Miracle on Leonard St.: Neighbors Rally Around Mother and Son In Need

SLIDE SHOW Click photo to see more pictures 

Amy Christopher, on Leonard Street outside the Louis Provenzano garage. Photographs by Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

Amy has been working at the garage for six years.

She is cheerful with customers…

…and people passing by—especially kids. She seems to know them all.

Sky Swerdloff, 3, is one of many neighborhood children who stop by the garage for treats and a big greeting from Amy. “Sky is a huge fan of Amy’s!” says Jill Swerdloff, her mother.

While they were staying with the Johnstons, Amy and Jamal would leave at 6:30 a.m. to take the subway to Jamal's school in the Bronx. Then Amy returned to Tribeca to start work at the garage by 8.

Most days, Amy's friend picked up Jamal from school and brought him back downtown to the garage.

Jamal waits in the garage office for his mother to get off work.

Through for the day, Amy and Jamal go next door to the Johnston's apartment, where they have dinner and spend the night.

Jamal loves to entertain all three Johnston children, including 1-year-old Mack.

Jamal romps with Davis, 4. “Davis told me he wants me to leave and he wants to keep Jamal for his brother,” Amy said.

Jamal decides to take a leap.

Jamal tries to distract Alison as she conducts business on her phone.

Alison gives Jamal a hug while chatting with Amy in the kitchen, where both families gather for snacks before bedtime.

“It’s been great. It’s been fun,” Alison says of her family’s time with Amy and Jamal, whom they took in after Thanksgiving. “I mean, what’s two more people?”

Before going to bed in the Johnston’s extra downstairs bedroom, mother and son watch TV in the den and have what Jamal calls “cuddling time.”

Amy gets ready for the party that is being given for her at Maslow 6, dressed in one of the outfits bought at Century 21 with the help of Leonard Street neighbors.

Alison adds a set of her pearls.

At the wine store, Maslow 6, Amy is greeted by co-owner Keri Kunzle, who lives next door to the garage.

Amy gets a hug from another neighbor, Will Dersch.

Elizabeth Skopp, with her husband Peter, attended the party for Amy. "Every morning I walk my daughter to school and she'd be there smiling and waving," Elizabeth said. "You have no idea what's going on with her."

Amy poses with Al Long, who has worked at the garage for more than 30 years.

With Alison and Donna Ferrato, Amy starts to cry as she speaks to the gathering. “The love that’s been shown to me,” she says. “I just don’t know how to say thank you.”

Everyone on Leonard Street, it seems, knows Amy Christopher. A parking attendant for the past six years at the Louis Provenzano Garage in Tribeca, Amy is as much a smiling neighborhood greeter as she is a parker of cars. Residents, their children, their nannies, their dogs, their dog walkers, she calls them all by name.

“Where’s Amy?” children will often ask as they peek into the tiny room at 24 Leonard St. where the workers wait for cars to pull up.

“Every kid thinks they are her favorite,” says Gina Ma, the Tribeca mother of a 6- and 7-year-old.

What should be a simple, nondescript place to park, soon to be demolished and replaced by a condo, is something of far greater importance, thanks, too, to men like Teddy Johnson, Al Long and Elvin Goodwin who have worked there for decades.

“It’s more than a garage, it’s a community,” says Alison Bellino Johnston, who lives next door with her husband, Jim, and their three children.

Unbeknown to the residents of Leonard Street, the last few years have been rough for Amy, a single mother making $8.25 an hour with no benefits. She and her son, Jamal, now nine, had been in and out of homeless shelters for the past two years until moving to a small room in a rundown boarding house in the Bronx. “I hated to take my son there,” she says. “But that’s all I could afford.”

On Thanksgiving eve, the landlord cut the electricity for a week.

But something extraordinary has happened to Amy and Jamal, and it started the day after Thanksgiving.

Perennially cheerful, Amy finally let down her guard to Alison that day and tearfully unburdened her frustrations.

“We will help you,” Alison assured her, “and I will ask all the neighbors to help, too.”

A few days later, Amy and Jamal packed what few belongings they had and moved in next door with the Johnstons. It was a new beginning for mother and son, and what Alison calls “the miracle of Leonard Street.”

Below, they describe what happened, in their own words.

AMY
“The shelters took a toll on my son.”

I love the people in Tribeca. I don’t feel like I’m around such wealthy people because they don’t act like wealthy people. They’re just normal people like me who I can hold a conversation with.

Sometimes I forget that this is where I am. Especially on this street. They’re all awesome—the dogs, the kids, everyone.

I’ve known a lot of the kids since they were real small. Some of them even started crying when they heard that the garage is closing. “What’s going to happen with Amy?” they said.

I worked for 13 years as a UPS driver. Then I lost my job. I’d been living with my brother but when he moved, I couldn’t afford it alone. I started staying with someone who was my boyfriend at the time. I needed a roof over my child’s head. But he got evicted, so I went to a shelter.

But the shelters took a toll on my son. So I decided to try a room in a boardinghouse. It killed me to take my son there but I had no place else to go. It was all that was in my budget. I’ve managed to live on $300 a week. Basically, that’s what I get paid. Thank God I have food stamps.

The day before Thanks­giving I was in the middle of cooking for the guys at the garage when the landlord turned the electricity off, so I had to call the guys and tell them I’m not bringing Thanksgiving.

The next day I saw Al­ison—guardian angel—and she started asking me questions and I just broke down. And she said, “I can’t believe it. How do you walk around so happy?” I said because I don’t take my problems with me wherever I go. I told her, as long as I can feed my son and he’s happy, I don’t care about anything else. I guess I was holding in so much.

ALISON
“I said, ‘I’ll help you and everybody will help you.’”

I’ve known Amy for years. She’s a super smiley, friendly, never complaining type of person. The day after Thanksgiving I noticed she was kind of down and I said, “Amy, what’s going on?” and she told me this whole story.

So I said, “Okay, I’ll help you, and everybody will help, and she said, “Really, why would people do that?” She was just in shock.

I said to her, “Let me talk to my husband and just hang in there.” A week later, she and her son, Jamal, came with a few bags and moved in.

Then I emailed everybody in the building and on the street who I knew and in 24 hours people had dropped off checks with the doorman. Two women took her to buy interview clothes at Century 21.

Keri Kunzle, who lives in my building and owns Maslow 6 wine store with Matt Reiser, immediately said, “We’ll do a fundraiser.”

It’s really amazing that everyone has rallied, but it’s not surprising. Amy’s the kind of person that at Christmas used to buy presents for the kids in the neighborhood. So when people heard that things were so bad they wanted to jump in and help. People have given a mattress, boxes of dishes, bags of clothing, a toaster oven.

I think everybody’s happy to help because Amy’s a great, hard-working person who’s diligent and trying to do the right thing. She just needs a break.

AMY
“I can’t believe the outpouring of love.”

I moved in with Alison on December 7th.

Since then, everyone has been helping me. Two women took me to buy interview clothes, because I literally had nothing, not even a good pair of shoes. I work in a uniform, Monday to Saturday.

I just can’t believe the outpouring of love that these people are showing me. Except from my mother and brother, I have never in my life had anybody do so much for me and it’s still mind-blowing.  I’ve never known that people can love like this.

The other day I took my son over to the wine gallery so he could meet Keri and Matt. I just wanted to say thank you. What else can I do? I feel thank you is not enough.

Sometimes Alison says, “You really don’t believe this has happened.” And I’m like, “I really don’t.”

EPILOGUE
“The good news is…”

Following are excerpts from emails that Alison wrote late last month to update neighbors who had helped Amy.

“The good news is that Amy found an apartment in the Bronx. We paid the broker, security and three months’ rent to give her some cushion. Amy has a couple of job interviews lined up this month, so everyone is hoping for the best. She also took the exam to be a New York City bus driver. It is not easy to get a decent- paying blue-collar job. We don’t want Amy to be back in this same situation a year from now, so we are shooting for better than minimum wage.

“I’m troubled by how many more Amys and Jamals are out there right now. My hope is this story will inspire others to get involved, person by person, like we have done.”