Creating a home
Dr. Jim O'Connell greeted the homeless man on a bench outside the Andrew Square MBTA station like an old friend last Tuesday night. In fact, he's known him for almost 20 years.
''I wake up in the morning in a puddle of pain," the man began. ''My back hurts, my feet hurt. I just want to check in some place, dry out, and take care of myself."
O'Connell bent down to take a look at his patient's feet. O'Connell would later say he is in danger of losing at least one, maybe two, of his toes to diabetes.
''Do you have your medication?" he asked the patient, referring to his insulin.
''Yes," he was told. The man hadn't been going into a shelter, he explained, partly because shelters are reluctant to allow patients with syringes.
O'Connell pulled out a phone and made arrangements for him to enter The Barbara McInnis House, a respite care facility run by Boston Health Care for the Homeless, the agency O'Connell has worked for since its inception in 1985.
Several nights a week, O'Connell and other medical personnel board a van owned by the Pine Street Inn and travel around the city, dispensing coffee, blankets, and medical care to the homeless.
Besides McInnis House, the agency has clinics at Boston Medical Center and Massachusetts General Hospital. Its staff members are familiar faces at Pine Street Inn and other homeless shelters across the city.
Health Care for the Homeless is now embarking on its most ambitious venture: creating a home for itself.
Its officials have their eyes on the Mallory Building on Albany Street in the South End, which once served as the city morgue. Mayor Thomas M. Menino has offered to lease them the building, vacant for years, for $1 a year for the next 99 years.
The idea is appealing. The building's location is excellent. Its proximity to Boston Medical Center is a plus. It would allow for inpatient care for 120 people and an outpatient clinic with 14 examining rooms. Mental health and dental care would have a real base.
There's a catch, of course. Renovating the 77,000-square-foot building will cost an estimated $22 million. The plan is to use $12 million in private donations, and $10 million in tax-exempt financing.
''Today, we had 24 calls and three beds," O'Connell said Tuesday. ''We've reached a point where we need a building. The mayor will lease us the old morgue if we fix it up. But it turns out to be a mess. So, we started doing something we never wanted to do, a capital campaign."
Menino convened a group of major business figures over breakfast last week at the Parkman House to urge them to contribute to the project. He announced that one anonymous donor has already written a personal check for $1 million. Health care for the Homeless is trying to raise the rest.
O'Connell was a Harvard-trained doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital a generation ago, on the way to what he expected to be a career in oncology. He had a residency lined up at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City when his life changed with little notice.
Thomas Durant, the legendary MGH doctor, social advocate, and humanitarian, had been involved in the effort to set up a healthcare practice for Boston's homeless. But it needed a doctor, and he persuaded O'Connell to put his residency on hold and get involved.
O'Connell has been on the van ever since.
''I suppose I had a bit of a 1960s mentality," he said. ''I never cared about money or anything like that."
Health Care for the Homeless is a shoestring-funded success story, operating literally and figuratively under cover of darkness.
If some determined people get their way, that could change. Many people most of us often don't really see are counting on it.
Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com.
