Gloves for The Needy: One Heart Warms Many Chilly Fingers

The old man sits on a bench off the Bowery, glazed eyes staring into a void, sipping on a tall can of Bud enclosed in a brown paper bag. “Twelve dollars and 50 cents,” he mutters. “Twelve dollars and 50 cents.” It is the sum total of one man’s life — the amount he says he has been trying to borrow from his family in Detroit to ensure his burial in potter’s field, and to escape from the death beyond death: “They send you to medical school and cut you up into little pieces — that’s not for me. No sir.”

/ This observation on oblivion was prompted by something as mundane as a pair of gloves, which had been proffered tentatively by a short man wearing a cap and an aging leather jacket, with a faded green cotton bag slung over his shoulder like an Irish peddler. For the past 24 years, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, Michael Greenberg, 60, has been taking his bag of gloves to Manhattan’s Bowery, long the haunt of the down-and-outs and the lost- weekenders, and wandering the gritty neighborhood looking for “the old, the reticent and the shy.” When he finds one, like the old man on the bench, he dangles a pair of gray or maroon woolen gloves and says, “Take them, please. They’re free. They’re a gift. No strings attached.” Then he shakes a trembling hand. This simple act of communion, says Greenberg, “will almost invariably bring a smile of acknowledgment. You can tell the handshake is in earnest because they press your fingers.”

It is hard work for this retired advertising account executive, handing out 300 pairs of gloves every year on New York’s infamous skid row, which runs from Chinatown a dozen or so blocks north to Cooper Square. “Oh, if I just wanted to stand here and give them away, I could get rid of 1,000 in an hour. Easy. But I prefer to go looking for the people I want. The ones who avoid eye contact. It is not so much the gloves, but telling people they count.”

Greenberg was shaped for his role of Samaritan of the streets by his memories of Depression hard times and by the charity of his father, Pinchus Joseph, who owned a Brooklyn bakery. “My father would often include a coffee cake or a sandwich in the bag without his customer’s knowing,” he says. “He would always tell us, ‘Don’t deprive yourself of the joy of giving.’ ” Money was short, and Michael has a searing recollection of losing a glove while helping bring supplies into the store on a bitterly cold morning. “I was never able to find it, and for years I went around without gloves. I never asked my father to replace them because I felt so guilty.”

When his father died in November 1963, he searched for an appropriate memorial. “I remembered the incident of the lost glove, and it occurred to me that gloves are a powerful symbol because being warm is being well-off and being cold is being poor. At that time there weren’t as many homeless people on the streets, and so I immediately thought of the Bowery, and I decided to put a pair of gloves on some poor fellow’s hands just as my father had slipped free Danish rolls into customers’ bags.” Greenberg was then teaching sixth grade in a Brooklyn public school, and the following year, despite his modest salary, he bought 72 pairs of woolen gloves, took them to the Bowery, and handed them out (very timidly, he admits) to the destitute and the derelict. Why 72? Because 18 is the Hebrew symbol for life, and “four times life is 72.”

In 1966 Greenberg left teaching for the advertising business, and with a higher salary he could afford to buy gloves regularly; if they were on sale, he bought in bulk. For the next ten years the Bowery became his route every November and December. In 1976 he was in the subway, taking two bags containing $220 worth of newly purchased gloves back to his office, when someone grabbed the gloves and ran. He reported the theft to the police, the New York Times heard of the incident, and for the first time the world read about the “glove man.”

As a result of that and many other television and newspaper stories, Greenberg has been inundated with gloves. A Girl Scout troop held a glove drive for him. A Colorado ski resort sent him its entire lost-and-found department. And when a story about him appeared in the International Herald Tribune four years ago, gloves flowed in, from Europe to India: leather gloves, driving gloves, fleece-lined gloves, children’s gloves, even work gloves. Some people send pairs, but most often they send only rights or lefts (the rights outnumber the lefts by four to one, for some curious reason). Some also send cash, which is quickly returned “because I am not an organized charity.”

Greenberg’s tiny apartment in Greenwich Village is piled high with 1,600 mismatched gloves, and he regularly has friends in for a glove-matching party because “I would never give out mismatched gloves. That’s denigrating.” The group sits around, drinking beer and matching gloves, “and the next day we discover there are not as many matched as we thought.”

Greenberg has witnessed a parade of defeated humanity in his quarter-century of giving on skid row. He has offered gloves to his former professor at Brooklyn College and to a once famous baritone at the Metropolitan Opera, recognized by Greenberg from his days as a youthful walk-on at the Met. Most of the people he meets are confused, seemingly uncertain of where they are or what they are doing. The more frightened refuse the gloves, and he will follow them for several blocks, insisting, “They’re a gift. I really want you to have them.” One elderly man finally stopped, took the gloves, then asked, “Do you have them in blue?”

Major changes have swept down the Bowery since Greenberg first ventured out. Sad, abandoned men can still be found in the few remaining missions, and in hotels with names like the Prince and the Sunshine. But most of the 82 bars and dozens of flophouses that once served a floating population of aging, mostly white, casual laborers and alcoholics, have gone. Instead the area now boasts expensive apartments and chic restaurants. The newer homeless inhabitants of skid row are more likely to be young, unemployed men who clean car windows at intersections or mill in groups on street corners. Drugs have become a perennial problem on the Bowery. “It’s a fearful place,” says Greenberg. “The men are a lot younger, a lot tougher and a lot meaner.”

But the man with the faded green bag continues to stalk the Bowery and its tributaries, staying clear of “the tough people, who have gloves anyway,” and seeking out “the little old guy who is frightened of people.” Sometimes he hands gloves to men who are muttering aimlessly over the rubble of their lives, barely aware of what they are clutching; some quickly trade them in for a pint of cheap wine. “It doesn’t make any difference. When you give a gift, you let it go.”

Occasionally, a star of hope radiates through all this gloom. Recently he was waiting for a train at Penn Station, when a well-dressed man asked him if he was “the glove guy.” Says Greenberg: “He said that I had given him a pair of gloves on the Bowery five years previously and that now he was married with two children, and he wanted to give me $20 to buy more gloves. I told him the same as I tell others who want to write me a check: no thank you. You spend the money on gloves, and you give them out.”