Miss Vera’s Finishing School

Behind Manhattan's Port Authority Bus Terminal lies a grimy, litter-strewn block of brownstones where a half dozen bums have camped outside an abandoned storefront. The tableau is like a mote of Old New York dust suspended in the neon beams reaching west from nearby Times Square. Since the late 1990s, the New York-based group Crossdressers International, or CDI, has maintained an apartment here.

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