Hell's Kitchen's Quarter-Way House for the Mentally Ill

The neighborhood around 48th St. and 10th Ave. isn't nearly as bad as it used to be. There's a community garden, a park, well-kept brownstones and all the little shops you'd expect. Just off the corner, on 48th, stands a fairly new seven-story building. Nice, but nothing you'd give a second thought.

You can't tell just to look at it, but the Clinton Residence is actually a housing facility for mentally ill homeless people. It's not a halfway house, exactly?more of a quarter-way house, a first stop for people just released from state hospitals.

Clinton Residence opened almost 11 years ago, as part of Project Renewal (which began work on the Bowery in 1967, and has since opened a number of shelters and residences around the city). The original plan was to provide permanent housing for the mentally ill. That changed a few years later, when the State Office of Mental Health decided that the goal of Clinton Residence should be to move people out, get them back to work, make them productive members of the community again. And?surprising as it sounds?that's exactly what they've been doing.

"The folks that live here are not ready to live by themselves and pay their own rent and manage their own medication," said director Jim Mutton. "A lot of what we do here is get people ready for that next step. People stay here on average three or four years before they're ready to move on... Most people who leave here don't go on to completely independent living."

All of the 57 residents who live there now are on some sort of medication, and most are dealing with a drug or alcohol problem.

Over the past five years, though, Project Renewal's had a pretty good record, especially considering the severity of some of the cases they're dealing with?35 residents placed into apartments, with a miraculously small recidivist rate.

"Historically, this has been regarded as a place where people are dumped and forgotten about," Mutton said. "There's a lot of stigma out there that people simply can't move on, that they're either here or in a hospital. We believe that people with a mental illness can achieve as many goals as any other human being?they just have a harder road of it."

Along with treating full-time residents, they also operate a 12-bed drop-in shelter in the basement for those homeless people who want to get off the street for a while, and who someday might move upstairs.

I asked Mutton and Alexander Rae, a caseworker, if they ran into much resistance from the neighbors when they decided to open a housing complex for the mentally ill. He answered that the community has accepted the facility but that, at the same time, people are "sort of fed up with more programs in this neighborhood for mentally ill people." The biggest problem they face, he said, remains combating the media's presentation of mental illness?concentrating on the unpredictable violence and ignoring the success stories. In 11 years, he maintained, Clinton Residence hasn't seen a single act of violence.

"When I tell friends," Rae added, "who I consider well-educated people?what I do, the first question to me is always, 'Oh my God?did you ever get attacked?' No."

As far as the success stories go, they pointed to the residents who found work through Project Renewal's job program.

"We had a guy working at Shea Stadium this past summer, in charge of parking. We have another guy who's a janitor at a recycling plant in Brooklyn... Somebody else who works for the Village Voice as a part-time receptionist." (For the record, New York Press put a mentally ill man behind the switchboard back in '95.)

They also told me about Freddy, who was sent over from a state hospital.

"They said, 'We're washing our hands of this guy, you're never going to get anywhere with him,'" Mutton told me. "He came in doped up on traditional medications like Thorazine and Haldol, just shuffling and drooling." After the staff psychiatrist switched his medication, though, everything changed. "He turned into this guy who had an incredible sense of humor, and started working in the kitchen as a chef." Freddy recently moved into a studio.

Tricky part to all this is that it's not always easy to get a room at the Clinton. You need to have a history of homelessness, a severe mental illness and have your Social Security benefits in place. That latter is necessary because SSI pays the rent?a hefty $842 a month, which leaves only a pittance left over for personal use?what they call "coffee and cigarette money."

But that $842 covers a room, three meals a day, medication and treatment, clothing, toiletries and transportation. And cable. Still, many residents take on extra jobs?either outside or within the facility.

"Some people are happy getting four bucks a day," Mutton said. "Others really try to build up their income again. A lot of people really want to go off benefits some day."

After we spoke, Rae gave me a tour of the place?from the rooms on the upper floors to the drop-in center in the basement. It struck me that the place was surprisingly clean and quiet?though not spookily so. Each floor has a lounge area with a tv and a VCR. The rooms are small and spare, yes?but more like a dorm than an institution. There weren't people wandering the halls in a stupor?in fact, while I was there (just after lunch) the place seemed pretty empty. One older woman lingered outside the library, waiting for the weekly distribution of donated clothing.

The third floor, Rae explained, is the "transitional floor"?where a handful of residents are left pretty much alone?responsible for, among other things, taking their own medication.

"We're trying to give people [on the transitional floor] a taste of what it's like to live in less supportive housing," he said. "They have an assignment sheet?it's somebody's job to vacuum the floor, clean the bathroom, clean up the kitchen. They have their own personal groups up here?like a cooking group. A lot of times people move out, and they don't have the first idea what to do?how to make a shopping list, or go shopping. They keep the milk in the cabinet... We've seen a lot of successes here, and we've seen people who become symptomatic again, because even these added responsibilities are just too overwhelming."

On the ground floor, a bulletin board lists the free activities going on in the city that day. Another, the various in-house groups. In the tv room just off the dining hall, a few people sat around, blasting the stereo.

Irene, a soft-spoken 33-year-old, came here from Texas in 1994. Since then, she's lived in a number of shelters, moving into the Clinton last May. I asked her how Clinton compared with the other places she'd stayed.

"It's nice, it's good, but sometimes I wish I was in another home where I'd get more money. But I think it's worth it, because we have cable, we have music."

(Just that morning, Irene was offered a part-time food service job, which she took.)

Mario's also 33, and he'd been at Clinton for three and a half years, after three years at MPC. He's a small, easygoing man who grew up on the Lower East Side. He designs a lot of the holiday cards the residence distributes every year, and says that some day he'd like to be an architect.

"I get along with everybody," he said, when asked how he liked it there. "Sometimes I feel like I'm surrounded by ghosts. But it's not usually like that... Sometimes I get paranoid, that's all."

Unlike Irene, though, Mario says he's not too anxious to get out on his own.

"I'm comfortable here. There's a lot of nice people."

Then there was Donald Moses. He's 54, a little gray at the temples, and has been in the Clinton for about a year. Mr. Moses told me that he's been a sheriff, a police commissioner, a fire captain, a towtruck operator, a psychiatrist, a private detective?and had been in the military for 30 years. He also told me that he was waiting around for the administration to find him an apartment.

"I can't afford a cooperative apartment or a condominium," he said. "And don't need to be housed as a mental patient, or in an SRO. But I can afford an apartment. And they should have never placed me on medication as a disabled veteran."

I asked Mr. Moses if he liked it here.

"Yes, it's comfortable living quarters... Just recently, it's become better. They'd been turning the heat off at night. I complained to the Board of Health, and now the heat's on at night."

He mentioned that he felt that the staff didn't always treat him with respect, and I asked him to explain.

"It's only because they placed me on medication... It stores up and makes you sluggish. Puts you to sleep sometimes. That, I say, is disrespectful."

He thinks that if the staff psychiatrist wanted to deter people from acting up, he should just use candy as a reminder. "Don't have a squabble and don't get out of hand. But in most cases, they keep you sedated, whether you get ornery or not."

Afterward, Mutton explained that Mr. Moses had been a Vietnam vet, and had spent the years since his discharge in a VA hospital. As a result, Project Renewal was in the process of collecting nearly $90,000 in back pay for him?which would go toward his new apartment.