Life's forgotten become family at Pine Street Inn

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

I should have counted the steps from the Herald. It couldn't have been many. It was no more than a five-minute walk. And yet the walk took me to the other side of the world.

The Pine Street Inn isn't on Pine Street. It's on Harrison Avenue, in an old building that looks like most old buildings in this city, brick on the outside,cinder block on the inside. I arrived there with preconceptions. The homeless are alcoholics, drug users, people who have alienated their families and friends; mentally unstable, needy, inferior, sometimes threatening people. That's what I believed.

I walked past a group of them on the way into the building and once again on the way out. On the way in, I didn't look in their eyes. On the way out, I did, and smiled, and said hello. What I learned in the two hours I was there is not to make judgments about people I don't know.

Six staff members who sat around a conference table and talked about the inn, who called the men and women who line up every day for food and a night's lodging "guests," who put faces on these people and shared their histories, made me see them not as a group of undesirables but as a gathering of individuals. The staff spoke of the guests with affection. They talked about all the progress being made.

They focused on the positive, not the negative. "These people see us as family," is what one said, and that is how the staff sees them. It is this affection and respect that run back and forth between the caretakers and those being cared for that is the story in this place.

The numbers tend to obscure this. Hundreds sleep here every night. Hundreds are cared for in clinics run by the Pine Street Inn. Hundreds more sleep at other shelters operated by the inn.

All these numbers erase faces, blend individuals. The women waiting for beds the afternoon I was there were young, middle-aged, old; black, brown, white. No one group stood out. Only individuals did. An 85-year-old with straight white hair half-covered by a blue pull-on hat sat on a bench and looked around. She's a regular, the staff told me. In the day, she walks around town. At night she comes here.

She's had a stroke and has difficulty speaking, but she has no trouble understanding. They greeted her when they walked by. She nodded to them. There was respect in the interchange.

A young woman, in her 20s, said "Excuse me, please" as she squeezed past us. She didn't look homeless. She looked like a million other women you might pass on the street. But she had nowhere to go.

The Pine Street Inn was opened in 1969 as a last stop for skid-row alcoholic men. But since 1980, the inn has provided emergency shelter for women, too. Twenty new women appear at the door every month. Last year, the inn provided shelter for 742. In April, a new building will open for women. In the meantime, the staff works hard to make do.

A counselor made flowered curtains for the women's dormitory. Someone donated mums. Someone else put pictures on the walls. The sea of cots with different colored blankets and quilts are clean and neat and a few room dividers offer a little privacy.

The staff's offices are makeshift, too. There are no drapes, carpets, no expensive furniture. There is not even the typical psychological separation.

"The first time I came, I had no intentions of coming back. I was helping a friend," one staff member said. "But then I looked around and saw people down on their luck with problems. I knew they needed help. And I knew I had to come back."

The creed here is that no one is beyond help. What the inn provides are food, shelter, clothing and acceptance. And a staff that tells its guests, you can do it, and works hard to assure that they can.