Storm Evacuees Get Help on Centre Street

 by Barry Owens


It is easy sometimes to forget that thousands of people remain homeless in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Time has gone by, other storms have passed, and it's been the political winds of Washington that have dominated the news.

But a sobering reminder sat in a Centre Street office last month in the person of 35-year-old Nelson Penalver from New Orleans' 8th Ward. He was slumped in a folding chair, where he sat for hours surrounded by suitcases packed with all his possessions. He was waiting, as were a dozen others, to learn what the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, New York City and state and federal agencies could do to help him.

Far from home, hurricane evacuees await help at the city’s assistance center. Photo: Carl Glassman

"I don't have no money or housing," he said. "I don't have any idea what they are offering, but I want to find out."

Lower Manhattan seems an unlikely place to find the displaced from Louisiana, but Penalver and more than a thousand people like him who have arrived in New York from the Gulf in recent weeks have been sent to the former Department of Motor Vehicles office at 80 Centre Street, now a cubicle city of housing, medical and charitable services called the Hurricane Katrina Disaster Assistance Center.

The city's Office of Emergency Management set up the center early last month in response to an overwhelming demand for government services from newly-arrived evacuees. It is expected to remain open through the end of this month.


"We had evacuees literally showing up and knocking on doors asking about food stamps. Who would have thought?" said Andrew Troisi, an OEM spokesman, marveling that so many would choose New York City as the place to restart their lives.

"I didn't know where else to go," said Mdtarik Naser, 35, who formerly ran a souvenir T-shirt stand in New Orleans' French Quarter. "I knew if I went to New York, I would have at least one friend."

The assistance center is staffed with workers from various city and state agencies, as well as Red Cross volunteers.

"I remember what it was like to have to live two weeks away from home, to have to buy new underwear, to come back to the dust," said volunteer Nell Cote, a Nassau Street resident who likened the evacuees' plight to her own Sept. 11 experience-but worse. "Imagine never going home."

Cote sat with evacuees, listened to their stories, filled out the appropriate forms and offered what advice and assistance that she could.

"They are in a terrible, terrible situation," she said. "It is hard to come to New York. Sometimes all you can offer them is to explain what subway to take to get somewhere."

Not all the visitors on this day were strangers to the city.
Downtown resident and Red Cross volunteer Nell Cote
xPearl Burrell, 76, lives in Queens and was visiting her elderly mother and aunt in New Orleans when the hurricane hit. After some harrowing days spent at the city's Convention Center and then in Houston, she flew her family back to New York to live with her.

"They have no place else to go," she said. "Everybody they know just scattered. Nothing to go back to there anyway."

Burrell said she had come to inquire about their Social Security checks.

Freddy and Natacha Zuniga, orbited by their three children, ages 1, 2 and 5, had fled Hurricane Rita and came to the center hoping to get enough financial assistance to make their way back home to Port Arthur, Texas. They had no plans to remain with their family in the Bronx. "It's not safe for the kids here," Natacha said.

But Penalver, with little left but his optimism, was convinced that he had made the right choice.

"If they help me here the way I think they can," he said, "I think I'm going to be alright."