Before I Find the Eggs

When a Proposed Shelter Moves Closer to Home, So Do the Questions About Safety, Dignity, and Process

Trader Joe’s has its own choreography.

The narrow aisles. The small collisions. The cart that stops too suddenly because someone has remembered they need cilantro. The little cardboard signs that try to sound handwritten and cheerful, even when the price has changed again.

I come here the way many Roosevelt Islanders do, by habit and by gravity. The island narrows your choices in certain practical ways, and the city offers them back to you in fluorescent light.

I was halfway between the bananas and the eggs when I saw her.

Not fully. Not at first. Just the outline.

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A woman in a neat winter coat, hair brushed back with care, hands gloved, posture upright in that particular way some women carry themselves when they have decided, long ago, that dignity is not negotiable.

For a moment, my mind did what it always does when it misses someone. It tried to manufacture a reunion.

My heart said: It’s her.

The pigeon lady.

She used to sit on the Roosevelt Island subway platform as if she had an appointment there. Not sprawled. Not collapsed. Seated. Proper. A woman with class, even in circumstances that were not kind. She fed the pigeons with a kind of ceremony. She never begged. She never performed her suffering. She simply existed, presentable, as though staying put together was the last thing she owned.

I watched her for years without ever learning her name.

That is one of the small embarrassments of city life. You can witness someone daily and still fail to truly meet them.

Then, one day, she was gone.

No announcement. No explanation. Just absence.

It is strange what you miss when it disappears. Not because it was pleasant, necessarily. But because it was part of the place, like a familiar crack in a sidewalk.

So when I saw this woman near the eggs, my mind filled in the missing years. I imagined a shelter that worked. A social worker who followed up. A case file that did not fall to the bottom of a pile. A bed that was safe enough to accept. A door that opened and did not slam shut.

I nudged my cart forward, quietly, like someone approaching a skittish animal.

And then she turned. It was not her. I reached for the eggs anyway.

The temperature

On February 2 at 6:30 pm, the Manhattan Community Board 8 Roosevelt Island Committee, the local advisory body that represents Roosevelt Island and the Upper East Side on land use, city services, and development matters, met over Zoom, chaired by Paul Krikler.

The recording opens with Paul in full focus, background blurred. The blur perfectly illustrated how much of public life remains just out of focus. Paul offered a quiet thumbs up to someone off screen before welcoming the community. It is a small, almost private gesture. Everything is working. The meeting can begin. RIOC updates. Library news. Community updates.

Then the discussion turned to unhoused neighbors on the subway platform.

Dan Sadlier of City Relief spoke first, laying out statistics about affordability and systems that cannot keep pace with rising rents. Sharon Pope-Marshall expressed compassion. Mia Haj asked what practical steps residents could take. Others nodded along, each careful to signal empathy, each careful to avoid sounding punitive. There was, at moments, an almost unspoken competition in grace.

And then Rick O’Conor said what many residents have said privately for months.

He read from an email describing drug activity on the platform. A daughter feeling followed. Safety concerns not theoretical but lived. It’s fascinating how quickly grace can curdle when someone mentions their child. Statistics are abstract. Daughters are not.

The temperature shifted.

A women’s shelter.

Not on Roosevelt Island. Not on our platform. But close enough to matter, close enough that the conversation came up at our Community Board 8 Roosevelt Island Committee meeting in February. Close enough that people on the island were already talking about it the way New Yorkers talk about things before they happen. With fragments. With rumors. With the anxious tone of people who do not trust official timelines.

The proposed site is 1114 First Avenue, near East 61st Street. A 200-bed facility, originally discussed one way, then revised, then discussed again. The kind of plan that can feel like it arrived already fully decided, even as officials insist public feedback is welcome.

No one dismissed compassion. No one dismissed safety. The tension remained intact, because it is intact in life. You can want help for someone and still not want your child cornered on a platform.

Dan said something that has stayed with me.

“We get weird when we treat people as problems to be solved.”

He meant it gently, like a hand on the shoulder. He was right. But I have also learned that the city gets weird when it treats residents as problems to be managed. The weirdness is different, but the result is the same.

Not near my groceries.

I thought about the neighborhood around 61st Street, where people have been shouting at meetings. Booing. Demanding not only safety, but control. I understand the impulse to protect your block. I also recognize the old, familiar reflex that appears the moment the city proposes something uncomfortable.

Not here.

Not near my children.

Not near my eggs.

If this women’s shelter at 1114 First Avenue is going to be built, I want it built with clarity. With honest communication. With a plan that is visible, not rumored. With a structure that does not rely on the public to guess.

Not because the neighborhood deserves special handling.

Because the women inside it will.

And because maybe, somewhere in this city, the pigeon lady is no longer feeding birds underground.

Maybe she is simply buying eggs, like everyone else.

If you found yourself nodding, worrying, or wondering as you read this, someone else will feel exactly the same way. Carry this conversation forward, share this with someone who should see it. That simple step keeps this work alive and strengthens our collective voice.