In recent weeks, shelter residents and volunteers have said the ban on cooking and selling outside the tents has been intensified. In an operation carried out on October 17 in which the Parks Department and the NYPD confiscated canopies and other equipment.
Adi Talwar
Man uses a camping stove, lent to him by another shelter resident, to fry bananas.
This article was originally published in English on November 22. Translated by Daniel Parra. Read the English version here.
Since August, the city has been using the tent complex as a shelter for 2,000 people on Randall’s Island to house single immigrants and immigrant couples in one of the largest Humanitarian Emergency Response Centers (HERC). English) of the city, built on part of the park’s soccer fields.
The facility is fragmented into five high-rise white tents. Showers, bathrooms and a food distribution area are located outside the tents, where cots are just inches from each other.
City officials say more than 140,000 immigrants have arrived in the city in the last year and a half, of whom approximately 65,000 remain in the city’s shelter system. Given the few work options and the reception deadlines imposed by the mayor’s office, some have resorted to peddling.
In mid-October, when City Limits visited the facility on Randall’s Island, there were several street vendors around the tents. Four outdoor barbers cut hair, while others spread colorful blankets on the grass to sell clothes and other items. Some groups of people with scooters offered rides to the nearest subway station for a few dollars; others cooked and prepared meals and snacks to sell. Along the interlocking steel barricade, shopping carts were parked, filled with bagged plastic bottles.
In recent weeks, residents and volunteers at the shelter have reported that enforcement measures around cooking and selling at the site have intensified, including a operation carried out on October 17 in which the Parks Department and the New York Police Department (NYPD) confiscated tents and other kitchen utensils, as well as scooters and shopping carts used by many to collect used bottles for recycling .
Parks staff returned Nov. 14 to stop people from cooking near the trees — which is prohibited by park rules — and to return picnic tables that had been moved.
NYC Parks spokesperson Gregg McQueen said officers continue to “enforce current rules in all NYC parks, including those prohibiting unauthorized sales and illegal fire pits.” No citations were issued, he added, and pamphlets about park rules were distributed.
Adi Talwar
A shelter resident prepares meals to sell outside the Randall’s Island HERRC on October 18.
The agency said that while anyone is free to use the park’s grills within the 12 designated picnic areas, any type of open flame or campfire is prohibited on the grounds.
“Yesterday the boys made rice and didn’t let us give it away,” Ramón Villazana, 28, told City Limits in Spanish via text message last Wednesday. “They made it come down to us raw.”
Villazana, a Venezuelan asylum seeker who arrived in the city more than a year ago and is staying with his family in another emergency shelter, had been for the past few weeks, along with two other migrants, providing free hot meals to those They were on Randall’s Island, using the donations they received. Although the HERRC center serves three meals a day, including a hot dinner in the evening, some residents complain about the quality of the food and portions.
Above: Volunteers preparing meals for Randall’s Island shelter residents on October 18. Photos by Adi Talwar.
When City Limits visited the park-turned-lodge in late October, Villazana was preparing to serve about 25 lunches of grilled meat or roasted chicken on a bed of salad and boiled yucca. His goal, she said, was “to help, just as people helped us when I came to this country.”
For others, cooking represented an economic opportunity as they waited for deadlines to stay at the shelter. Some, like José, 28, thought the island’s isolation in the East River made it an ideal place for street vendors to emerge.
“This was my dream when I left Ecuador, to cook in New York,” José, who asked that his full name not be used for fear of reprisals, said in Spanish. His goal is to sell his food on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, a popular area for vendors.
Daniel Parra
José cooking rice and lentils.
José, who that day was cooking rice with lentils and grilled meat, had adapted a grill with wheels for outdoor cooking: on a shopping cart he placed half of a metal barrel, and on it he stacked firewood and a grill. People passed by from noon asking about the daily menu, and at one in the afternoon, several customers were sitting around their awning tent, asking when lunch would be ready.
“Of all the people you see,” José said, pointing to the other eight tents with awnings that that October afternoon were selling some type of Latin American food, “I’m the only one who cooks with firewood, and you know that that gives a unique flavor. only”.
The small food stand not only helped him support his family and children in Ecuador, he explained, but it allowed him to offer a few dollars and a plate of food to compensate other people who helped him with the operation: supplying firewood for the kitchen fire, washing kitchen tools and utensils, taking him and her to and from the Harlem supermarket to buy ingredients. “It is better to live among immigrants, there are no complaints,” says José.
When city agencies dissolved the market on October 17, José was waiting at the Roosevelt Hotel — the city’s main immigrant reception center — to reapply to enter the shelter system, as part of a policy of the city that limits the stay of most immigrants in shelters to 30 or 60 days. Joseph’s 60-day deadline had expired.
That Tuesday afternoon, he received a video call from a colleague telling him that his three supermarket carts had been confiscated. “Everything was there,” José says, including his bicycle, his clothes, and the supplies he had accumulated for cooking and selling: sauces, condiments, knives, pots, cutting boards, paper plates, plastic utensils, and napkins.
“Why?” he asked a journalist by text message. “We were far from the city, we didn’t bother anyone there.”
One day after the October operation, only three immigrants had timidly ventured to cook in the area of the island’s tent complex, according to City Limits’ observation. Although there were few of them, their pots attracted waves of diners who sat down to eat at the park’s picnic tables, while others ate standing up and some ordered takeout. There was only one barbershop in operation.
Adi Talwar
Yoselín prepared Venezuelan-style cupcakes, which she sold for $2 dollars each.
At one of the tables, Yoselín and Carmen, two residents of the shelter, were preparing Venezuelan-style pastries, assembling them according to people’s requests—cheese; cheese and ham; or potato and meat—before frying them for $2 each.
Three weeks earlier, Yoselín, who asked that her full name not be used for fear of retaliation, had borrowed $40 from another immigrant she knew at the shelter. “With that I bought a thermos, coffee, sugar, water and plastic cups,” says Yoselín, 34, adding that he started selling coffee for a dollar.
Within a few days, selling from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., he had paid off the initial loan and had enough to expand the business. She bought a propane tank and a square, single-burner stove to fry the cupcakes, while Carmen, whom she had befriended at HERRC, took the orders and put the filling into the cupcakes.
On the day of the October operation, as soon as they saw the police, they picked up everything and left. “They took the awning,” says Yoselín.
Above: People preparing meals to eat and sell on Randall’s Island on October 18. Photos by Adi Talwar.
Yoselin continued selling until October 22, when her and her husband’s stay at Randall’s shelter expired. With the savings they had achieved, they were able to rent a room in Fordham Heights, in the Bronx, where they pay $1,450 a month.
But since he stopped selling, the couple’s income has decreased and he is now worried they will not be able to pay next month’s rent.
Yoselín goes out to look for work and asks his acquaintances, but since he left Randall’s he has not found a job. Her husband works as an app driver, but the couple is worried about not being able to send funds to her children in Venezuela.
“We reinvented ourselves and were able to rent,” he says, but “there is no money left.”
To contact the reporters for this article, write to [email protected]. To contact the editor, email [email protected].
2023-11-30 17:51:52
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