Fort Street fix is The city's efforts to move the homeless population out of Fort Street Mall have left some people looking for shelter and others just looking for a place to sit.
a flop to homeless
The mall's decision to remove
benches does not sit well
with the local transientsBy Treena Shapiro
tshapiro@starbulletin.comMany in downtown's transient population have joined others living at a makeshift camp at the bottom of River Street, near Nimitz Highway.
But that leads to another headache: Every day, police officers tell the people to move themselves and their belongings from the area, according to a man who identified himself as "Jimmy."
In the downtown area, however, there is nowhere else to go, he said, and people are trying to catch a little sleep anywhere they can get covering overhead. "It's been cold lately," Jimmy said. "The rain doesn't help."
However, as his friend Jack pointed out, in between getting chased from place to place, "sometimes you hardly even get sleep."
Last week, the city temporarily removed all the benches from Fort Street Mall between Hotel and Beretania streets in response to requests from Hawaii Pacific University and the business community, said city spokeswoman Carol Costa.
"Fort Street Mall is the heart of our downtown area, and there are 50,000 people in the downtown area," Costa said. "We need to make this location clean and safe for our downtown residents and workers," she said.
Police are also enforcing a law that prohibits people from being in the mall between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., she said. Like the city parks, the mall is closed to the public at night. "Parks and malls are not for sleeping," Costa said. "That's not their purpose."
One man, who declined to give his name, said that moving the benches out was pointless, since people had been prohibited from sleeping in the mall at night anyway, and he had a $75 ticket to prove it. He said he had been issued the ticket just a few minutes after the mall closed for the night. "You get a ticket if you're here one minute after 10," he said.
He sat on a wall at Fort Street Mall yesterday that was clearly labeled "private property, no loitering" to eat his lunch because there was nowhere else to sit. "It's rude, degrading," he said.
He was one of about a dozen people sitting on the wall. The only other place for Don Pfeifer of Foster Village to sit and do his crossword puzzle would have been on a cement planter around a tree, where there was a danger of pigeon droppings.
However, he pointed out that periodically a security guard came around telling them to get off the wall. "We're only sitting here because there's no benches," he told the guard.
"People make out like Fort Street Mall is a drive-through drugstore, and it's not," said Pfeifer.
Only a small percentage of the people who hang out at Fort Street Mall are homeless or drunk, said David Whang, 59, who lives on School Street. "They're mostly from somewhere else. The older guys come down here to talk story with their friends."
"I usually bring my daughters and come and feed the birds and eat here," said Debra Campbell, 33. "Now they have all these 'private property, no loitering' signs."
While she said she does not mind the alcoholics being cleared from the area, she would like to see the benches back soon.
City & County of Honolulu
