Covenant House: Help or Hype?

To many of us, the mention of Covenant House calls to mind the horrible scandals of the 1980s, when charges of financial dishonesty and sexual abuse on the part of its director were all over the news. Its founder, Father Bruce Ritter, was forced to resign and eventually ended up living in nearly total isolation for the rest of his life. But let's take a closer look at the early days of this organization, which during the Seventies and early Eighties was greatly admired for its innovative work with kids.

Ritter founded Covenant House in 1972 as a shelter for runaways and street kids. One of his facilities, "Under 21," was located on 8th Avenue between 42 and 43 Streets, right in the heart of what was then the sleazy Times Square district, riddled with drugs, prostitution and opportunities for a kid to be exploited. Ritter's idea was a simple one; a kid could stay at the facility as long as he or she abided by the "Covenant," a set of ground rules for behavior. Covenant House grew rapidly, and Ritter was often to be seen on television or the lecture circuit. He certainly deserves some credit for bringing the plight of street kids to the attention of the wider public, even though the portrayal of your typical homeless child was not always accurate.

Many people imagined the population of street kids as composed heavily of white children from places like the Midwest who ran away from home to NYC for a variety of reasons, only to be trapped and forced into prostitution and drugs by predatory pimps. Certainly that did happen, and the idea of such a horrible thing was a potent fund-raiser. Just take a look at the cover of Ritter's short book Sometimes God Has a Kid's Face, thousands of copies of which were mailed, unsollicited to potential donors. But the majority of these children were minority teens, often from tough backgrounds. They certainly needed lots of help, but their pictures didn't bring in the bucks as well.

Ritter was criticized on several other accounts. The very idea of locating an actual shelter for kids in the midst of a drug and crime-ridden area struck some social workers as akin to putting a hen house right by a den of foxes. It was not a good environment for growth and healing! The idea of having the kids stay in a shelter where the only requirement was a behavioral code was also criticized by those who believed that there needed to be more emphasis upon heavy-duty counseling and other treatment services; it was seen as treating the symptoms instead of the underlying causes of a child's problem. Ritter was also known as something of an ego maniac. One social worker I knew who worked at CH described him as wanting the be "The first person canonized while still alive." I am also told that the chapel at one CH facility had a stained glass window containing Ritter's image.

Staff at CH often complained to me of poor pay and an administration that did not respect them. Many people volunteered there, and the bosses considered them somehow more worthy than those who could not afford the luxury of working for nothing.

Still, Covenant House became a true NYC institution. Conservatives loved it because it was what we now call "faith-based" and stressed abstinence. And everyone admired the idea of doing something, anything, to help the street kids.

Just What Were the Bee-Gees Singing?!

A lot of us hated the squeaky voices from the "Saturday Night Fever" soundtrack. But, love 'em or hate 'em, the Bee Gees's disco tunes were part of our collective culture during the Seventies, even though nobody seemed to know what they were actually saying.

Here are the lyrics from probably the most (in)famous of SNF tunes, "Staying Alive." (The title seems to say something about people's priorities during the decade).

Well, you can tell by the way I use my walk,
I'm a woman's man: no time to talk.
Music loud and women warm, I've been kicked around
since I was born.
And now it's all right. It's OK.
And you may look the other way.
We can try to understand
the New York Times' effect on man.

Whether you're a brother or whether you're a mother,
you're stayin' alive, stayin' alive.
Feel the city breakin' and everybody shakin',
and we're stayin' alive, stayin' alive.
Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin' alive, stayin' alive.
Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin' alive.

Well now, I get low and I get high,
and if I can't get either, I really try.
Got the wings of heaven on my shoes.
I'm a dancin' man and I just can't lose.
You know it's all right. It's OK.
I'll live to see another day.
We can try to understand
the New York Times' effect on man.

Whether you're a brother or whether you're a mother,
you're stayin' alive, stayin' alive.
Feel the city breakin' and everybody shakin',
and we're stayin' alive, stayin' alive.
Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin' alive, stayin' alive.
Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin' alive.

Life goin' nowhere. Somebody help me.
Somebody help me, yeah.
Life goin' nowhere. Somebody help me.
Somebody help me, yeah. Stayin' alive.

Well, you can tell by the way I use my walk,
I'm a woman's man: no time to talk.
Music loud and women warm,
I've been kicked around since I was born.
And now it's all right. It's OK.
And you may look the other way.
We can try to understand
the New York Times' effect on man.

Whether you're a brother or whether you're a mother,
you're stayin' alive, stayin' alive.
Feel the city breakin' and everybody shakin',
and we're stayin' alive, stayin' alive.
Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin' alive, stayin' alive.
Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin' alive.

Life goin' nowhere. Somebody help me.
Somebody help me, yeah.
Life goin' nowhere. Somebody help me, yeah.
I'm stayin' alive.

Cradle to Grave: Welfare In the 1970s

Those on all sides of the welfare reform debate should have seen a New York City "Income Maintenance" office back in the 1970s.

NYC inherited a welfare mess that had been decades in the making. But which really picked up during the Sixties, when people came here in droves to take advantage of public assistance benefits. New York State's constitution mandates that benefits be paid to needy residents. While other states offered only what the Feds mandated (and in the case of able-bodied adults, there was no mandate to give anything) New York City essentially had to take whoever came here and met the requirements. Furthermore, the Aid to Dependent Children program, which was tacked onto the Social Security Act as a stopgap measure to look after people with small kids who didn't qualify for other benefits, required payments to just about anyone who claimed their kids' father deserted them.

At the same time, other states saw this as a golden opportunity to get rid of their poor people. By making their own welfare laws super-restrictive, they all but insured that some would come to places like New York. The system became over-burdened, and some of us can remember the scandal during the 1960s when the City was so starved for space to put welfare families that they put some in the Waldorf!

A strange coalition of liberals and conservatives helped things get bad. To the liberals, welfare was a right. And if people on welfare didn't find jobs or had kids they couldn't support, well, that was Society's fault. At the same time, the Nixon administration figured out that it was actually cheaper to just keep people on public assistance than to try and get them back on their feet. Processing welfare claims is cheap, and computerization helped the process along. Providing child care, assessing needs, investigating fraud and other measures required time, personnel and money.

Soon a whole Welfare lifestyle seemed to develop. The Housing Authority's "project" apartments, which at one time required a tenant to have references and a job, became more and more dominated by public assistance recipients. Working families provide stability. Without them, some of the projects turned into hell holes. At the same time, private and public universities rushed to take advantage of liberal grant programs intended to "train" the new poor, who were happy to go along, because being in training helped guarantee continued receipt of benefits. I worked at one such college. It was a joke. Many students would come to class only a few times a semester, and would often be seen outside, getting stoned. They kept getting incomplete grades, and Welfare kept paying them. I have met people whose entitled work careers have consisted of nothing but a series of special employment programs. There were also "Medicaid Mills" sprouting up all over town - dubious medical practices which catered to recipients of the free medical care to which welfare recipients were entitled.

Once a welfare mother's children reached maturity, there was no guarantee that she would be self-sufficient. She often had few marketable skills. But, if she could produce a doctor's note (and everyone knows that some doctors will put anything on paper) saying she could not work, benefits could continue. Meanwhile, single males and females could get unlimited assistance if they made a half-assed effort to act like they were looking for work, or were enrolled in yet another training program.

To be honest, there were many stereotypes of welfare recipients that were not accurate. The commonest was the "welfare Cadillac." Everyone claimed to see welfare recipients driving up to pick up their checks in Caddys. I never did. But, like most urban legends, it took off, based upon what people wanted to believe.

Welfare benefits were also anything but generous. The basic grant for one person in the late 70s was $262.10 a month. Still, it was more than what other states paid. Besides, cheating welfare was so easy. The City rarely verified anything.