At midnight, Lisette Lojo started her rounds at Penn Station and offered placements to people she found there. Christian said no. Anand Giridharadas would call the setting a night living in Penn Station, but the work on the floor was narrower and harder: one conversation at a time.
Lojo and Penn Station
Lojo works for the Bowery Residents' Committee, the nonprofit contracted to handle New York City's outreach to homeless people. She now runs B.R.C.'s transit work and often goes out with her team, after years as a street-and-subway team caseworker who handled forty or fifty cases at a time.
Her rounds at Penn Station are built around repeated contact. She said outreach workers and police work together there even though they have different goals, different training, and different specialties. The station becomes a place where the same people can be encountered night after night, and the job is to keep offering shelter and safe haven until one of those offers sticks.
Christian at Penn Station
Christian had spent time in and around Penn Station for several years. During the day, Christian could often be found in Grand Central Terminal and then moved when that station closed, carrying a grocery bag stuffed with essentials while plodding down the hall. Christian had accepted placement several times before, but had a tendency not to last in shelters.
Lojo said Christian was more open to safe havens because they felt more comfortable in smaller programs. That is the practical edge of this kind of outreach: the pitch changes from a general shelter slot to a setting that feels more manageable to the person being approached.
Officer H. and the rule
Officer H. worked Penn Station and enforced the rule that people were not supposed to lie down to sleep. That puts the station's overnight order and the outreach effort in the same frame, but not on the same terms. Lojo is trying to move people into shelter. Police are enforcing a rule against sleeping.
At five feet tall, Lojo moved through the station with a social worker's script and a manager's familiarity, beginning with the line: "Hello, how are you? My name’s Lisette. I work with B.R.C. Is there anything I can help you with tonight?" The exchange with Christian ended there for the night, with no placement taken and no visible resolution for the people who keep cycling through Penn Station after dark.
