Meet Armando, Who Lives in Central Park, Where He Dispenses Spiritual Wisdom and Doggy Treats

By Carol Tannenhauser

I met John Maynard, the 84-year-old poet who agreed to act as my guide, in front of the Dakota at 9 on a freezing-cold December morning. We were both bundled up as we headed into Central Park at West 72nd Street, past the Imagine mosaic, to the sounds of a pretty decent rendition of The Beatles’ “In My Life,” stopping to listen and applaud.

We were on a journey to find a man named Armando, whose last name we don’t know, who lives deep in the woods of the park.

Lots of wayward people sleep in Central Park; you see them huddled under blankets, beneath bridges, or behind rocky outcrops – transients who are gone by morning. Armando is different. He lives in the park. Year round. Somewhere in the woods on a hill is a flat rock he calls “my bed.” The park is the place he comes home to after his daily activities, which take him all over the neighborhood, including to Trader Joe’s, Morton Williams, and the Y.

No, he doesn’t have a tent or encampment. He carries everything he needs neatly packed in what he calls his “mobile home,” a wooden cart painted light blue, with pictures of birds on it and sayings like “Stillness Speaks,” ”The Power of Now,” and “No bad times.”

Do not mistake him for homeless. Armando lives in the woods by choice. He once had a Section 8 apartment in the Bronx, but gave it up for the outdoors. “I told them maybe someone else can use it, because I’m not going to,” he told me. He said he loves to go to bed when the sun does and wake up at 4 a.m. when it’s still dark and “meditate on the stars.”

We were lucky that day: we found Armando on his usual bench, surrounded by admirers and well-wishers, and flocks of birds and plump squirrels playing in the trees. One man had brought him a new down vest: “It’s getting chilly,” he said (the high that day was in the 20s). John and I joined the group, and I immediately experienced a feeling of belonging and comfort. I didn’t want the moment to end, was aware that it must, yet still was able to enjoy it – a moment spent with a random group of New Yorkers, all of us chilled to the bone, communing together in Central Park.

There was so much good will emanating from the small, smiling man at the center, who told us that life’s essence is “peace, happiness, and love,” but that we bury it under layers of lifelong, often self-inflicted pain and suffering. Armando has a paradoxical solution to the problem of suffering: surrender to it, as he said he had. Once he did that, he said, it transformed him and his life. The suffering was gone. The world was new. Everything was shining, and the snow was whiter than white. 

But, wait. We’re getting ahead of the story. What brought Armando to that moment of nothing less than enlightenment, and then to his life in Central Park? I asked him to start at the beginning and tell me about his childhood.

“It was very short,” he said, laughing. “Because I started with drugs and alcohol at 13. So my really young life is only 13 years.” Armando was born in Coney Island; his mother was Colombian, his father Puerto Rican, and he lived with his grandmothers. “I was very good in the school, with the family, and everything,” he said. “Then, on the same day, I fell in love with pot, beer, and cigarettes. And after that day, forget it. I went the drug way: heroin, pills, acid, selling and using crack.”

This lifestyle continued for 30 years, until Armando stole drugs from a dealer who threatened to kill him, and he fled from New York on a bus to Boston. When he arrived, in the dead of winter, he hoped to be tossed into a warm Boston jail, but the police wanted nothing to do with him and threw him out in the snow instead. He saw a large concrete sewer pipe by the side of an expressway, walked to it, and crawled inside. 

“It’s 2, 3 in the morning,” he recalled. It was the year 2000, and Armando was around 41. “And I had my spiritual experience,” he said, matter-of-factly. “One moment the police are in my mind, you know. And then I start feeling something beautiful inside. I surrendered to suffering. From that time on I stopped all drugs. It’s been 25 years.”

Armando stayed in Boston for six months, then returned to New York City. He went into the city’s homeless shelter system and was assigned an apartment, but by then he was already living in the park. “I said ‘Maybe you can send somebody else over there, because I’m asleep over here.’” He did keep his food stamps and Medicaid.

When he’s not running errands, Armando holds court on his bench, which he has nicknamed the “Jelly Belly Cafe,” because of the countless dogs who come to visit him and feast on Trader Joe’s treats, while their owners chat with Armando. Among his regular visitors is John Maynard, the poet who brought me to Armando. Maynard has written an entire book of poems about Armando and John’s dog Maisie. 

There is so much more to tell about Armando. He is famous in his own right. Eckhart Tolle, the renowned spiritual teacher and bestselling author of “The Power of Now,” learned that Armando was an adherent and came to visit him in Central Park. You can read that story here.

As far as whether the authorities bother him because the park is closed from 1 to 6 a.m., he demurred. “The police know I follow the rules,” he said, enigmatically.

By 5 p.m. it is already dark these days. Armando loves it that way. He places cardboard and a thermal pad on his flat rock, then zips his two sleeping bags together “and slips in like a pizza,” he giggles.

You can find Armando. His life is as open as his heart. Go early to The Ramble and follow along The Lake. If you already know him, tell us more in the comments.

Look for Armando and Maisie, by John Maynard – HERE.  Thanks John!

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