Welcome to Home of the Brave. I'm Scott Carrier. Today I'm going to play a story from the archive

way back to 1984, a story about the anti-war protesters and homeless people who were occupying Lafayette Park across the street from the White House.

I was somewhat homeless myself at the time, just starting to produce radio stories,

and my method was to drive around the country collecting interviews and then go to NPR in Washington to produce the stories,

using their studios and equipment and

also getting help from the producers there like Art Silverman.

When I wasn't working on stories I'd walk around the city. Lafayette Park was close

and interesting because of the protesters and also because it was a safe zone for

people who'd been let out or pushed out of St. Elizabeth, the psychiatric hospital,

due to cutbacks and social funding, and also there was the theory that they'd be better off in the real world.

Unfortunately, many of them had no place to live.

A lot of people back then had no place to live.

It was the beginning of the epidemic of homelessness that continues to this day.

Ronald Reagan was in the White House, so I called the story Reagan's neighbors. Okay, the place I like to go here is Lafayette Square. It's a park and it's right across the street from the White House.

It's a square city block and it's got grass and benches, trees just like any city park, but this one's better because of the people who hang out there.

There are usually a lot of people there, business people, tourists,

and you can tell those people by the way they move.

You can watch and you can,

and business people walk straight. They walk in straight lines and they go straight through the park.

And tourists kind of turn around. They kind of spin around in circles.

Police ride motorcycles.

And there are a lot of police down here.

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