Upper East Side Neighbors Ask Community For Migrant Family Donations

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — One neighborhood group is asking Upper East Siders to clothe thy (new) neighbors.

"Heading to the Bentley Hotel - with nothing more than the clothing on their backs," reads a new flyer slowly spreading across building lobbies in the lower east 60's.

The fliers, made by the East Sixties Neighborhood Association, or ESNA, asks for Upper East Siders to offer a helping hand by bringing gently used or new clothing and footwear to the Bentley Hotel on East 62nd Street and York Avenue, a temporary emergency family shelter now home to almost 600 asylum seekers.

ESNA co-founder Judy Schneider said that when she recently met with the hotel, she learned more about the families living inside.

"These are all immigrants," Schneider said. "They have nothing but the clothes on their back."

So she did what comes natural to her and her husband, Barry, who she co-founded ESNA with back in 1996: ask the community for help.

"It's great that they have shelter and food," Schneider said, "but that's all that they have."

One woman at the Bentley is expecting a child soon, and a hotel worker asked Schneider if she could help find a donated stroller (she already has a few leads).

And now that things have settled since the families moved in this past April, Schneider said the hotel staff, and the provider, Highland Park, are trying to help the desperate families get on their feet.

"When I spoke to some of the people at the hotel, they're trying to help a schedule stuff for the kids to do when they're trying to on their own — not the city — to make it a more friendly, habitable place," Schneider said.

"We've been doing clothing drives for years and years and years," Barry told Patch. He designed the flyer and is asking for buildings who are members of ESNA to pitch in.

At their own building, they're doing a more formal clothing drive over the weekend. A kind police officer from the 19th Precinct even agreed to help drive the clothes to the hotel if they needed help delivering the donations.

But, as the flyer reads, anyone can deliver their own donations — clothes, diapers, toiletries — to the Bentley Hotel on weekdays between 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the reception desk.

"Pretty much from children to adults, whatever people have as long as good condition I think will be appreciated," Schneider said. "It would be a huge help, because they have nothing."