Ready, Willing & Able | The Doe Fund

It measured 6 by 9 feet and was known as an SRO, a single-room- occupancy unit of the kind once built here for single, poor adults. The rent was $55 weekly and McDonald, a former advertising agency executive from Spring Lakes, N.J., whose life had taken a bad turn, was an unpaid volunteer for the Coalition for the Homeless. His job was to pass out sandwiches to the homeless at Grand Central Terminal, where he was often arrested by the Metro-North cops for trespassing-but never by the cop with a heart whose name is Frank Dowd and who lives in Rockaway Park.

I had already written about McDonald, who was then trying hard but fruitlessly to win a political job. He went to the plate four times in the 1980s, running three times for Congress and once for City Council president, as a Democrat.

His main issue was the plight of the homeless. They were everywhere then, sleeping outside of classy restaurants or outside subway stations asking commuters for money. They slept in subway tunnels and on the trains as well.

I admired McDonald for his persistence, but thought he would one day disappear into the city's woodwork. No one person was going to move this massive problem up the hill.

Was I wrong! A few weeks ago I got an invitation to attend a ribbon-cutting for the first SRO building to be built from the ground up in the city in a half-century.

The six-story, 74-unit building on East 117th Street, named in honor of the Peter Jay Sharp Foundation that funded it, was the fulfillment of McDonald's longtime dream of providing graduates of his Ready, Willing & Able program with drug-free, affordable housing.

"I have a sign at the top of the building that reads 2000," says McDonald, 56, "because I think this building will be the bedrock building of many more like it to be built here and across the country." McDonald says that in 1985, when he began pitching the idea for this kind of housing for the homeless, he began making the rounds. "I went to Peter Grace [then head of W.R. Grace Corp.] and he listened to me and then said, 'George, I am going to pray for you.'" Then McDonald went to Cardinal John O'Connor and told him what Grace had said.

"I told the cardinal that now that I had someone praying for me, I needed him to give me money. He laughed and then gave me a name to call." Nowadays, the money is coming in, from big people and from little people.

About 30,000 individual donors send him $1.5 million yearly, along with notes thanking him for sending those nice, young men to their neighborhoods to clean their streets, in a work program that pays disadvantaged people for such services.

When I talked to McDonald a few days ago, he said he had been sitting in front of his television screen like the rest of us watching the riveting presidential contest.

"I'm a Democrat and proud of it," McDonald says, "but they [Republicans] had the guns at the end." He recalls that the first time his program was honored, it was by the Bush administration, when Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp commended him for his efforts in finding housing for the homeless.

Down the road, he says he hopes to integrate his homeless housing programs with the prison system. "When young men are released from Rikers Island, they are deposited in Queens Plaza at 4a.m. with no money and no place to go." His offer to such men is this: "We'll give you a job and a place to stay. In return, you have to get off drugs and we will test you to make sure of that." In March, at the organization's annual graduation ceremonies in St. Ignatius on Park Avenue - more often than not a moving ceremony for the young, poor and mostly black and Hispanic participants - more than 1,000 people will have graduated, assuming they work and stay clean.

McDonald's wife, Harriet Karr-McDonald, whom he met at a mass for a young homeless woman who shot herself to death on the steps of St. Agnes Church in mid-Manhattan years ago, is herself a forceful advocate of a simple idea.

"It makes me sick to hear advocates talking about the homeless as though they are so frail they can't make it on their own," she says.

Amen, says McDonald, who reduces his formula to two words: "Work works."