At first it was a desperate call from Ebou Sarr’s sister, about their cousin who needed a place to crash last fall. Then another call came in about a friend’s cousin.
Sarr, who had arrived in New York City from Senegal more than a decade ago, had opened a furniture store in Richmond Hill last year and there was some spare space in its basement.
He let the two men stay there, he told THE CITY on Tuesday afternoon, and over the weeks and months that followed more and more West African men showed up outside the Queens store after hearing about his hospitality. Many of those men had been ejected from shelters after the city began evicting adult migrants after 30 day stays, starting in late September.
When FDNY marshals responding to a complaint about e-bikes arrived at the Liberty Avenue store late Monday night, they found dozens of men sleeping on bunk beds in the basement and on the ground floor. Sarr said around 70 men had been living in the store, with those able to pay chipping in around $300 a month for food and lodging — money he was saving up to try to find a more adequate place for them all to live.
At first, Sarr said, “it was only for the two of them. But what happened is, at the end, everyone needed help.”
Authorities hit the building with a partial vacate order, citing a lack of light and ventilation as well as insufficient emergency exits, sending many of the West African migrants who’d taken refuge there back into days-long line for a shelter cot, along with thousands of others.
An FDNY spokesperson said they’d found three e-bike batteries on site in the rear yard, along other e-bikes with no batteries — not enough to trigger a fire code violation, which kicks in when five or batteries are stored or charging at a given location.
Sarr said he was concerned about fires and had let the men store their bikes in the back courtyard, but told them not to charge their batteries on site.
“We don’t allow no batteries here,” he said. “I know about the situation that’s going on. So we didn’t allow no batteries.”
The building’s landlord, Narharry Ghaness, told Gothamist he didn’t know about his tenant’s arraignment until he was contacted by city authorities on Tuesday.
Speaking in French, 41-year-old Gueye Dèmba, a Senegalese migrant who moved into the furniture store about a month ago after his 30 days in shelter ran out, said he enjoyed relative stability, sharing communal meals with a group of men from Senegal, Mauritania and Guinea.
“We shared everything, we were friends, we felt good there,” he said.
Dèmba said he’d already been through the boondoggle at the East Village center where adults reapply for shelter, which is why he’d ended up at the furniture store in the first place.
“It’s eight days or ten days before they give you another shelter,” he said. “You get exhausted, you can’t sleep at night, so that’s why I left.”
‘Intense Care’
Asked about the FDNY vacate order Tuesday, Mayor Eric Adams described the situation in Richmond Hill as a one-off.
“One thing we know for sure, there was not 110,000 in that store,” Adams said referring to the number of migrants who have entered and then exited shelters since the city began keeping tabs in the spring of 2022. “We have been successful in our 30‑day program, intense care. And so when you move that large volume of people, are they going to be a small number that someone is going to do something inappropriate? Yes.”
Adams went on to say city agencies had responded after getting a 311 complaint for e-bikes. He said, regarding the West African men, that officials had “let them know that if you are in that setting, there’s care, there are ways of placing you in [a] proper setting. And that’s what we have been doing.”
The men kicked out of the store on Monday were offered bus rides by the city’s Office of Emergency Management, with many of them ending up in an overnight waiting room in the Bronx to rest on the ground. Others had not spent time in city shelters and were sent to the Roosevelt Hotel to receive their first 30-day placement, according to a city official familiar with the matter.
They returned to the East Village reticketing site Tuesday morning, where they got wristbands and were told to return Wednesday to get assigned a number.
Another Senegalese migrant, who said he didn’t want to share his name so his family back home won’t know he is struggling, met his latest disruption with resignation.
“We’re new here, it’s their choice, we can’t do anything,” he said in French. “God is here,” he added, looking up to the sky. “God is going to help us.”
“The system did its job,” Adams said Tuesday, while defending his strict 30-day limits on how long adult migrants can stay in city shelters before being evicted and re-applying. “It started with a 311 complaint and the city responded accordingly.”
Sarr, the furniture store owner, had a different take.
“They were desperate. That’s why we had to do something, do something, that’s better than what they’re doing,” Sarr said. “I mean they’re human beings.”