Belle Harbor Manor Residence Aid
Since Superstorm Sandy made its way up the eastern
seaboard leaving devastation in its wake, the Armory (built in 1893 and now a
YMCA) has been a refuge for upwards of 500 evacuees from Far Rockaway, one of
New York City's hardest hit areas. Housing primarily lower-income seniors,
plucked from flood-ravaged areas in pitch blackness by National Guardsmen and
Marines, the space has been transformed into a disaster relief center with long
food lines, no shower facilities and scared citizens seeking solace under
specially embroidered City of New York blankets.
Residents of Belle Harbor Manor, a 162 member assisted-living facility were decimated by flooding and subsequent looting that occurred in the neighborhood of Far Rockaway, Queens, following the storm. They now reside in the Park Slope Armory shelter.
Most of these senior evacuees are surviving through donations and the kindness of strangers. Many of them, if not all of them, evacuated in the dark of night without their wallets, pocketbooks, or anyway to communicate with loved ones or care for basic needs on their own.
This funding drive's goal is to raise $100 for each senior within the next week to help alleviate the stresses of being suddenly homeless, looted, and terrorized by this natural disaster.
Every single cent raised will go directly to these seniors.
But the members of this makeshift community who came
with little more than the clothes on their backs are doing what they can to
make the best of a truly unfortunate situation. Donald Pascale, a 65-year-old
former pizza pie-maker from Queens who came to America from Italy aboard the SS
Andrea Doria (which infamously sank off of the coast of Nantucket in 1956)
employed the spirit of these seniors.
"If I could survive the sinking of the Andrea Doria,
I can survive this," says Pascale. One of the few hundred residents at Belle
Harbor Manor, an assisted living facility in Queens located just one block from
the ocean, Pascale and his friends Thomas Reilly, Howard Kucine and Robert
Rosenberg make up the "Fearless Foursome," a nickname that's been around since they
started rooming together.
"The employees, they didn't tell us anything [about
how to evacuate]," says Thomas Reilly, one of the Foursome and retired farmer
from upstate New York. "Howard and Robert live on the first floor. When the
Marines came we thought they were going to help us get out, but they were busy
trying to get the wheelchairs through the mud. So Robert [who is less than five-feet
tall] had to learn to swim through our living room. Nah, just kidding, we
carried him out."
