4:30
It was a long winter for the handful of Pittsfielders living in the makeshift village tucked into the woods of Springside Park.
“Oh, it was brutal, said Paul. I ll give you that much, it was wicked brutal.”
Paul is one of the five people now calling the 240 acre park just north of downtown home. They opted to live outside in the spring of 2020 rather than face what they considered threatening conditions in city shelters when the COVID-19 pandemic began.
“Just living in that cold, negative degree weather all the time, he told WAMC. Snow you have to dump off. No, nobody helped us. Imagine getting up at 4 o clock or 3 o clock or even earlier every morning to get the tent to get, just get, knock snow off your tent, you know, because you re afraid it s going to collapse on top and you freeze to death. You know? That s what these people don t understand. We don t have it easy out of here. They think we have an easy out here. We don t.”
11:28
Emails obtained by WAMC News using the Freedom of Information Act show how the city of Pittsfield, Massachusetts developed a strategy to remove unhoused people from public parks in fall 2020 – and why the unfinished plan was scrapped just before it was set to go into effect.
The chaos of 2020 caused some of Pittsfield’s unhoused population to choose to live in homemade encampments in city parks rather than risk contracting COVID-19 in city shelters. Michele Mathews, a city resident living rough in Pittsfield, says the shelters posed other threats as well:
“The staff, albeit really nice people, some of them were sicker than us, she told WAMC. Some of them approached females, you know, for money. And I found a man in my bed. And my husband, 25 years legally married, couldn t even sleep on the same side of the building as me, but other men could in the same corridor as us.”
“Our next facility after that will be Mount Greylock on the 2nd of January, followed by Williamstown Commons on the 4th, and then we have North Adams and Hillcrest Commons on the 8th, she said.
At the county’s largest hospital – Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield – nurses feuded with management over mask policy, with RNs like Mark Brodeur insisting the company supply all frontline workers with the then-scarce N95 masks as potential COVID-19 exposures ran rampant through the staff.
“Since a patient could have been exposed and shedding the virus without any symptoms, at this point in order to reduce the spread it’s important to assume that every single patient you have contact with has the coronavirus in order just to flatten that curve and ensure that the spread is slowed down as much as possible so that all of our resources aren’t overwhelmed at one time,” he told WAMC.