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The squeegee man had wine for breakfast, which isn't all that strange if you happen to live at Broadway-Lafayette. But that is where he lived, and that is what he had.
In all the New York subway, no station is more like a flophouse than Broadway-Lafayette. It's a big, airy dump, right down the steps from Houston Street, an easy walk to the Bowery and what's left of the downtown missions - even with a good-sized load on.
The place is huge. This one subway station has enough hidden corners, secret passages, dead-end mezzanines and staircases to nowhere to accommodate half the homeless population of New York. And that's not even counting the huge network of tunnel caves, which the regular residents treat like private suites. There are nights the Broadway-Lafayette subway station looks like nothing so much as a grungy, used-mattress store.
Addicts, mental cases, petty and not-so-petty criminals, people who can't stand the rules at city shelters, people whose minds are too far gone to ever explain what they're doing down there - they all stake out little corners of Broadway-Lafayette. It's been that way since the early Reagan years, when homelessness burst out into the open. It will be that way tonight.
Today's story goes back a few years, to the spring of 1986. When you see what happened with this particular squeegee man, you'll understand why so...