"Return to the Friendliest Place"

Peekskill on the Hudson is aka Peekskill: A Friendly Town

A small city can call itself “the friendliest place,” but that slogan rings hollow when fear, exaggeration, and quiet cruelty shape public decisions. On North Division, near Whiskey River, people who never sat on those benches are suddenly outraged that the city removed them, as if they had lost something they ever truly valued.

One excuse is that homeless people were sleeping there overnight, yet that claim falls apart under even casual observation. Another is the familiar complaint that the homeless and pantry crowd are too loud, too visible, too inconvenient—smoking, arguing, existing in ways that make others uncomfortable and supposedly chasing paying customers away. But what is really being driven away here: disorder, or humanity?

The truth is that some people are less interested in solving problems than in pushing vulnerable people out of sight. And when anyone objects to that cruelty, the labels come quickly—liberal, leftist, whatever helps dismiss basic compassion as political weakness.

But this is not about ideology. It is about remembering that people are not all good or all bad, and that poverty does not erase a person’s dignity. A homeless person is not a nuisance simply because they make others confront realities they would rather ignore—especially when that person may be someone you know, someone as human and connected as anyone else.

​If the mere presence of struggling people is enough to frighten someone, perhaps the problem is not the benches, or the block, or the homeless at all.