Under the protective cover of 14 blankets, “Q,” as much of a name as he would give, dozed through the weekend of record cold temperatures on Lower Wacker Drive in downtown Chicago.
He was a short sprint from the icy mosaic that covered the Chicago River, and he was not concerned at all about the cold.
“I’ll be asleep, so it doesn’t matter,” he said Saturday. “I’d rather sleep in here than in the shelters.”
“Q” said he would rather live by his schedule than the shelter’s and that he was turned off by the preaching that some of them offer.
Throughout the city, authorities were facing a similar dilemma: How do you help people who don’t want your help? And it wasn’t only the homeless.
Some senior citizens and others contacted by city officials and social workers were unwilling to leave their unheated apartments.
The issue is especially delicate given last summer’s heat wave that left 733 Chicagoans dead, many of them senior citizens who lived alone.
The heat-related deaths raised questions about the city’s response to the crisis and also the government’s role in protecting citizens from natural events, such as heat waves.
The reality is that some people just want to be left alone, like 31-year-old Derrick Robertson, who was trying to keep warm close to “Q.”
He was clad in layers of clothes and lying atop a makeshift platform of carpet and foam padding and an open coat. “I’m warm,” he said softly as he peered out from under three heavy blankets.
“I just stay out here. I’m OK.”
At least three people are believed to have died as a result of the weather–and that’s frustrating to city officials.
Jim Williams, spokesman for Mayor Richard Daley, said people have to want to accept help.
“Homeless people have to be willing to come out of the cold. . . . If a senior citizen has no heat in an apartment, they should go to a warming center. We can’t force them to seek help.”
Late Friday, Chicago’s low of 16 degrees below zero broke a record for the date. The daytime temperature had climbed to a high of just 6 below, breaking a record for coldest high temperature ever on Feb. 2. The previous record was set 91 years ago.
At 7 a.m. Saturday, the windchill temperature reached a bracing 52 degrees below zero. With its high of minus 5 degrees, Saturday set another record, displacing another–2 degrees–set in 1970.
Even though some people are rejecting help, Daley said Saturday that it is important for city workers, community members, churches, neighbors and families to look out for each other.
“This is not strictly a city employee effort,” Daley said at a news conference. “It’s the effort of all citizens.”
Chicago Police Supt. Matt Rodriguez said police contacted 4,995 senior citizens by telephone and personally checked on 1,053 others they could not reach by telephone.
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An official of the city Department of Human Services said 660 shelter beds remained available at various sites in the city. Only eight people remained on Lower Wacker’s shipping docks overnight.
By Saturday afternoon, the Chicago Health Department officially attributed one death to the cold. Two other deaths were still under investigation.
The frozen body of an unidentified man was found Thursday in a boxcar in a railyard at 126th Street and Torrence Avenue.
Another body, that of Archie Yeck, 78, of the 6800 block of South Kostner Avenue, also was found Thursday in his basement apartment.
And the third body, that of Wladyslawa Cukiernik, 88, of the 1400 block of West Huron Street, was found in her apartment. The latter two victims reportedly had turned their heat off to save money, according to a Health Department spokeswoman. Cukiernik’s death officially was attributed to the weather.
Senior citizens have comprised about a third of the 5,000 or so people each night during the cold wave in the city’s temporary shelters, or warming centers.
But like “Q” and Robertson, some people say they’re fine where they are.
Irma Miller is among them. On Friday, she didn’t want to leave her West Side home, even though she didn’t have heat and frost caked her windows.
“I don’t want to go to nobody’s shelter,” said Miller, 72. “I’d rather stay here in the cold than leave my house and go to somebody’s shelter.”
Miller, who lives with her daughter, Michelle, three grandchildren and a nephew, said she had been without heat for nearly a year.
It was cut off because, when her husband died two years ago, she decided the gas bills could wait until she paid for his funeral. Now, with gas bills exceeding $2,000, she said the gas company won’t even let her pay on an installment plan.
But Miller insisted that the cold wasn’t too bad, since she had two small electric space heaters warming her cramped living quarters.
“It’s really at night when it gets bad,” said Michelle Miller, 26. “It’s not that bad during the day.”
But it was bad enough Friday that Velma Brandt, a crisis intervention worker for the Department of Human Services, told the Millers that they had to leave.
“We can’t make you go anywhere, but we are asking you to please go to a shelter,” Brandt pleaded. “I’m no electrical expert, but it doesn’t look safe here at all to me. The way this is set up is exactly what causes fires.
Later, Brandt said: “It’s really frustrating because you know why people don’t want to leave their homes. But you can’t make them go.
“This is clearly a family in crisis that needs to be out of here. The whole family is in danger here.”
Irma Miller initially stood firm, saying her home in the 500 block of North Long Avenue had already been burglarized once, and she wasn’t about to let it happen again.
She later promised that the family would leave that evening to stay with a son who lives in Maywood, though Brandt was skeptical.
“Just in case, I’m going to call you later to see how you’re coming,” Brandt told Miller. “I’m determined to see you staying someplace safe and warm tonight.”
On the South Side on Friday, Police Officer Charles Radcliffe said many senior citizens refuse to leave unheated homes for fear the homes will be burglarized in their absence. Others would rather be cold in their own homes than warm in a sterile and unfamiliar warming center.
The same phenomenon occurred last summer, when senior citizens in his district died because of the scorching heat, he said.
“Some of these people have lived here 20, 30 or 40 years,” he said. “It’s difficult to get them out. You’ve got to use a lot of time and patience.”
On Friday, Radcliffe peered into a cellar door of a two-story frame house on South Wabash Avenue and discovered the reason that the heat doesn’t work. The furnace and basement floor were coated with two inches of ice.
The building’s owner, Rose Fairnot, 73, said she replaced the furnace in the fall, but it was only on for a few weeks before the pipes froze and shut it down.
“It’s rough,” Fairnot said. “We haven’t had any heat this winter.”
Radcliffe said there is little the city can do, since Fairnot owns the building. But Fairnot has made do: She simply moved in with a neighbor who has heat. “I come over here just about every day,” she said, nestled in her neighbor’s living room.