On a cold spring night in 1986, a group of church leaders and community organizers gathered in a park outside City Hall, intending to sleep there and speak on behalf of New York City’s homeless at a budget hearing the next day. When a storm blew in, the park’s homeless population came to the organizers’ aid and showed them where to find shelter.
That night sparked the foundation of the Interfaith Assembly on Homelessness and Housing. On Wednesday, 22 years later, IAHH board member Dennis Barton spoke at the Kraft Center for Jewish Student Life on the human impact of homelessness.
The catch was that Barton himself lived on the streets of New York for 14 years, battling drug addiction for decades before piecing together a comfortable life in 1999.
“My teen years were the sixties. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll was playing like I don’t know what, and I fell for it hook, line, and sinker,” Barton said. He started with marijuana, then moved on to heroin and cocaine.
He was arrested twice and spent brief stints in jail before being sent to state penitentiary, leaving a girlfriend and two daughters, by two different women, back home.
Barton earned his high school diploma while in jail, and received “educational release” to study at Bronx Community College, where he earned a degree and found a job in the admissions office. He worked his way up to assistant director of admissions and planned to marry his girlfriend—who was pregnant with Barton’s third daughter—but he lost the job when “the gorilla on my back,” as he referred to his drug habit, clamped down again.
“We’re planning to get married, and here comes the gorilla, except the gorilla’s not just carrying cocaine this time, he’s carrying crack,” he said.
His girlfriend left, and he became homeless in 1984. Personal hardship developed into mass alienation, and Barton began to face the ostracism common among New York’s homeless.
“The guy you see sitting on the 1 train, who smells so bad you have to leave the car—that was me,” Barton said. “When I wanted a seat on a train, I took off my sneaker.”
He was homeless until 1998, when he was finally arrested for drug dealing. The state sent him to a shelter in Brooklyn, and from there he found a job, entered a drug treatment program, and reconciled with his daughters.
“The gorilla was no longer a gorilla—he was just a little chimp,” Barton said.
In his post at IAHH, Barton imparts the lessons he learned from living on the streets, facilitating “life skills” workshops. Founded in 1988, the assembly works to relieve the homeless crisis, mobilizing people on spiritual grounds.
“I was 53 years old before I wrote my first check,” he said, explaining the struggle many homeless undergo when transitioning into the working world. Even choking up the change for laundry, he said, required concerted effort.
Yet Barton was careful to emphasize that not all homeless are drug addicts.
“I’ve known lawyers who lost their condo and wound up in a shelter,” he said.
Sarah Brafman, CC ’10 and social justice coordinator for Columbia/Barnard Hillel, related Barton’s fight to what students see on the street every day.
“He can provide the little shock value we need—that maybe those people we see in the street can get to the point he’s at,” Brafman said.
Barton encouraged audience members to reflect on the ways they can make a difference. He suggested donating to charities or religious organizations, or looking up the phone numbers of shelters and soup kitchens that give to the homeless on Broadway.
“You can’t give a dollar to every homeless person on the street unless you’re Donald Trump’s daughter, but you can help in other ways,” he said.
maggie.astor@columbiaspectator.com
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