Grand Central Winter

July 1, 2003
"In New York City," writes the author, "there are three centers for people living on the street: Central Park, Grand Central Terminal, and Central Booking." And in this candid, sad, yet upbeat memoir we visit them all. Stringer once co-owned a graphic-design company, but with the death of his partner and his substance abuse found himself evicted from his apartment and camping in Grand Central Terminal. We see what life is like on the street and how the homeless search for shoes in a bureaucratic city agency. In one shelter we see hams, turkeys and other roasts going into the kitchen, but only fried salami is served. We witness homeless being rousted by cops for criminal trespass for sleeping in Grand Central, then learn that often the police do this only at the end of their shifts in order to collect overtime. The author relates the embarrassment of meeting an old business colleague while collecting cans for their five-cent redemption fee; how he rescued a coked-up businessman from muggers; and how the authorities ruthlessly cracked down on the homeless to move them out of Grand Central. Street News, the newspaper of the homeless, helps get him back on his feet, first by selling it, then by editing and writing for it. From stories about flim-flamming clerics prying on the homeless, to the streetwise Romeo who wants to make the prostitute mother of his child an "honest woman" ("I can't believe it, even charged me to go to bed with her on our honeymoon night"), to the manipulations of being on the Geraldo show, Stringer possesses a sharp eye for the street and the rich, sagacious talent of a storyteller.

July 1, 1998
Stringer went from running a successful graphic design business to living on the streets by way of the crack pipe, a journey he chronicles with gruff insouciance. Too honest for polemics or mawkishness, he has written a unique and incisive memoir of street life that neatly eviscerates all stereotypical images of the homeless. For Stringer, "living on the streets was not an insurmountable inconvenience," and he succinctly sums up the art of living in public and the routines of shelters, police stations, jails, and courts in anecdotes as powerful as short stories. He collects and redeems cans and bottles, survives various confrontations, holes up in the bowels of Grand Central Station, and discovers his facility with words after casually putting the pencil he'd been using to scrape resin out of his pipe to the use for which it was intended. Astonished to find that writing provided as good a rush as crack, he kept at it, and this time his predilection for addiction paid off. Stringer's crisp detail, straight-no-chaser wit, and uncompromising frankness are as bracing as his subject is significant. ((Reviewed July 1998))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1998, American Library Association.)

June 15, 1998
This autobiographical account of homelessness and crack addiction rambles engagingly among the key locations of New York City's Grand Central Station, Central Park, and Central Booking. Written by a former editor and columnist for Street News, a newspaper produced by New York City's homeless, the book gives full humanity to its troubled characters and homes in on the motivations, strategies, and relationships of people surviving on the streets. The power of each discrete narrative compensates for a disjointed overall structure. The biggest gap is a lack of attention to the dynamics of Stringer's transition to sobriety. In pivoting the center of morality away from the world of "working stiffs," Stringer challenges the taken-for-granted perspective on the problems of urban poverty. Highly recommended for public and academic libraries.--Paula Dempsey, DePaul Univ. Lib., Chicago