Gloves for The Needy: One Heart Warms Many Chilly Fingers

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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."