COMMENTARY
Charity Vogel: Grim story of survival in the library
The cold has brought them in again. It happens every year. Like swallows to Capistrano, in reverse, they come not to escape the heat but to find it. Bedraggled and grim-faced, weighed down by tattered duffels and beat-up thermoses, they trickle in as temperatures drop.
People, mostly men, who have no homes to sleep in at night, or marginal ones — in shelters or shared rental spaces with little in the way of heat or food.
To them, the Central Library isn’t a temple of knowledge. It’s got a much more practical function: survival.
A reader of this column e-mailed me recently, after seeing some of these men sitting at reading tables in the Lafayette Square library. His heart went out to them, he said. He wondered how many of them were veterans.
I went to see for myself, on a day last week when the thermometer dropped below 20 degrees on a bright, clear Buffalo afternoon.
And I found them. It wasn’t hard. There are tell-tale signs: layers of overstuffed coats, hats and gloves; big bags stuffed with food and possessions. Their faces, tired and a little bit vacant, reveal them, too. They sit with books, but they haven’t come to read. They shuffle papers, but they haven’t come to write.
In one section on the library’s main floor, a man reclined in the aisle between two tall shelves, turning the pages of a picture book while a little girl — his daughter? — lay on his lap, looking on. An oversized pink tote bag held their belongings.
Over by the popular materials, two older men wearing heavy coats had dragged chairs to a picture window. They sat, motionless, and watched the traffic go by on Broadway.
In yet another section, a man sat at a table, surrounded by three enormous duffel bags. He had snacks and a variety of bottled beverages spread out around him. When I talked to him, he had been there more than four hours.
“It’s almost free,” said Craig, another of the library’s unlucky swallows, who was working a crossword puzzle. “If you can afford 50 cents for a paper, you can stay all day.”
Craig knows what he’s about. At 54, years past the job he once had driving cement trucks in Texas, he has the schedule down pat. Breakfast at a soup kitchen, then over to the library for a day’s worth of heat. At 5 p. m., he leaves, so he can make it over to Friends of Night People by 5:30 — walking quickly, trying to find sidewalks that are plowed — for a hot dinner.
It’s not a daily routine any of us would want. It’s one that some of us have.
Library officials realize that and opt to let the situation be.
“We have an open-door policy that anyone who wants to come in and use the library, can,” said Paula Sandy, a spokeswoman.
One staffer who works in Central put it this way, a soft expression on his face: “We kind of see it as part of what being a public library is all about.”
In this city, the poor are everywhere — and nowhere. They are all around us: one in every three adults, and 43 percent of children. And yet we stop seeing them, after a while; they become invisible, especially if you live and work far from the city’s poorer neighborhoods.
The library men don’t want, necessarily, to be noticed. They just want to go about their day as best they can, trying to cope.
“When you’re poor,” says Craig, “you’re poor.”
Which means you look for the small blessings in life. Like free heat in the bus station and in St. Michael’s on Washington Street, and the fact that on Thursdays, the library stays open until 9 p. m.
Sometimes, when it’s all you have, that seems like a lot.
