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.
...Until the city removed them Tuesday, about 70 “desperate” migrants, many of whom had been evicted from city shelters, had been sleeping inside the Richmond Hill storefront.
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.
