Morning Read 2: Hyde vs. Homeless
I’ve never done a double Morning Read — and certainly never two hits on the same author — but I stumbled across another Will Doolittle essay in the Post Star that’s worth a read.
David Setford, director of The Hyde Collection art museum, criticized the plan to move the Open Door Soup Kitchen, along with a homeless shelter, into the Glens Falls Home located across Warren Street from the museum.
“Just like any other business, we would be concerned about how that might affect our future. We bring 35,000 visitors a year to Warren Street,” he said.
Is The Hyde “just like any other business”?
Then, at the recent Planning Board meeting where the soup kitchen’s plan was rejected, Alan Redeker, chairman of the museum’s board, said a shelter could discourage other museums from lending art to The Hyde.
Read the full essay here. And hat tip to the Adirondack Almanack, which noticed Doolittle’s essay first.
Tags: adirondacks
The Hyde is assuming that a homeless person is a criminal. That is an assumption that many people make. The truth of the matter is that homeless people are just people in need. This is truly a sad state of affairs.
The issue is how it would be managed.
The shelter itself from my experience could be done without most people even knowing it was a shelter.
The issue would be if combined with the food, you would have large numbers of people hanging around outside. I don’t know the size and how this particular shelter is managed; it could be just fine.
I do think we have to have some sympathy for the position of the museum and neighbors. The question I think would be what has been the experience of current neighbors of the shelter?
To me this is just more proof the elite have their own set of rules.
For those of you who haven’t heard anything about this previously the Open Door soup kitchen has operated for many years on South Street in GF on the ground floor of the Madden Hotel which is basically a flop house.
For many years politicians and business people have been trying to get the kind of people who live in flop houses and eat at soup kitchens away from South Street as they want to gentrify the neighborhood. Local leaders have secured millions in federal funds to improve the area — where, coincidentally, local business people have begun renovating long-underused buildings.
Recently Glens Falls National bank bought the Madden Hotel for $650,000, with $150,000 of the purchase price provided by the local EDC, and told the soup kitchen to leave by October 1.
To me almost everyone looks bad in this deal. Nobody wants “those people” in their back yard. We, the taxpayers, have given the Bank –which is doing just fine, thank you– a whole bunch of money to toss the poorest, most needy among us out on their ear in the short months before winter.
Everyone should be ashamed but I believe many are gloating inside that they have found a way to finally get “that element” off of South Street. The Hyde is no different than the Bank.
There is a solution. Since GFN Bank received taxpayer money to make this deal the bank should either incorporate the soup kitchen in its new addition — which, by the way the bank says it has no plans for as yet — or it should spend $150,000 in renovating another building for use by the soup kitchen.
Just a bunch of snobs being snobs.
I guess we can now call the Hyde the Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde museum.
We should keep the impoverished out of sight. It makes good, god-fearing, hard-working Americans nervous.
I’m not sure the “elitist” museum director has any concentrated power to determine the outcome of this situation. As for “rules” he is just exercising his first amendment rights. Of course, he has that right, but he should be “more sensitive”. Or is it the Soup Kitchen that should be “more sensitive” – I get confused.
Another fine example of the bad name that we elitists can get from the mis-guided comments of other.
I agree with Knucklehead that sounds like a good solution.
South Street, “The Street of Dreams” they used to call it. Best darn hot dogs in the world at the Nu-Way Lunch, aka-Dirty Johns, now gone. They just don’t taste the same up in Queensbury.
I’m sorry, but if the homeless bother the elite museum crowd in GF that’s just too bad. Go down to the larger cities and you can see the crackheads and homeless just outside their museums. Maybe it’ll bring some sophistication to the Falls to have a few winos artfully placed in the perfect spot, like they way they do furniture, I forget the Japanese term. Feng Sheua or something like that. Life imitating art imitating life.
Dang, I should be able to get grant for that idea….