From the Ivy League to a Woonsocket rooming house: One man's unlikely journey

WOONSOCKET – Yellowed diplomas from the Hackley School, Brown University and New York University hang from the wall, a reminder that Edgar Pedraza wasn’t always living in a $150-a-week rooming house where tenants cook on hot plates and take turns in the shared bathrooms.

Practically every other inch of his 200-square-foot room is covered with artwork. Rembrandt, Renoir, Monet and Degas reproductions line the walls from top to bottom and are tacked to the sides of the small refrigerator, a cabinet and the back of the fire-safe door. Pedraza wanted to mount some on the ceiling, but that’s where his landlord drew the line.

Pedraza, 62, is not someone you expect to find renting a cheap furnished room in the run-down heart of Woonsocket. Sitting in his rocking chair on a winter afternoon, he enthuses about Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos and Longfellow’s poetry, quotes Shakespeare’s "Henry V" from memory, and drops words like “effluvium,” “argot” and “accouterments'' in casual conversation.

When he arrived at 233 High St. nine years ago, he was deeply depressed and on the verge of becoming homeless. His living quarters might seem cramped to some, but he says he’s incredibly grateful that Russell Archambault, who's owned the rooming house for nearly 40 years, offered him a place where he could afford to live.

“I had nowhere to go,” Pedraza said. “If it wasn’t for him, I don’t know what would have happened to me.”

How an Ivy League graduate wound up down and out

Just about everyone at the High Street rooming house has a story to tell. Pedraza, who is slim with muscular biceps and wide-set eyes, is no exception.

He grew up in “abject poverty” in a New York City housing project, he said. But he was fortunate to have a mother who passed on her love of books to him.

By fifth grade, he was reading at a 10th-grade level, “which actually wasn't pleasant, because I got beaten up,” Pedraza said. He escaped by getting a scholarship to Hackley, a private boarding school outside New York City, where he eventually earned high honors.

“That was the greatest miracle from God,” said Pedraza, a devout Catholic.

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After graduating in 1979, he went to Brown, where he majored in Latin American studies and sociology and, by his own admission, “partied too much.” Next, he earned his master’s degree in inter-American relations from NYU.

Despite his obvious intelligence, Pedraza never quite managed to translate his prestigious degrees into a career. After earning his master’s from NYU, he worked the night shift at a post office for a while, then got a job at a youth agency. At one point, he worked as a research assistant at the Americas Society but was let go after his boss took another job.

Other prospects didn't work out – a potential job with the Defense Intelligence Agency didn't come through, a position teaching in New York City's public schools was a poor fit. Then, his mother developed dementia, became physically violent, and his life unraveled more.

He took jobs at bodegas to afford his mother's medical bills, and when his father developed dementia, too, he moved in with a sister living in Rhode Island to share caregiving responsibilities. But their relationship gradually deteriorated, he said, and in 2015 she kicked him out.

“That broke me,” he said. “I realized I was just alone in this world.”

Rooming house offered refuge, and an unexpected friendship

Pedraza had no home and no car, and he knew the money left in his bank account wouldn’t last long.

On top of that, he said, he was “emotionally broken.” For a long time afterward, he would get startled by sudden sounds like a muffler backfiring, or find himself “just staring off at the wall.”

Pedraza had been seeing a counselor at Community Care Alliance, so he contacted the agency, which quickly found him a room at 233 High St.

“Let’s go get your stuff,” he recalls Archambault saying when he showed up. But Pedraza didn’t have any stuff. His new landlord drove him to Walmart.

That first night, Pedraza remembers, Archambault told him, “I don't know what happened. I don't care. You're safe here no matter what.”

Determined not to accept charity, Pedraza quickly found a job at a mill in Pawtucket, only to get laid off less than a year later. Devastated, he informed Archambault that he’d need to move out because he didn’t have the money for rent.

Archambault told him not to worry. A few months later, when Pedraza got another job and went to settle up, he discovered that Archambault had destroyed the ledger, effectively erasing his debt.

“I will not throw someone out who’s trying their best,” Archambault said. “The money does not matter to me.”

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For a little while, Pedraza taught at Community Prep in Providence, but that didn’t work out either, he said. For the last seven years, he’s held down a full-time job at the Dollar Tree just over the border in Bellingham, Massachusetts, walking 3½ miles round-trip to get there because he doesn’t drive.

As far as he’s concerned, he now has the “dream job”: His boss treats him well, and he makes “a very decent living,” especially by taking on overtime shifts. And all that walking is good exercise.

“I love to work,” Pedraza said. “I don’t care what the job is. I’d shovel manure, I don’t care.”

At one point, Pedraza was down to $225 in his bank account and eating peanut butter sandwiches twice a day. Now that he’s earning $18 an hour and working overtime, he said, he’s been able to save up “close to six figures” and start a 401(k).

“I'm not going to spend the rest of my life here,” he said.

He expects he’ll stay at the rooming house for at least another decade, but after that he wants to buy a house – probably in the South, since he’s been researching which states have a lower cost of living than New England.

For now, though, he’s grateful to have landed in a place where he can get back on his feet.

“You're treated as a human being,” he said. “And you know, if you're down on your luck, that makes all the difference in the world.”

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Woonsocket rooming house saved a Brown graduate from homelessness