The three homeless men who sparked a flurry of soul searching in Park Slope — and the ire of a local pastor — after refusing to moderate their drinking and noise-making have abandoned their long-time hangout on the steps of the Old First Reformed Church, but they have left a legacy behind.
Rev. Daniel Meeter, Rabbi Andy Bachman of Congregation Beth Elohim, and the Park Slope Civic Council have formed the “Park Slope Coalition for the Homeless,” which will be devoted to improving the well-being of the dozens of homeless who flock to the Slope for its wealth of, well, wealth.
The incipient group was borne from a Nov. 20 meeting with the city’s Department of Homeless Services.
The next day, Bachman posted the Coalition’s four basic principles on his blog, www.andybachman.com: “Acknowledge with dignity those who are homeless. … Work for their dignity and safety. Connect them to the variety of homeless services in the city. Support the provision of services to these people.”
It’s not as though Meeter hadn’t been trying to do just that.
As The Brooklyn Paper reported last month, three men had taken up residency on the steps of the Old First Church this summer: Robert Royster, who’d been an on-and-off visitor for years, Will Franklin, who drank on the stoop yet slept elsewhere, and Frank Silano.
Meeter first tried to help, getting Franklin a job at a local Key Food — a job he soon lost. The pastor also gave the men leftover food and offered to help them get treatment. His deacon knitted them scarves.
But nothing helped. After the men “started urinating and losing self-control,” Meeter said he asked them to leave.
“There was a week in July when I said, ‘Hey guys, it’s over,’ and I started throwing their stuff out and chasing them away. Problem was, they’d come back — and now they were hostile.”
But Meeter said the final kicker was Sunday, Oct. 21, when he discovered that the men had hidden a steel bar behind the church wall.
“I saw the steel bar as a weapon. It was all beyond tolerance,” said Meeter.
After Meeter wrote about the situation on his blog, www.oldfirst.blogspot.com, the story became the talk of Park Slope, with plenty of people defending Meeter’s right to get frustrated by the homeless men on his doorstep, but others questioned the pastor’s inability to turn the other cheek.
“I thought that the church was about the awesome, unrelenting, compassionate, power of God,” wrote one person on Meeter’s blog. “I guess…the world is changing.”
Later, Bachman wrote to Meeter and, with the help of the Park Slope Civic Council, set up a meeting with the city to create the new organization.
It’s already bearing fruit, Meeter said.
“I saw Robert Royster walking up Carroll Street,” Meeter said. “I told him, ‘Robert, I’m going to call Common Ground [a homeless services organization], and they’d like to come and meet with you to determine what services they can provide.’ We met him outside of Key Food. He’s now in their system for medical care and permanent housing.
“Today, I talked to another homeless guy I know near the Q train on Flatbush Avenue.”
Not bad for the organization’s first week. Not that the rabbi hasn’t been pulling his weight, too. On his blog, Bachman wrote about his efforts to help a “chronically homeless man,” prompting responses ranging from congratulatory to skeptical.
“I admire everyone’s optimism in this effort, but know many social workers and others in this community [who] have personally made intense efforts to connect various homeless individuals with appropriate services over the years and have been rebuffed,” wrote a woman named Janet.
Be that as it may, Meeter and company are determined to try. It’s not as though the homeless problem is going away anytime soon.
“There’s been a homeless problem in Park Slope for decades, and we expect it to continue for as long as there is wealth here and relative safety,” said Meeter. “Today, I encountered four homeless people just between the Q train on Flatbush and the church.”
