Volume 36, Number 2 · February 16, 1989
The Rise of the Homeless
By Sue M. Halpern
Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America
by Jonathan Kozol
Ballantine, 272 pp., $8.95 (paper)
The first time I went to the Martinique, the New York City welfare hotel Jonathan Kozol wrote about in Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America, there was no fence around the interior of its commanding marble staircase. Walking down from the tenth floor, leaning into the banister to avoid the attention of the teen-aged boys clustered on the landings and spilling down the stairs in twos and threes smoking pot and leering at passersby, I looked into the deep, funneling well and thought how easy it would be to fall in. I could recall being that scared only once before—two hours before, in fact—when my companion, a Legal Aid lawyer, and I had taken the elevator to visit one of her clients. The light inside the lift was vague, and as we lurched upward in fits and starts, it would flash on and off. We were the only women in the elevator, and once, when the light blinked on, I thought I saw a man palming a knife. That was why, on our way out, we had decided to take the stairs.
Review, 4188 words
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