Chester, N.Y. — EVERY night after dusk, yellow school buses begin to arrive in the town of Chester, driving past silos and onion fields to a fenced-in complex at the top of a hill. They have come from New York, an hour-and-a-half drive south of here, and they are carrying homeless men.
The men will sign in and scatter to their beds, in military-style dormitories or, if they are sick or frail, whitewashed cells that once held prisoners. If they are here for the first time, they will be issued toothpaste, deodorant and a suit of freshly laundered secondhand clothes.
At midnight, staff members will make a final count of the men for a report they will send to city officials. Then they will continue on their rounds, walking through the darkness and silence of the countryside.
For 72 years, the city has transported homeless men to Camp LaGuardia, in the hills of Orange County. Its 1,001 beds have housed gaunt men from Depression-era bread lines, drunks from Bowery flophouses, down-on-their-luck immigrants, and, occasionally, elderly men who simply made their home here. A German man, who is remembered with particular fondness by the staff, stayed 29 years, and raised pigs.
All that will end this summer, when Camp LaGuardia shuts its doors. New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has vowed to decrease the city's homeless population by two-thirds by the end of his second term, moving as many as possible into subsidized apartments. The city is getting out of the business of sheltering people for indefinite periods. Over the years, no facility has better epitomized that business than Camp LaGuardia, New York's largest shelter and its most easily forgotten.
Already, the population has been cut in half, to below 500. One recent departure was Adam Kropiewnicki, 61, a wordless, sweet-tempered Polish man known locally as "the Walker." Every morning for seven years, he set out on foot looking for work as a day laborer. But not until last fall did anyone call an interpreter to the site to speak to him in Polish, said Courtney Denniston, 27, a case manager supervisor.
"The first words out of his mouth were: 'Home. I just want to go home,' " Denniston said. He had come to the U.S. illegally to work as an asbestos handler, but when he lost the job, he had no money to fly home. He had a wife and children in Warsaw.
