New York, N.Y.
A Habitat-Style Homecoming

HFH New York City's major Jimmy Carter Work Project site was at 233 W. 134th St. in Harlem.  Volunteers and homeowners renovated 10 units in the building in one week.

Linda Fuller looked at the rich brocade curtains and chandeliers in the Empire Room at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. The room was filled with hundreds of guests for a reception honoring major donors for the 2000 Jimmy Carter Work Project and HFH New York City. But in her mind, she went back to the mid-1960s, and she was sharing an evening out with Millard. They were the picture of a successful couple on their way up the corporate ladder.

“We were having dinner in this room 38 years ago,” she told the guests at the reception. “Millard was working as a lawyer and making money hand over fist. Little did I know then that we’d be back in New York City for such an event as this.”



Then, in 1984, former President Jimmy Carter was in the Big Apple and went for a jog. He saw how hard volunteers for Habitat for Humanity —founded by the Fullers in 1976—were struggling to renovate a building on the Lower East Side. Not even realizing he was speaking out loud, he said that he and Rosalynn should come up and give them a hand. Someone told Millard Fuller, who took him up on the suggestion.

“I thought we’d get six volunteers,” President Carter says. “We got 42. In Philadelphia in 1988, we got more than 10,000. In the Philippines (where 14,000 volunteers joined efforts in 1999), one family we worked alongside had been living in an abandoned septic tank for six years. And all of it started in New York City.”

Roland Lewis, executive director of HFH-NYC, says the years before the first Jimmy Carter Work Project in 1984 were some of the worst in the city’s history, a devastating decade that had seen the city sink into fiscal crisis.

“In the late ’70s, the Bronx was burning,” he says. “It was a war zone. Landlords burned their buildings for the insurance and there was a general decline in the city...I’m a native New Yorker and I’d go just about anywhere, but I wouldn’t go to the Lower East Side. It was desolation. It was like walking into a Mad Max movie.”

The arrival of the former president and his wife, leading a small band of volunteers in an effort to fix up one run-down building was “that little spark” the city needed to begin to change its thinking, Lewis believes.

“Shortly after that, Mayor Edward Koch announced an investment of $5 million in housing.”

When it became clear that the 100,000th Habitat house worldwide would be built in 2000, it made sense to include it in the momentum of the Jimmy Carter Work Project and to bring the JCWP back to New York City. This time, volunteers rehabbed one 10-unit apartment building in Harlem, started work on a second 10-unit building and built 12 new rowhouses in Brooklyn.

The 2,300 volunteers came from as close as down the block and as far away as the Netherlands. There were celebrities and scientists, engineers, teachers, architects, union workers, admitted “Habitat junkies” and first-time volunteers. For out-of-town volunteers, the week helped shatter misconceptions about everything from rude New Yorkers to the dangers of Harlem to risky subways. Participating in the New York tradition of sitting on the stoop at the end of the day, volunteers were regularly approached by residents of the community, who wanted nothing more than to say, “Thank you.”

More than half the volunteers, though, came from a local coalition of 150 churches, synagogues and mosques that joined hands to raise nearly $2 million for the project. The Rev. Tom Tewell, senior pastor of Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, chaired the effort, calling it “an adventure with God.”

“It’s not just interfaith—it’s interracial and all social strata,” Lewis says of the coalition. “There’s a desire to come together. We put a human face on a terrible problem.”

In New York, the face of substandard housing is quite different than in many parts of the country. Economic boom times and a white-hot real estate market have made affordable housing virtually un-available for hundreds of thousands of families; the median price of a two-bedroom condominium in Manhattan is $400,000.

One of the faces of the JCWP in New York City was Nigel Baynes, whose parents Colin and Mercedes Baynes worked with the Carters on the renovation of their first-floor apartment on W. 134th St. in Harlem. After 5-year-old Nigel witnessed two shootings committed by teenagers who hung out in front of their building, Mercedes and Colin were desperate to find a better environment for their young son.

At closing ceremonies, Mercedes Baynes brought the volunteers to tears, even as her own emotion filled her voice. “As a little girl growing up, all I ever wanted was a family and house filled with love,” she said. “As I got older, the chance of owning a home seemed impossible. Thanks to Habitat and the unselfishness of everyday people, we have fulfilled a dream. This is ours.”

The closing ceremonies gave volunteers, homeowners and community residents a chance to come together once again.

Then, after the presentation of their keys, the homeowners at 233 W. 134th St. each went to their new homes. Starting from the top floor, they each lit a candle in the front window, until 10 twinkling lights split the darkness.


--Pat Curry





Reprinted from Habitat World Magazine, December 2000/January 2001.
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©2000 Habitat for Humanity International