Police dispatchers use the term as a geographic point of reference: “There’s a very large fire coming from the Jungle behind Carpet Warehouse …”The Jungle.
Tucked beside railroad tracks that course through gnarly woods, the encampment harbors the disenfranchised and distrusting, the addicted and the unwell, the vulnerable and the predatory.
It is an off-the-grid community, a hide-out, a drug den, a home for people with nowhere else to go.
A place of freedom and fire, overdose and escape, where the police are uncertain of their role and first responders enter with caution.
But the Jungle reflects more than the often-intertwined plagues of drug addiction, mental illness and homelessness.
Organizations:
Police, Jungle
Locations:
New York, Ithaca