Category: Voices from the Streets
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Central Square, Cambridge, MA
“The form of a city changes faster than the heart of a mortal.”– Baudelaire The streets teem with activity. There is a giant hole where the building filled with many small businesses, owned by individuals, flourished. There was a clothing store over 90 years old, a breakfast place where one whose pockets contained only a few…
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Childhood Realities
I’m 76 now and things look different to me. First of all, I don’t run up and down stairways anymore. I trudge the steps. When I do the laundry, I have to climb down 26 steps and then back up the same 26 steps. But that isn’t the major change. I have clear memories of…
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“They Were Locked In, We Were Locked Out”: A Story of Lockdown and Homelessness in Harvard Square
It was 22 March 2020. There were about 12 of us living in the shelter. Saturday morning was our last day there. We had no place to go. It would be my first day outside with nothing open, no restrooms, no place to sit and have a hot cup of tea, it really was hard…
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‘I Always Came Back’: A Story of Survival
“Hey, baby!” Linda Burston, with an illuminating smile and wide eyes, greets every woman who comes through the doors of Women’s Lunch Place. They always know when Linda is in the room; even among the clink clank of dishes being piled high, the scraping of metal fork against ceramic plate, the hum of conversation among dozens of…
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Holidays and Gray Hair
My birthday flew by, squashed between three holidays—Thanksgiving, Christmas/Chanukah and New Year’s Eve. While time was having its way with me, I had to go to the dermatologist to have various blemishes checked out. The older I get, the more I hate going to the doctor, even though, as my wife Mary Esther says, it’s…
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Indigenous People and Homelessness: a Distinct and Growing Reality
Photo by Paul Fleurent Carole Lévesque is a professor at the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS) who specialises in urbanization, culture and society. Over the course of two years, she headed a team of six researchers who studied the situation of homeless indigenous people in Montreal and Val-d’Or and wrote a report on…
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Labor Pains and Growth in Recovery
Spare Change News is proud to present the second installment of its new monthly feature, “In Their Own Words,” which highlights the work of writers who meet at Rosie’s Place. In late 2014, Rosie’s Place, a community center for Boston’s poor and homeless women, started a memoir workshop. The intention was to have the guests,…
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The Doomsday Clock
The Doomsday Clock is calculated by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. It first appeared in 1947 when it evolved into a magazine from a newsletter. The Doomsday Clock symbolizes the urgency of nuclear and other dangers, as determined by the broader scientific community, which is trying to communicate the level of danger to the…