PEOPLE, PEOPLE! A Whole Foods employee in Union Square (above) turns away angry customers at early closing time yesterday, while, across town, New Yorkers forced to evacuate their homes line up outside a shelter. (AP)
Thousands of rattled New Yorkers yesterday poured into shelters to escape Irene’s wrath, but thousands of others defiantly rode out the storm at home.
Unsettled author Samuel Quiñones, 70, was persuaded to board a city rescue bus outside his home in Battery Park City — a mandatory evacuation zone — clutching his birth certificate, passport, the book he is writing, and toys for his dog, Ophelia.
“My cellphone hasn’t been working inside the building. I haven’t seen any of my neighbors here, because they all went to their country houses,” he said at Seward Park HS, on Grand Street.
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City teachers, asked to volunteer by the Department of Education, distributed lunches of tuna on whole wheat, peas, and chocolate milk to about 8,700 evacuees who had begun filtering into the shelters by last night.
“The food’s not bad, but the problem is they don’t have pillows on the cots, there are no showers and we’re running out of toilet paper,” said a disabled Opal Gordon, 48, who was evacuated from lower Manhattan.
The city opened nearly 100 shelters Friday night after ordering 370,000 New Yorkers to leave their homes in low-lying areas.
The shelters have a capacity of 71,000 and about 35,000 cots, a city spokesman said.
But not everyone listened to Mayor Bloomberg’s increasingly strident pleas.
Only 80 percent of those living in the Rockaways, for example, had left by midafternoon, officials said.
And many in the Hammel Houses, a public-housing complex, were similarly refusing.
“I have a lot of stuff to lose,” explained an 18-year-old who identified himself only as Moochie. “This is the projects. If you leave, your place will be empty when you get back. Your s- -t will be gone.”
But Clifton Brown, 70, said he didn’t think twice before heading to John Adams HS, in Ozone Park, Queens.
“They want to play the hero? The only hero I know is the dead hero,” he said of those who stayed.
Some New Yorkers, meanwhile, found out the hard way that food would also be gone if they waited too long to stock their cupboards.
Customers and workers found themselves in an ugly standoff when the Union Square Whole Foods closed early.
Additional reporting by David Seifman and Kathianne Boniello