Inside a Once-Grand Building That Housed the Vulnerable for a Century

You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.Credit...Sara Hylton for The New York TimesInside a Once-Grand Building That Housed the Vulnerable for a CenturyA shelter for men near Bellevue Hospital is closing. It is a symbol of an approach to homelessness that the Mamdani administration hopes to leave behind.Credit...Sara Hylton for The New York TimesSupported bySKIP ADVERTISEMENTListen · 12:51 min Share full article14By Elizabeth A. HarrisApril 27, 2026Updated 12:43 p.m. ETThe hulking brick building on 30th Street and First Avenue in Manhattan was conceived with the best of intentions. Proposed by an “alienist,” as psychiatrists used to be called, who believed his patients deserved the best, it was built nearly 100 years ago as the Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital, with a light-filled auditorium, Juliet balconies and open views of the East River.By the mid-1980s, however, the building had become a homeless shelter for single men, notorious as a troubled and often dangerous place, where an inspector once found a shard of glass from a broken window hanging over a dormitory bed and feces smeared across a wall.Long a way station for New York City’s most vulnerable and desperate, the 30th Street Shelter and Intake Center is shutting down, after an announcement last month by Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration.The men who were staying there have already been transferred to other shelters. Its operations as a center where people go to be assigned a bed elsewhere were supposed to end this week, though those plans have been put on hold because of a lawsuit.The shifting history of the shelter offers a window into the city’s approach to homelessness over the past 40 years, what the Mamdani administration hopes to move away from and how grueling and slow that process can be.The city says the building, long known informally as the Bellevue shelter, is in such disrepair that it is unsafe. There are nets suspended over its limestone cornices and balconies to keep them from plunging to the ground.<div class="css-7axq9l" data-testid="optimistic-truncator-noscript"><svg width="24" height="24" viewBox="0 0 24 24" aria-hidden="true" class="css-1b5b8u1" data-tpl="i"><path fill="currentColor" fill-rule="evenodd" d="M2.5 12a9.5 9.5 0 1 1 19 0 9.5 9.5 0 0 1-19 0Zm8.5 1.75v-7.5h2v7.5h-2Zm0 2v2h2v-2h-2Z" clip-rule="evenodd"></path></svg><div data-testid="optimistic-truncator-noscript-message" class="css-6yo1no"><p class="css-3kpklk" data-tpl="t">We are having trouble retrieving the article content.</p><p class="css-3kpklk" data-tpl="t">Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.</p></div></div>Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.Related ContentAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT

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