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Vera Coley said she couldn't believe the good news that spread quickly through the lobby of the Martinique welfare hotel on West 32nd Street late last week: The city was going to shut down its operations there and find her and the rest of the 442 homeless families there other places to live by the end of this year.
"I can't tell you how happy I am today," said Coley, 42, the mother of 10 - five of whom live with her in the squalid building just off Herald Square. "This place is a hellhole. I'm glad they're shutting it down."
On Wednesday, city officials announced that the Martinique would be shut down; or, in the words of Alberta Fuentes, director of the Mayor's Office for the Homeless, "replaced to give homeless families a decent place to live and a chance to patch their lives together." Later she said that the city hoped to do the same at the 10 largest welfare hotels and that the Martinique was first on the list because "it is a symbol of despair."
It is that, indeed. The Martinique is a building that reeks of despair and of broken dreams. It is often called a symbol of the city's inability to deal with the homeless population. It is one of the oldest of the welfare hotels and is second in size only to the Prince George hotel on East 29th Street.
But what lends an added poignancy to the sad story of the Martinique is that it is home - if you can imagine that a place this...