She was in a corner of Grand Central station, right beneath the Apple Store, hidden away in plain sight, packing her things into two shopping carts as commuters made their way to their trains around her. She said her name was “Ada” and that she was from Cuba and that she didn’t want her photo taken. She’s one of the dozens of homeless people who choose to stay in Grand Central instead of going to shelters.
She’s been in New York for four years and had been in the United States for over thirty. When I asked her what brought her to New York, she talked about a claim she’d made against the government, about boxes with her papers burned, about her property forcibly taken away by dark forces, about appealing to Kofi Annan at the UN.
Her incoherence and talk of conspiracies led me to believe that she was a paranoid schizophrenic. In other words, she seemed to be one of the 25% of homeless people that were severely mentally ill. I’m not a professional, of course, so my “diagnosis” can’t be taken seriously. But I do know this: Ada does not belong in the streets–or in Grand Central.