Without very much fanfare, or any public announcement whatsoever, over the weekend, the city-run “respite center” for new asylum applicants on 359 Stockton Street has closed down.
“None of us from the community or mutual aid groups knew about this. We learned about the shelter potentially closing just two days ago,” said Mariel Acosta, a volunteer at Bushwick City Farm, a community garden that sits across the street. Since opening last year, the tallish brick building, just steps away from the Myrtle Broadway JMZ train station and once earmarked to turn into another Blink Gym, has instead been rented out by the city and filled with cots.
According to Acosta, who has been involved in circulating supplies to these asylum applicants, “there were about 600-700 men” in the building by the time it closed, “about 120-something per floor.” A city official, however, who confirmed the move to close the shelter on Stockton Street, said that “Stockton was at a little over 270 people last week according to our data.”
The shelter has also been a magnet for various critical news reports. A news package a year ago from Fox 5 was headlined: ‘It’s prison’: Hundreds in Bushwick shelter go weeks without showers. Acosta appeared throughout a Gothamist post on the subject that month, describing the floors of the place as “just like concrete.” A month later, we published some photos from the inside of this place where, by then, a shower trailer had arrived on the scene.
Now, according to Acosta, the city was throwing the people there out.
“Many migrants were not previously notified, and it was a surprise when they were verbally told they had to move today and the thing they were given were print outs of Google map directions in English, which they can’t read, to the shelters they were being relocated to,” Acosta told me on Sunday night. According to some of those instructions city officials handed out, the homeless asylum applicants were told to relocate to different shelters in Long Island City, “another near JFK and to Hall St in Crown Heights,” says Acosta. The Hall Street shelter had been the subject of an extensive report from the City, the non-profit news site, after it had “grown to house around 3,000 people,” back in February.
By the next morning, the building appeared empty, its windows were taped over from the inside and a small group of city officials seen idling outside confirmed that the building had closed, though it was still being rented out by the city. Some public statement about this would be forthcoming, one of them said. A city official later told me that the other, similar shelter in the neighborhood, over at 455 Jefferson Street, remains open and that there are currently no plans to close it.
“When I learned two days ago about Stockton potentially closing, I planned on going Tuesday to ask around for information because we kept hearing different dates and versions of the story,” says Acosta, who believes that, since opening, the building has been “a site neglected by city council and [state] senators since its opening, and they know about it.”
As far as Acosta and others from her group had heard, the people staying there had not been given any notice from the city about the closing of the building until they had “scanned their ID to get into the shelter” that week.
The closing follows the imposition of a new curfew there earlier this year and the use of a new “30-day” limit for people staying at the same shelter, among others, which Eric Adams put forward this March, changing how the city would comply with the legally-mandated “right to shelter” that homeless New Yorkers have and which Adams has been trying to use the courts to get rid of. Since then, says Acosta, “men that had been kicked out of various shelters across Brooklyn or whose 30 day limit was up and couldn’t get a reassignment, have been breaking into the [community] farm to sleep, or sleeping in the streets around there.”
“One of the reasons why I’m so upset with this situation,” she says, “is that when shelter management and the city officials do this type of mess we’re the ones scrambling to correct it or at least mitigate its effects.”
Update: This story has been updated to include a response from the city.
Photos taken by “Stockton street neighbors.”
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