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Patrick Marquis
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Terry Gross
Hi, it's Terry Gross. Before we start the show today, I want to say a few words about Public Media. It's been in the news a lot because federal funding for it was completely eliminated earlier this year. But it's the fact that NPR is public media that enables Fresh Air and all of NPR's podcasts to be unique and to be there for you. Public Media was created to represent and serve diverse audiences, including underrepresented communities throughout America, enabling us to better hear and understand each other and, in the words of the Public broadcasting act of 1967, to offer programs for instructional, educational and cultural purposes.
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At npr, we still believe in these core commitments, but the loss of federal funding that the act provided for is creating major challenges for NPR and all public radio stations as we move into this uncharted future together. We know that you will not let the service that has been here for you all these years falter. We rely on your support to bring you Fresh AIR now more than ever. This year, we've continued to bring you interviews with investigative journalists who have uncovered important stories that otherwise may have never been revealed about our government and the state of our democracy, as well as interviews with authors, musicians, actors, directors, scientists, health experts, religion scholars and more. Who knows what surprises await us in 2026. Thank you. If you already go the extra mile as an NPR supporter. If not, you can join the PLUS community. Get a bunch of perks like bonus episodes and more from across NPR's podcasts, including FRESH AIR. And support public media by signing up for NPR today at plus.NPR.org thank you.
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Tonya Moseley
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Moseley. My guest today, Patrick Marquis, has spent more than two decades advocating for the homeless, going to places that most people avoid tunnels, parks, abandoned buildings, and makeshift encampments where unhoused people live. In his new book, Homelessness in the New Gilded Age, he argues the surge in people living on the streets didn't happen overnight. It has been shaped through policy choices, economic shifts and and a profound erosion of our social fabric centering on New York City. To tell the larger story, Marquis takes us from the abandoned rail tunnels under Riverside park where residents carved out entire communities in the 90s to the streets of the Lower east side shelter armories, psychiatric wards and family intake centers. He describes the housing crisis as a game of Musical Chairs and argues that New York City doesn't just tell us the story of homelessness, but about America itself, its values and its inequities. Patrick Marquis is the former deputy executive director for advocacy of the Coalition for the Homeless in New York City and a former member of the board of directors of the National Coalition for the Homeless. He's authored several research studies on homelessness and housing policy and has written for the Nation and the New York Times Book Review. Patrick Marquis, welcome to FRESH air.
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Patrick Marquis
Thank you so much for having me on the program.
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Tonya Moseley
Yes, I think it's great for us to actually start with the title of this book because you didn't call it Homelessness in the Gilded Age. You specifically used this term that many of us have never heard before, placeless. Can you say more about that word?
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Patrick Marquis
Yes. Cause I think when I started to really think deeply about the modern homelessness crisis, what we're really looking at is a crisis of displacement. I think so many of us have come to think of homelessness as kind of a special form of urban poverty, a kind of almost like subspecies of urban poverty. Too often it gets discussed really as a social work problem or as a problem of individual dysfunction, when in fact it has systemic causes. And the problem of homelessness, as bad as it is, kind of the scale of the problem being as huge as it is is is really only the tip of the iceberg of a larger wave of displacement that we've seen in American society in this period that I call the new Gilded Age that really sort of extends from the 1980s to now, this kind of 50 year period where what we've seen is economic dislocation, neighborhood dislocation via gentrification and other forms of kind of sort of home displacement. We've seen mass migration and we've seen, frankly, homelessness as being, I think, in many ways the kind of the worst symptom of this age, of this age of displacement.
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Tonya Moseley
And you use the term homeless throughout the book. You make a point to say you're sticking with that, even though through time we've used different terms to describe people who are living out on the street.
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Is there a particular reason to use other terms that aren't derogatory, like homeless or unhoused? What is your take on the word usage?
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Patrick Marquis
Well, the word homeless itself actually dates back to around the first Gilded Age of the late 19th century, early 20th century. But obviously there have been some unfortunately very derogatory terms used to describe homeless people over the years. You know, hobos, bums, vagrants Some of these terms have come in and out of fashion. Many of them have always been, you know, offensive and derogatory. The term homelessness, you know, I think describes kind of the state of the crisis that we're talking about. I mean, you know, whether we use the term homeless or unhoused, we're really talking about people who lack a permanent residence. And it can be everything from people sleeping out on the streets to people sleeping in shelters, to often what we see and what I describe in the book is kind of the hidden homeless population, but people living in doubled up or severely overcrowded housing. And that's increasingly a bigger and bigger share of the problem of homelessness that we're seeing across the country.
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Tonya Moseley
This idea that we are in the new Gilded Age. What is the most striking parallel you see between that time period and this one?
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Patrick Marquis
Well, the first Gilded Age was marked by more than anything by just radical inequality. We just had incredible concentrations of sort of wealth and then economic and political power kind of among the sort of the plutocrats, the sort of oligarchy of that age, the kind of industrial elite of what was then a sort of urbanizing and industrializing United States and a sort of urban elite of industrialists and capitalists who had sort of controlled city governments, controlled the economy, and then this incredible population of poor people, many of them immigrants. And I think there's a parallel there to the current age that we're in now of just waves of immigration, people crowding into cities and then really also I think radical changes in the structure of the economy. At that time it was industrialization. What we've seen over the last several decades right now is deindustrialization and kind of a move towards a more precarious services based economy. And that sort of mixture of structural economic change.
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Changes in our cities demographic, and frankly the reaction to that in the terms of systemic racism and xenophobia. All of those things are kind of a recipe for this age that we're seeing now. And then on top of that, and I think you spoke about this earlier, we're seeing political and policy choices made, the rise of sort of neoliberal and right wing economic policies over the last several decades that have contributed to and shaped and frankly sustained the crisis of homelessness that we're experiencing now.
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Tonya Moseley
Let's slow down and go back a bit because I find it really fascinating the way you chart that time from the Gilded Age to then a period where actually we didn't experience the level of homelessness that we see now and then towards the 70s, we start to see that rise. But 1874, that is really at the heart of the Gilded Age. You write about how thousands of unemployed workers gathered in Tompkins Square park in New York City. Police charged them on horseback in clubs. The mayor celebrated it. You write that the elites blame the poor for their poverty. They called them lazy and immoral. They cut off aid. It really does sound very similar to what we see today. But take me to that time period after the Gilded Age. There was a bit of improvement that we saw. We saw less folks out on the street. There was a decline in homelessness. What was happening during that time period before we get to the 1970s?
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Patrick Marquis
Well, I think there are really two key historical moments there that we're talking about. Beginning in the early part of the 20th century, particularly in the 1920s, and then even during the Great Depression of the 1930s, there were extraordinary housing movements alongside sort of labor and community movements that pushed for addressing not only the crisis of inequality and poverty and sort of issues around labor, but also housing problems. In New York City. On the Lower east side, we saw extraordinary movements that addressed the incredibly unhealthy conditions in tenement housing. The Lower east side, at that time was one of the most densely populated places on the plan. There were enormous problems with just incredibly hazardous and unsafe housing. There were movements led by Jacob Riis and other immigrants who actually came and said, you know, we need to be improving the health conditions in this housing. So they improved those housing conditions in terms of health and safety. Then they started to fight increases in rents which were being imposed by landlords in the 1920s and then in the Great Depression as well. So that led to the policies of rent regulation and rent control in New York City, which at one point actually went national. So we actually saw a control on the affordability of rents, which I think is going to resonate very much with what's going on right now. And then a sort of third important movement was the creation of public housing. It wasn't perfect. I'm not trying to sort of romanticize what was going on, but we actually had a system in place where through public housing and other federal housing programs, like the housing voucher programs, which were created in the early 1970s, ironically under the Nixon administration. So this was a sort of a bipartisan project for many decades. We have federal housing programs which were aiming to ensure that the poorest Americans could actually.
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Have decent, safe housing and that people, working class people, low income folks, were going to be sort of buffeted from, you know, the Worst excesses of rent increases and the worst, you know, the worst threats of eviction.
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Tonya Moseley
Okay, so the seventies arrive, everything accelerates. New York loses a significant amount of jobs. I think you write about 600,000. The population drops significantly. Whole blocks are abandoned. You describe this as the birth of modern mass homelessness. What was happening economically that made this moment the breaking point?
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Patrick Marquis
Well, there was, you know, there was an economic crisis in the early 1970s, which triggered in New York City an extraordinary loss of employment and of population, but particularly of manufacturing employment. And, you know, New York City had actually already begun to lose some manufacturing jobs from the 1950s and accelerating through the 60s. But there was just a sharp drop off of it in the 1970s. And New York City, which had been in many ways, whose economy had been fairly balanced in many ways. You had manufacturing, you had the sort of more traditional industries of finance and banking, which we're familiar with, from the sort of Wall Street. You had service sector jobs. We really lost an enormous number of manufacturing jobs in those years and just an enormous number of jobs in total. So that created economic shifts which then put real pressures on the city government. There was a fiscal Crisis in the 1970s. New York City came close to going bankrupt, frankly. And under pressure from creditor banks and from conservative politicians, and with zero help coming from Washington, D.C. there were enormous cutbacks in government programs which had been helping working class and low income New Yorkers. And we saw just huge cuts in healthcare programs and education programs, but also in public assistance income assistance programs and in housing programs. New York City in that period also lost an enormous amount of housing. So there was just, you know, incredible abandonment of housing as the population dropped so significantly. And that contributed to a housing affordability crisis, which would only grow worse in the 1980s.
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Tonya Moseley
One of the things you really point out is the approach. The approach really changes and shifts based on party lines. I mean, there's nuance there. But by and large, when you look at the big picture, that seems to be the case. You point out how, if we Fast forward to 99, when Rudy Giuliani was then mayor, there started to be sort of this idea of criminalizing homelessness. He ordered police to arrest people sleeping on the streets. Bloomberg continued those kinds of sweeps. And then last year, as you note in the book, the Supreme Court ruled cities can criminalize sleeping outdoors. How prevalent is that particular approach when we think about the ways that New York City and then other cities throughout the country began to try to deal with this growing problem?
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Patrick Marquis
Well, sadly, in the early days of the modern mass homelessness crisis. You know, this is in the sort of late 1970s, early 1980s. The city, city government of New York did choose to have one of its primary responses be the police. And we saw this, you know, under the administration of Ed Koch, who was the mayor through most of the 80s. We saw it a little bit continuing under David Dinkins, his successor in the. In the late 80s, early 90s. But it was really the Giuliani administration that sort of like, intensified and perfected this sort of like wholesale criminalization of street homelessness. You know, Giuliani had sort of run for mayor on this campaign of cleaning up New York City. And it became very clear early on that among the kind of things that he thought needed to be cleaned up were homeless people. So there were just mass arrests of homeless people in parks, on city streets, and transportation terminals throughout the subway system. Giuliani's first police commissioner sort of had actually been the head of the.
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Unit of the police department that polices the subway system. And he had talked about flushing homeless people out of the subway system and talked sort of proudly about this. Giuliani himself used some just really inflammatory and offensive language to describe homeless people sleeping out on the streets. And there was just a real period of kind of demonization and then wholesale criminalization of the problem of homelessness, which, of course, was incredibly counterproductive. You know, I worked very closely with a group of homeless people sleeping in the Madison Square park neighborhood, which is an area of kind of downtown Manhattan, which, you know, in the 1980s and 90s had fallen a little bit on hard times. I mean, it was still sort of a middle class type neighborhood, but, you know, was beginning to gentrify. And Giuliani made that sort of one of the epicenters of his homelessness crackdown, his police crackdown on homelessness. You know, I worked with these, you know, these poor folks who, you know, were just trying to find a place to sleep at night. You know, Madison Square park was considered kind of one of the less dangerous kind of places to sleep outdoors if you didn't have a place to. A place to stay, and the police would just come in and just, you know, take people's belongings, throw them into dump trucks, just throw them away, you know, arrest people, threaten them with arrest. The neighborhood ended up gentrifying and then hypergentrifying in the couple of decades after.
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Tonya Moseley
That, I want to delve into some of the ways that cities like New York have tried to solve or combat or lessen the homelessness population. Let's stay with the 90s for a minute because this was an important moment in which some of the modern day approaches we have come to know were implemented. There was this idea championed by Andrew Cuomo, among others, that many homeless people weren't housing ready, that they needed to go through treatment, rehabilitation, training programs before they could be trusted with a home. What was the thinking behind that? And from your view, what's wrong with it?
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Patrick Marquis
Well, this was an approach and a philosophy actually, that, you know, was unfortunately incredibly prevalent and also really had its roots going back to the earliest days of homelessness in New York in the Gilded Age of the late 19th century. I described this as an attempt to kind of pathologize the problem of homelessness, to sort of describe homeless people as kind of broken people, as not ready for housing or sort of dysfunctional. And actually, some of the people that, you know, kind of tried to describe the homeless people of that period as somehow, you know, really dysfunctional, as really disordered, were actually some of the architects of the eugenics movement in the United States as well. So there's just a very deep and unsettling kind of history. We started to see that reemerge in the 1990s, coming out of the 1980s, when, you know, mass homelessness was kind of a new problem in the United States and in New York. And, you know, people had kind of were sort of shocked, especially in early 1980s, when you started to see homelessness appear throughout the country. Going into the 1990s, there was what I call a backlash era. There was a sort of movement of compassion fatigue, unfortunately. And unfortunately, some politicians like Rudy Giuliani and others kind of took advantage of that period to kind of demonize and once again pathologize homeless people. Andrew Cuomo and others of that period tried to kind of create a model of homelessness services which really relied on that image of homeless people as being sort of broken and unready and needed to be trained, needed to go through therapeutic programs. And then Cuomo, who, you know, at the time was elevated by Bill Clinton to be the head of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, you know, really codified that into a system called the Continuum of Care, which really just sort of mapped out a model where homeless people had to first go through therapeutic programs or training programs before they would ever be able to get housing, if there was any housing assistance that was available to them. Because keep in mind, remember that this was at a time when there were cutbacks in the federal housing budget. So this treatment first approach was really kind of developed in the 1990s and, you know, just proved to be, frankly, a mistake, proved to be absolutely counterproductive because it really just cut against everything that homeless people themselves had been telling us, that advocates working on the ground had seen. And everything that we started to learn as the models of supportive housing and housing first were really starting to be implemented, we started to see that you don't need to do treatment first, you actually need to do housing first.
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Tonya Moseley
If this approach doesn't work, why does the idea keep coming back? You've been fighting this argument for 30 years.
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Patrick Marquis
Exactly. And it's just the most frustrating thing in the world. I mean, we're really starting to see it come back with a vengeance now. You know, Donald Trump and the sort of MAGA movement have really been pushing this idea of treatment first again and waging some just incredible attacks on the housing first approach. Once again, it's this idea of trying to sort of demonize and pathologize homeless people, to try and claim that the problem is a problem of personal dysfunction or, you know, homeless people are either lazy or they're dysfunctional or they're pathological, that the problem is you've got to fix those people first. And that's how you solve the problem of homelessness, instead of looking at it as a systemic problem. And what we really learned through the housing first approach is that if your goal, your end goal is to help somebody who's, say, living with mental illness to kind of get stability, to get treatment for their mental illness or somebody who's recovering from addiction to be able to, you know, recover from drugs or alcohol, that you need that person to be in a home. It's so much easier to engage in that kind of treatment, to take medication, to get into recovery programs. It's so much easier to do that when you have a home, to instead say, well, we want that person to do that while they're sleeping rough on the streets or while they're sleeping in a shelter, you know, crowded with hundreds of other people is just counterproductive. It just doesn't make sense.
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Tonya Moseley
My guest today is Patrick Marquis, author of Homelessness in the New Gilded Age. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tonya Mosley, and this is FRESH air.
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Patrick Marquis
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I want.
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Tonya Moseley
To talk a little bit more about housing first and how it worked in practical terms, but I want to go back to something that you mentioned around the eugenics movement, because I think it's important to talk about race because we can't really separate race from this crisis. Today. Black and Latino New Yorkers make up nearly 90% of the homeless population.
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Patrick Marquis
Yes, it's just stunning. I mean, they make up 90% of the homeless population. Black New Yorkers make up nearly 60% of the homeless population. Latinos make up around 30%. You know, when you look at their in comparison, you know, black New Yorkers now are, I think, less than a quarter of New York City's total population. Latinos are about a quarter of the population. It's just stunning the sort of disproportionate impact that homelessness has had on black and Latino communities across the United States. But in New York City in particular, I did an analysis when I was at Coalition for the Homeless, looking at some data we were able to get from the municipal government, and I found remarkably and the most stunning statistic I found was that one out of every 17 black children in New York City had spent some time in a homeless shelter over the course of a year. I mean, one out of every 17. I mean, for black and Latino kids in New York City and in other large cities, and particularly for low income kids.
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You know, homelessness is like a common experience. It's not even like a bizarre thing that it's not even Something that's just kind of out of the imagination. It's absolutely like a part of almost an expected experience for a significant percentage of our black and Latino kids.
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Tonya Moseley
And for you, Patrick, I just wonder how you untangle everything with this. Because if, you know, if administrations are really pushing that homelessness is a moral failing, it's a moral defect. There's a reason why you're out on the streets, that you have done something wrong in your life, and then the majority, you layer on that race, and the majority of those people are black and brown. You can't really separate some of the systemic issues that go along with that. But then there are so many challenges on whether those systemic issues even exist.
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Patrick Marquis
Well, I think there's just no mistake that these problems result from some clear policy choices and acts of sort of government and politics that were made throughout this period. The really signature moment comes in the 1980s under the Reagan administration. Reagan instituted the most draconian cutbacks in federal housing programs that have been seen in US history. And a nearly 80% cut in the budget authority of the Department of Housing and Urban Development occurred under the eight years of the Reagan administration. Just devastating cutbacks that have really never been. We've never sort of recovered from them ever since. In many ways, the federal government sort of got out of the business of significantly providing, creating affordable housing and providing affordable housing assistance beginning in the 80s and then continuing to now. I mean, right now, only one out of five eligible low income households in the United States is receiving federal housing assistance. That means four out of five that need that housing assistance and qualify for it are actually not getting federal housing aid.
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Tonya Moseley
The number of homeless kids of color was really staggering. But overall, there are thousands of children, you note, who sleep in New York City shelters every night. It's about one in eight public school students experiencing homelessness last year. Has the system assistance programs, the way shelters operate, caught up with that reality?
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Patrick Marquis
I mean, the short answer is no, because the problem has gotten so much worse. I mean, right now in New York City, we have more than 100,000 people sleeping each night in our shelter system. Two thirds of that is families. Of that 100,000 people in shelter each night, 35,000 of them are children. And half of those kids are really young kids, like 5 years old.
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Tonya Moseley
Slow down on that, because sometimes when we throw out numbers, they can just almost become abstract. I mean, 35,000. That is significant. That's astounding.
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Patrick Marquis
No, it's stunning. I mean, it's stunning to think that we've got 35,000 kids sleeping in shelters each night. And then, as I think you mentioned, the federal Department of Education uses a broader definition of homelessness, which doesn't include just homeless kids sleeping in shelter, but also includes homeless kids who are living doubled up, so who are sleeping maybe on the sofa or on the living room floor of a relative or a friend. So that broader definition then accounts for 150,000 homeless students in our public school system. So that's again, one of every eight kids in the New York City public school system is homeless. There's an elementary school in my neighborhood in the East Village where half of the kids in that school are homeless. And there are other schools around the city that, you know that are in sort of the same boat where you've just got an extraordinary number of homeless kids. At the same time, we also know that homelessness just creates incredible negative impacts on kids. Study after study has shown that homeless kids, even compared to other low income kids, have much higher rates of physical health problems, particularly respiratory health problems, much higher rates of emotional and mental health problems. They do much more poorly in school. They miss school at a much higher rate. And I used to see this firsthand in working with kids who are in the shelter system who would sometimes, particularly at the point when their families were applying for shelter and trying to kind of enter the shelter system would get bounced sometimes night to night from one shelter to another or from one sort of grim intake office to another or to a single night placement, you know, in a hotel or in a shelter and then back to the intake office the next day. Kids would miss just incredible amounts of school. Their parents would miss work, you know, all of these families, adults, and the kids, you know, would suffer, you know, all sorts of health problems, you know, contagious diseases, all of this stuff. And it just, you know, again, there's an extraordinary cost to homelessness for children. So having such an, you know, just an enormous number of kids who are homeless each night is really setting those kids back in an incredible way.
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Tonya Moseley
If you're just joining us, I'm talking with homelessness advocate Patrick Marquis about his new book, Homelessness and the New Gilded Age. It's a sweeping look at how inequality, policy and displacement have shaped modern homelessness. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
- [31:22]
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- [31:38]
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Tonya Moseley
Hey, hey, it's Brittney Luce from It's been a minute. Your voicemail box is full. Okay, I'll admit it. So is mine.
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Maureen Corrigan
So I'm leaving this for you here.
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Tonya Moseley
I wanted to say thank you for supporting NPR this year. And if you haven't given yet, it's not too late. Give me a call back when you can visit donate.NPR.org in the book, you take us to this train tunnel that ran for nearly three miles under Manhattan's west side beneath Riverside Park. Dozens of homeless people live there, some for over a decade. There have been documentaries about it. They built plywood shacks and slept on mattresses and propped on milk crates, mate, communities in that space.
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When they were finally able to move out in the mid-90s.
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You were part of this effort to help them go directly into apartments. So no shelter stay, no rehab program first. At the time, that was considered radical. What did that experience teach you?
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Patrick Marquis
Well, I learned so many things from working with those folks sleeping in the Riverside park tunnel. I mean, first of all, one of the things I learned is that these were people who were just incredible survivors, you know, who could really live under the most kind of like grim and difficult conditions. I mean, the conditions in that tunnel. And I started working there in the sort of late autumn through the winter, the last winter before the tunnel was completely shut off by Amtrak, which was going to sort of restart train service through the tunnel. You know, it was cold, obviously filthy, you know, it was dangerous. There were rats in the tunnel, all of these things. And yet these people had managed to persist and survive and endure in some just really, really difficult conditions. And so what I really learned, and I write this in the book, is I learned that these are people who could make a home anywhere. And we were able to move some of these folks directly into apartments in the community. Almost none of them ever experienced homelessness again after that. I mean, it's just, it was an incredible, incredible experience to see these folks be able to move from such grim conditions into their own homes.
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Tonya Moseley
That's pretty remarkable. I mean, I know there's so many as you've laid out. I mean, the issue of actual places, affordable places, though, is a real issue in this Housing first idea, this approach. I mean, those who are against this idea believe that the housing first experiment is a failed experiment. What is the success rate? Like that. That sounds like a very successful endeavor that you all were able to do, but, like, is that replicable? Have you seen that on scale across the country where housing first has really worked?
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Patrick Marquis
Absolutely. I mean, if anything, what we did was just sort of one, you know, one very small example of an incredibly successful approach that's worked all across the country. And when I'm saying that this is an approach that, you know, has worked everywhere, I really mean everywhere. It's worked in Salt Lake City, it's worked in Houston, Texas. It's worked in, you know, New York City, and it has been incredibly successful in reducing homelessness, street homelessness, in many of those cities. Because this is a model that really, really works for some of our most vulnerable folks, our unsheltered homeless population. Folks sleeping on the streets or in parks or in subways. This folks, this approach gets them out of, you know, out of street homelessness into housing and keeps them in housing. The other thing is that we've seen now multiple studies of this approach over decades that have shown that the sort of incidence of homelessness among this group, so after they've been providing with housing first, very few, if any, end up going back into homelessness. Their physical and mental health improves dramatically. Especially when you compare all of these sorts of outcomes with the treatment first approach. You see how successful housing first is. Housing first leads to better health outcomes, leads to better housing stability, leads to lower rates of homelessness. All of that is true when you compare it to the treatment first approach. And then to make matters, you know, it's almost like, you know, the exclamation point is that it turns out that it's actually cheaper. So one of the remarkable things that we learned about supportive housing and the housing first approach is that if you analyze the total cost sort of to taxpayers of providing this subsidized housing apartment with support services, and then you compare it to the cost of leaving the person homeless, it's actually cheaper to provide supportive housing and a housing first apartment.
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Tonya Moseley
Talk to me about the people that you met that you've helped out on the street. I'm thinking back to the folks beneath Riverside park that you were able to find housing for, and none of them went back to homelessness. Can you share a story of one of them.
- [37:02]
Patrick Marquis
Well, actually, I'll just tell the story of the memorial service for one of them. There was a guy, Jose, that had lived in the. You know, had lived in the tunnel. I got to know him only briefly because he had just started to move out of the tunnel when I was beginning my work. My work there. And then he, you know, he had been somebody who had worked in a factory in Manhattan, and then the factory closed down. I think actually they moved. They moved a few of their jobs over to New Jersey. So he lost his work, just ended up on hard times, ended up on the streets, found his way to the tunnel and was in the tunnel for a long period of time. And then he was able to obtain one of these federal housing vouchers that allowed him to rent an apartment in the Bronx. And then he lived in that apartment until he passed away in the late 1990s. And I remember going to the memorial service with him and the. Some other folks from the tunnel who were there. There was a remarkable woman named Margaret Morton, who was a photographer, who did a book of photos of the people living in the tunnel. She had gotten to know the folks there really well. And the photos are just really like stunning. Just something black and white photos. But you actually really see the kind of the incredible light in the tunnel. I mean, it's kind of a strange thing to say, but the tunnel was actually a very beautiful place in many ways.
- [38:17]
Tonya Moseley
Really?
- [38:18]
Patrick Marquis
Yeah, I mean, it was. You know, the train tunnel was actually sort of a human made creation. It wasn't like excavated under the park. It was actually the park was built over the rail line by Robert Moses. And so there were these ventilation shafts, and sometimes you would just see shafts of light coming through in the middle of the tunnel. And it was just kind of, in some ways a beautiful place, although a grim place and obviously not a place where anybody should be living. So when I was at that memorial service, I got to talking to some of these folks, and they remembered their time in the tunnel as something that they had survived. And obviously it was a place that they had lived. So in some ways they missed it because they had sort of been displaced from it. They were forced to leave it when Amtrak ended up closing down the tunnel. But they were just also so much sort of healthy. When I was at that memorial service, I got to talking to some of these folks and I think they, you know, they remembered their time, you know, in the tunnel as something that they had survived. And obviously, you know, it was a place that they had lived. So in some Ways they. They missed it because they had sort of been displaced from it. They were forced to leave it when Amtrak ended up closing down the tunnel. But they were just also so much sort of healthier and more settled, you know, being in homes. I mean, it was just so clear. I mean, they just looked, you know, some of them had looked so kind of gaunt and unhealthy when they were living in the tunnel, for obvious reasons, because it was just such a difficult place to live. But, you know, by the time they'd been, you know, living in their own homes for such a. For so many years afterwards, I mean, they were just in such a sort of healthier and sort of calmer place.
- [39:58]
Tonya Moseley
You know, I'm thinking about, with all of your experience, when you walk down the street and you see a homeless person, an unhoused person.
- [40:07]
What are you seeing that maybe the rest of us might be missing?
- [40:12]
Patrick Marquis
I mean, I think what I try and do, and I think really everybody can do this, is try and just kind of see that person for who they are at that moment, you know, and try and just kind of, you know, it's a little bit of a cliche statement, but just sort of meet them where they're at and appreciate, you know, that what they're going through in that moment is, you know, it's just incredibly difficult. And then try and have some compassion and empathy. I mean, again, it's just sometimes these encounters are momentary encounters, right? You might just go up and talk to them for a moment, just kind of see how they're doing. You know, maybe they need, you know, they need some money to get some food. You know, maybe just offer them a few dollars to, you know, kind of help them out in that moment, but try and do it in a way that's, you know, just almost, you know, again, just be a human being about it. I mean, I think that's what I try and do as much as possible. I mean, there's no. I don't think there's any, like, one answer, any sort of magic answer, but just kind of try and actually be there on a human to human level with people. I mean, one of the things that I learned, you know, over more than 20 years working with homeless people is they're just people like people like the rest of us. You know, like, they're everybody's. You know, they're just going through some terrible times and they've kind of been dropped out of the bottom of systems that are broken and are not working. And, you know, they've been kind of left there. But they're just people like the rest of us. And it's not up to us to be like judging them. You know, we should be just offering compassion and helping them out.
- [41:45]
Tonya Moseley
Patrick Markey, thank you so much for this book and thank you for talking with us.
- [41:50]
Patrick Marquis
Oh, thank you, Tonya. It's been such a pleasure to be here.
- [41:54]
Tonya Moseley
Patrick Marquis's new book is Homelessness in the New Gilded Age. Coming up, our book critic Maureen Corrigan shares her top 10 books of the year. This is FRESH AIR. During the holidays, there's a lot of pressure to make things perfect, but that can actually make the season less merry and bright. And I remember thinking, oh my gosh, it's all the doing.
- [42:16]
Patrick Marquis
I am not here.
- [42:17]
Tonya Moseley
I'm not present. I am missing being. This week on the Life Kit podcast.
- [42:21]
NPR Sponsor/Announcer
From the NPR Network, tips to make.
- [42:24]
Tonya Moseley
Your holiday season actually enjoyable. Listen in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [42:30]
Maureen Corrigan
It's been a great year for tv, movies and music and we are highlighting.
- [42:35]
Tonya Moseley
The best of the best, including K.
- [42:37]
Patrick Marquis
Pop, Demon Hunters, Sinners and Severance. We're talking about our favorite moments moments.
- [42:42]
Maureen Corrigan
Of the year, including some of the.
- [42:43]
NPR Sponsor/Announcer
Best pop culture you might have missed.
- [42:45]
Tonya Moseley
Listen to Pop Culture Happy Hour in.
- [42:47]
Maureen Corrigan
The NPR app or wherever you get.
- [42:49]
NPR Sponsor/Announcer
Your podcasts this holiday season. Give a gift that gives back. The NPR Shop is back with the iconic logo tee, the tiny desk hoodie and fresh gear for fans of public media. What you wear funds what you hear. Shop meaningful gifts now@shopnpr.org do you need.
- [43:09]
Tonya Moseley
A book for holiday gift giving? While Maureen Corrigan can Recommend at least 10 here's her annual best books list.
- [43:17]
Maureen Corrigan
My picks for this year's best books tilt a bit to nonfiction, but the novels that made the cut redress the imbalance by their sweep and intensity. Karen Russell's long awaited second novel, the Antidote is my pick for novel of the year. An epic story of immigration, land grabs and aspiration, the Antidote is set in Nebraska and framed by two actual weather.
- [43:46]
The Black Sunday dust storm on April 14, 1935, in which people were suffocated by a moving black wall of dust and a month later, the Republican river flood. The central character here is a so called prairie witch who heals her customers by holding whatever they can't stand to know. Russell herself is America's own Prairie Witch of a writer, exhuming memories out of our national unconscious and inviting us through her spellbinding writing to see our history in full. Patrick Ryan's Buckeye is a more straightforward historical novel. Set, as its title indicates, in Ohio. Stretching from Pre World War II to the close of the 20th century, the story focuses on two married couples. When we first meet her, Margaret Salt, a red headed looker, walks into the hardware store where Cal Jenkins works and demands that he turn on the radio. There's commotion in the streets and because Margaret's husband is in the Navy, she wants to know what's happening. It turns out Germany has surrendered. Overwhelmed, Margaret kisses Cal and married man Cal likes it. Throughout the novel, Ryan's narrator underscores how chance moments shape our lives. Like Karen Russell, Kiran Desai has kept readers waiting for her second novel, but the loneliness of Sonia and Sunny makes the wait worthwhile. At the outset, Sonia, a college student in Vermont, is homesick for her native India. Her depression makes her vulnerable to a visiting painter, an art monster. Meanwhile, Sunny has left India to work in New York, but distance can't shield him from his fearsome mother. Desai's near 700 page novel ruminates on exile and displacement and tells a tangled love story with enough coincidences to make Dickens blush. My last fiction pick is more in the Jane Austen miniaturist mode. Hart the Lover is a companion novel to Lilly King's 2020 novel Writers and Lovers, but the structure of this follow up is so ingenious that you don't have to have read the earlier book. This is an emotionally charged story about a young woman with literary ambitions screwing up, wising up, finding herself and realizing what she may have lost in the process. On to nonfiction. Gertrude Stein's writing, as the critic Wyndham Lewis put it, sometimes has the consistency of a cold black suet pudding, the same heavy, sticky, opaque mass all through. And yet, maddening as she can be, many of us sense that when it comes to Stein's literary genius, there really was a there there. Francesca Wade's lively, unconventional biography called Gertrude An Afterlife doesn't end at Stein's death in 1946, but also tells the story of the obsessive admirers who help Stein achieve serious posthumous recognition. Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy is one of the most vivid and exquisitely written memoirs of a mother daughter relationship I've ever read. Roy's single mother was a beloved teacher who founded a school in India. Roy and her brother, however, endured their erratic mother's rage. And yet, Roy writes of her mother, I truly believed she would outlive me. When she didn't, I was wrecked, heart smashed. Like Gertrude Stein and Roy's mother, Patti Smith defies easy characterization. Her latest memoir, bread of Angels, expands upon Just Kids, her 2010 memoir that's since become a classic. Smith delves into more intimate material here, like the secret of her paternity, her sense of her own sexuality and her 14 year marriage to the late musician Fred Sonic Smith. If Patti Smith's title references Angels, stephen Greenblatt's Dark Renaissance invokes the somewhat devilish figure of playwright Christopher Marlowe. I can think of nobody who brings the world of the English Renaissance to life with the verb and erudition of Greenblatt. Here he explores the mysteries of Marlowe's originality and his murder at age 29. In 2017, historian Judith Geisberg and her team of grad student researchers launched a website called Last Seen Finding Family After Slavery. It now contains over 4,500 ads placed in newspapers by once enslaved people hoping to find loved ones. Geisberg's arresting book, also called Last seen, closely reads 10 of those ads, giving readers a deeper sense of the lived experience of slavery and its aftermath. My final best book pick is A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhurst, which is part extreme adventure tale, part meditation on marriage. In 1972, Morris and Marilyn Bailey spent four months adrift in the middle of the Pacific after a whale knocked a hole in their wooden sloop. They held themselves together mentally by focusing on small things like the card games that Marilyn devised. Not bad advice, perhaps, for all of us in challenging times ahead. Happy holidays, everyone.
- [50:17]
Tonya Moseley
Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University and you can find all of her year end recommendations on on our website@fresh air.NPR.org and to browse more than 360 titles recommended by NPR staff and critics, visit Books we love@npr.org BestBooks Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, Rhea Seehorn, the star of the new series Pluribus. You may know her as the co star of Better Call Saul, which was both the sequel and prequel to Breaking Bad. And Pluribus has a sci fi premise, but asks larger questions about happiness, anger, conformity and resistance. I hope you can join us with Terry Gross. I'm Tonya Moseley.
- [51:07]
NPR Sponsor/Announcer
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- [51:38]
Tonya Moseley
Podcast evergreen trees are Pacific Northwest icons in journalism. An evergreen story isn't tied to one news cycle. It goes deep and high helps you understand the world. The Evergreen is also a podcast from OPB about the Northwest. I'm Jen Chavez. Listen to the Evergreen podcast from OPB every Monday.
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