Everyone please leave the train.”

None of the sleepers got off.