In New York’s Public Housing, Fear Creeps In With the Dark

The New York Times

By CARA BUCKLEY and MICHAEL WILSON

Published: November 2, 2012

It would be dark soon at the Coney Island Houses, the fourth night without power, elevators and water. Another night of trips up and down pitch-black staircases, lighted by shaky flashlights and candles. Another night of retreating from the dark.

Photographs

Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Using a lantern and a candle for illumination, Landswan Elam, 13, right, played chess with Joseph Williams in the seventh-floor hallway of a public housing unit in Red Hook, Brooklyn, Thursday. 

On the second floor of Building 4, an administrative assistant named Santiago, 43, who was sharing her apartment with five relatives, ran through a mental checklist. Turn the oven on for heat. Finish errands, like fetching water for the toilet, before the light fades. 

“We don’t dare throw out garbage at night,” she said. “We make sure everything’s done.” 

Elsewhere in the building, Sandra Leon, 35, a mother of two, kept an eye on her door fearing another attempted break-in. Victor Alvarez, 60, waited for any word of his wife, Lucet, who suffers from schizophrenia and had disappeared into the wreckage-strewed neighborhood. And Marilyn Smalls, 48, sipped a room-temperature Corona that she had liberated from a gas-station trash bin the day before, along with sodas and bags of beef jerky — which drew neighbors knocking, as word of the haul got out. 

Perhaps more so than in any other place in the city, the loss of power for people living in public housing projects forced a return to a primal existence. Opened fire hydrants became community wells. Sleep-and-wake cycles were timed to sunsets and sunrises. People huddled for warmth around lighted gas stoves as if they were roaring fires. Darkness became menacing, a thing to be feared.

A lack of friends or family in areas with power, or cars or cab fare to get to them, meant there were few ways to escape. Dwindling dollars heightened the pain of throwing out food rotting inside powerless refrigerators, and sharpened the question of where the next meal would come from. Some had not left their apartments since the storm swept in. 

“Where am I going to go?” said Miguelina Newsam, 71, who subsists on food stamps and $661 in monthly Social Security payments, outside her building in Red Hook, Brooklyn. “My son is on Staten Island and they have the same problem.” 

Thousands of public housing residents in New York City defied evacuation orders because they underestimated the ferocity of Hurricane Sandy; now they make up a city within a city, marked by acute need. Any bathtubs filled with water on Monday are empty. Unflushed toilets stink. Elderly people with creaky joints are marooned on upper floors. Batteries are running out. 

An estimated 400,000 New Yorkers live in public housing and many of their institutional brown brick buildings hug the waterfront. 

On Thursday, 227 of the 2,600 buildings operated by the New York City Housing Authority remained without power, according to an agency spokeswoman, including many in low-lying neighborhoods like Coney Island in Brooklyn, Rockaway Beach in Queens, and Alphabet City in Manhattan, the areas most seriously affected by the storm. 

“The higher the rises, the more families, the more problems,” said Ninibet Rodriguez, 44, who fled the La Guardia Houses on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to take refuge in another powerless building in the nearby Vladeck Houses. 

In the meantime, heroes emerged among public housing residents, with those well prepared and able helping those who were not. 

As light drained from the skies above the Red Hook Houses in Brooklyn on Thursday, Sharlyn Marin, 18, huffed her way up 140 steps to visit her godmother, Judith Rodriguez, on the 10th floor. Blind and in a wheelchair, Ms. Rodriguez, 62, relied on Ms. Marin as her sole conduit to the outside world. 

Three floors up, Carmen Jimenez, 48, cowered in the descending darkness. She had not left her apartment since the storm arrived and depended on her neighbor, Jacqueline Fuentes, 47, for food and water. Ms. Fuentes, a bus driver for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, had also lighted candles in the hallway, so her neighbors could see. 

On the Lower East Side, at the Baruch Houses, neighbors helped an older woman down flights of stairs because she was feeling ill. An ambulance emergency worker gave the woman oxygen and the neighbors helped her back up to her apartment. 

“There’s a sense of community,” said Darryl MacCullum, 24, who lives at the Jacob Riis Houses in the East Village, where the tidal surge had, for a time, ringed the buildings like moats. “Neighbors I usually don’t talk to, I talk to now.” 

The residents cooked for each other, eager to not waste food that was thawing fast. At the Red Hook Houses on Wednesday night, there was an impromptu outdoor barbecue for 25 people, with hamburgers, frankfurters and ribs sizzling on grills. 

Open hydrants in Coney Island and at East Sixth Street and Avenue D became lifelines, drawing residents on foot and skateboards to fill buckets and bottles, which were then hauled up darkened stairways for use as drinking water, for baths, and for flushing festering toilets.
 

Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Using a gas burner, Richard Bates fried chicken for family and neighbors in the Red Hook Houses, where the power is still out.

Desperation also set in. In the East Village, after workers at a market on Avenue C threw bagged food into a large metal container not far from the Jacob Riis Houses, people began pawing through it for edible items, pulling out chocolate bars and pasta, among other things. In Coney Island, near the public housing there, looters broke into a pharmacy, a bank branch and a Rent-A-Center. 

Some vented their anger despite the presence of volunteers who showed up with ice, water and food. “We’ve been left for dead here,” said Charles Richie, 50, who has lived in Red Hook houses for half his life. “We’re living day by day.” 

A few residents shrugged off the hardship, acknowledging that they had been told to evacuate and now were paying the price. 

“It’s just an inconvenience. Half the world does not have electricity,” said Ralph Lopez, 73, as he shuffled slowly along the sidewalk outside the Red Hook Houses with his plump Chihuahua, Pepe. “I grew up in a cold-water flat with no heat at all. And this is just for a week. So boohoo.” 

Fear of the dark was rampant. There was no emergency lighting in powerless buildings, and while the police had set up some floodlights, most hallways and stairwells were windowless — making them pitch black even in daytime. 

Miriam Williams, 47, had twisted her ankle and scraped her hand falling down a set of concrete stairs at the Red Hook houses. In the Rutgers Houses, on the Lower East Side, people said there had been robberies in the stairwells. 

Robert Davis, 70, who lives in the La Guardia Houses, said someone was pretending to be a police officer, blinding people with a bright flashlight, asking for ID and then taking their wallets. Ms. Leon, of the Coney Island Houses, said someone tried to break in the night of the storm by pulling screws out of the front door knob, so she used a baby gate and a knife, jammed into a lock, to keep the door shut. 

“When you walk in the building, you don’t know who is waiting for you,” said a young man named Charles, standing with friends outside the Vladeck Houses on the Lower East Side, explaining that the lobby door did not lock automatically without power. 

Police cars have been patrolling the housing projects but officers have not been getting out of their cars, one of his friends said. “They are as scared as us,” he said. 

Colin Moynihan and Mosi Secret contributed reporting.