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Last Updated: Aug 10th, 2006 - 15:58:39 |
Super Bowl brings shelter for homeless
Down on the riverfront in Jacksonville, Fla., a beautiful woman with blond hair and an older man in a blue blazer step off a $5 million yacht.
They walk across the street to a high-rise hotel, where the rooms are going for $500 a night and the scalpers are working the lobby, selling Super Bowl tickets for $3,000 apiece.
Meanwhile, a couple miles away, Tom, a drug addict from Roanoke, Va., is standing in the cold rain outside a homeless shelter with an old cowboy boot on one foot, a discarded tennis shoe on the other.
"If I had a Super Bowl ticket, I'd sell it and buy myself a good pair of waterproof boots," Tom says, shaking his head and taking a drag from a cigarette butt he picked up off the street.
"But they don't want me anywhere near the Super Bowl. They don't want the undesirables mingling with the beautiful people."
Welcome to the Super Bowl homeless shelter -- a temporary sanctuary for the down-and-out while the uppercrust invades Jacksonville. The shelter, in an old shuddered-up brick building, is only open for the two weeks leading up to the Super Bowl.
Although Jacksonville officials claim this impermanent haven is here for the good of the homeless, is there any question it is also for the image of the city? When you spend $3 million to illuminate the bridges for the Super Bowl, you don't want beggars and bag ladies sleeping under them, right?
"We've been accused of trying to get the homeless out of sight during Super Bowl week," says Wanda Lanier, executive director of the Homeless Coalition of Jacksonville, "but that's not our intention at all. "These people live on the streets of downtown, and their home is being taken away from them by 100,000 people who are coming here to party. That's a frightening situation for these people, some of who are mentally ill. We're just trying to provide them a safe refuge, someplace to go."
Someplace nearby, but yet far, far away from the aura of the Super Bowl. We can debate the city's purity of intentions all we want, but those sleeping on mats inside the shelter don't really care. They just want to come in out of the rain -- even if it is for just two weeks.
If the end result of all this Super Bowl hype and hoopla is that they get a temporary home and a glint of hope, they're OK with that. There may not be any chilled Cristal Champagne here as this Super Bowl get-together, but there is something just as valuable: A hot shower.
"This place has been a godsend," says Michael, an ex-con from New Orleans. "Sometimes, you just need a place to clean up and warm up so you can sort out your life."
Says James, a former postal worker who drank away his wife, his kids and his job: "I don't have any Super Bowl tickets, but I have a bed and some food. You can't ask for more than that."
Meanwhile, at a Super Bowl party the other night at the swanky Sawgrass Country Club, revelers were heard complaining because the boiled shrimp wasn't peeled and the line at the chocolate fondue fountain was too long.
If only they knew.
If only they knew that for the price of an elaborate fireworks display Wednesday night, Jacksonville could keep this homeless shelter open for two years instead of two weeks.
This place houses nearly 300 people and was packed to capacity on the day it opened. Makes you wonder.
Where were these people sleeping before?
Where will they sleep after?
"I just wish," James says, "they treated us this good when the Super Bowl wasn't in town."
---------------------------------------------------------MIKE BIANCHI is a sports columnist for the Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel.
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