For Group of Young People, Village Piers Mean Home

By LYNETTE HOLLOWAY

It was about 9 on a recent Wednesday night, and the crowds had already started gathering around the West Village piers. More than three dozen young men lingered at the waterfront just off the West Side Highway, talking and smoking cigarettes and marijuana. Dozens more milled in front of a pornographic video store across the highway at Christopher Street.

Men in expensive cars cruised by. Frequently they stopped, exchanging brief, hushed words with youths who approached, climbed into the cars and rode away.

Kris Hernden, 21, and a friend, James Richardson, 23, marveled at the bustling scene. Two weeks before, each had stuffed some clothes into backpacks, bought a $26 one-way bus ticket and left Baltimore for New York City. Both dream of becoming actors. But for now they are on the piers of the West Village, part of a loose band of young people, most of them gay and many of them homeless runaways, who have increased their presence in the area in the last two years.

Other neighborhoods might call in the police to drive these youths away, but officials at Community Board 2 in the West Village -- with the support of residents, community organizers and business owners -- are extending an embrace, and seeking to open a 20-bed emergency shelter for them.

Organizers acknowledge that 20 beds would not come close to housing the 500 or so homeless youths who gather at the piers. What is more important is the services the shelter would offer, including AIDS education, life skills training and mental health and substance abuse counseling, said Ruth M. Sherlip, chairwoman of the youth services planning committee of Community Board 2.

So far, there is no organized opposition to the idea of a shelter. Business owners along Christopher Street, a thriving commercial strip that cuts through the heart of the Village, agree that a shelter should be opened, but away from the center, which bustles with tourists, said Michael C. Mirisola, co-chairman of the Christopher Street Merchants Association and a member of Community Board 2.

The shelter proposal is far from complete, and an array of questions has yet to be resolved. Where will it be? Who will pay for it and run it? And will youths use it?

Another difficult question is the extent of the homeless problem. Experts estimate that there are about 20,000 homeless youths in the city, but no count has been conducted since 1973. On a hot summer night there may be hundreds of young people gathered on the piers, but there is no way of knowing just how many are truly homeless and how many are simply hanging out. Youths on the streets and those from the suburbs frequently look and dress alike.

While a dozen or so young people can usually be spotted sprawled out on benches at the piers at daybreak, most homeless youths avoid sleeping outdoors by selling sex in exchange for shelter, said Christopher Rodriguez, a spokesman for the Hetrick-Martin Institute, a nonprofit agency that serves gay youths.

Nonetheless, more and more youths are gathering on the piers as what was once their main hangout, Times Square, is rebuilt.

Rodriguez said that outreach workers who used to find hundreds of youths in Times Square barely see dozens today. The population, he said, has spread out to Central, West and East Harlem; Prospect Park in Brooklyn; Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights, Queens; along the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, and, of course, the piers, where Hernden and Richardson have been sleeping.

Both men grew up in the McCullough Houses, a sprawling housing project on Baltimore's West Side, but came to New York for different reasons.

Hernden dropped out of high school in the 11th grade because he was tired of school, he said. He also became a drug addict, he said.

"Some days, I would be so binged up and hyped up on crack that I would have to sniff heroin to be bring me down," he said. "Every day, I said I wasn't going to do it again, but I did."

Hernden said he became depressed when confronted with the reality that few doors were open to him without a high school diploma. He began to work as a prostitute.

"I just had to leave," he said. "I was basically working here and there. I got tired of that. I'm 21. I should be stable by now."

At the time, Richardson was homeless, turning tricks on the streets of Baltimore in exchange for a place to sleep, he said.

Richardson said he told his mother and sisters he was gay, and then endured a year of homosexual slurs from his family.

It got to be too much. Taking a drag off a cigarette, he said, "I just got up and left."

Hernden, who told his mother he was gay when he was 16, lowered his head as he listened to his friend. The pain of his friend's story still cuts through him, he said, even though he has heard it a hundred times.

One night, Hernden recalled, he hit rock bottom. He talked to Richardson about moving to the storied West Village, a place they had longed to live. Between the two of them, they could buy bus tickets and have $100 left over for expenses.

"It sounded good to me," Richardson said. "We each bought one-way tickets. We wanted to make sure we didn't go back."

Hernden hopes a bench will not be his bed for long. He recently found a job at a McDonald's in Chinatown and wants to save up enough money to rent an apartment. Richardson has not found a job.

Just how many homeless young people like Hernden and Richardson there are in New York is unclear, said Margo Hirsch, director of the Empire State Coalition of Youth and Family Services, a network of 60 nonprofit programs that serve homeless and runaway youth in New York State. A count has not been conducted since the 1973 survey by the police department, she said, and the figure of 20,000 used by experts is an estimate.

But social service workers agree there are not nearly enough shelters. The city has about 500 emergency shelter beds for homeless youths -- 80 percent of which are paid with private dollars through the Covenant House New York, a nonprofit agency, officials said.

The administration of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, which has come under fire because it left $1.3 million of its $3.1 million budget to help homeless youth unspent last year, has indicated that it would work with Community Board 2 to "study the possibility of opening a shelter," said Samantha I. Lugo, a spokeswoman for the Mayor.

The City Council's Youth Services Committee held the first of a series of public hearings two weeks ago to determine the extent of the problem in the homeless youth problem in the West Village and throughout the city.

City Councilman Kenneth K. Fisher, a Brooklyn Democrat who heads the committee, said he was perplexed by the administration underspending and questioned why services for homeless youth are so fragmented. The Division of Homeless Services has capacity in the adult shelter system for 18- to 24-year-olds, while adolescents under 18 fall under the responsibility of the Administration for Children's Services or the Department of Youth and Community Development.

But even when beds are available, some young homeless people are averse to using them. Nicholas Mitchell, 21, recently leaned his skinny 6 foot, 3 1/2 inch frame against a phone booth outside the video store as he took in the scene.

He said he left home three months ago because of family problems and moved in with a transsexual he calls his "gay mother." But even if he were homeless, he probably would avoid a shelter.

"If there was a shelter here, I can't say I would use it," Mitchell said.

But a formerly homeless 21-year-old, Bobby Williams, warned against that attitude. "As a veteran of the streets, I try to tell these other kids that they need to be careful," Williams said as he was hanging out on the corner of Christopher Street and the West Side Highway.

"If a shelter opens, they should go. I've done all of that other stuff, selling drugs and working as a prostitute. It doesn't pay."

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