NewsBeat

8 NewsBeat June 2018 Last of the Newsies? relentless chill has been especially punishing. But there are two good reasons Mr. Singh has prevailed so long at this Upper West Side corner: his iron devotion to the job, and his customers' devotion to him. One by one over the years, they have each made the silent decision to continue buying from him, paying full newsstand prices and often walking blocks out of their way, past other vendors, rather than reading the news online or getting home delivery. They fetch his takeout meals and draw him into conversation. They buy him warm coats and scarves and sneakers. Some trade emails about his health, which has been remarkably robust despite an occasional scare. ("He didn't get to the corner until 5:30 instead of his usual 3," a neighbor messaged to another on a morning in 2014. "He said he has to down cough syrup twice in the night now, and this time it knocked him out.") Mr. Singh was born in Bihar State, in northeastern India, the third of six children. His father died when he was 8, and while top grades won him scholarships, he had to work constantly, he said, to pay for books and other expenses. Yet Ram Badan Singh, who left a job as a civil engineer in India to come to New York at age 42, is still scraping together a living out of all three, in the same spot where he began 36 years ago next week. Except for three brief trips back to India in the 1980s and '90s, he has sold newspapers outside the 86th Street subway station every night and morning, in blizzards and rainstorms and heat waves, with no newsstand for protection and not a single day off. There is every reason to expect he will turn 81, in July, at his chosen perch on the side doorstep of a grand prewar apartment building that calls itself, without apparent irony, the White House. He has an uneasy relationship with this White House, which has alternately welcomed and shunned him; the current administration has restricted entry to a foyer where Mr. Singh would shelter on the coldest and wettest nights. The past months' By PATRICK FARRELL ong before dawn on a wind-whipped April night, the only thing stirring at the corner of Central Park West and 86th Street was a slight figure in boyishly oversize attire — ink-stained parka, baggy pants, owlish eyeglasses — that nearly hid him as he fussed with a stack of newspapers. He certainly seemed invisible to the gathering parade of passers-by, ears plugged with speakers or eyes fixed on tiny screens: the runners around 5:30 a.m., the dog walkers at 6. Then, slowly, his people arrived, ambling up the sidewalk or pulling cars to the curb to press dollar bills into his palm, take the morning paper and check on the whiskered face that poked out of the parka. "How's it going, Singh?" they asked. "What's in the news today, Singh?" Newsprint is endangered. Retail has fled to the internet. Cash is becoming quaint. Ram Badan Singh has sold newspapers on the corner of Central Park West and 86th Street for over three decades. Credit: Joseph Michael Lopez for The New York Times Mr. Singh in more bustling times (note the number of papers available for sale). L

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