Judy McGill, formerly of Warwick, shares her tent with her husband and cat Magneto under the Crawford Street bridge.

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The Providence Journal / John Freidah

PROVIDENCE — On a raw night, John Joyce and Roland Colpitts look for the city’s homeless.

They’re not official outreach workers. Colpitts, 37, sports a black eight-ball tattoo on the back of his neck. “I’m ahead of it, not behind it,” he says. Joyce, 46, carries a red bag — he calls it his briefcase — filled with phone numbers and a bent copy of Reveille for Radicals, a handbook for activists. His Rolodex? Cards and paper bound by a hair band.

Both men are homeless.

From a closed underpass, they head out for the city’s East Side, where poor men and women live outside, in the shadows of the Providence Athenaeum library. Across town, they poke around the closed Arcade.

“Anybody up there?” shouts Joyce, clapping his hands. On some nights, as many as a dozen people sleep on the third-floor stairway, he says. The stairs are outside, but the roof blocks the rain and snow.

At 7 p.m., the Arcade is empty. But at Tommy’s Place, a nearby restaurant, a bearded man huddles near a wall.

“George, where are you staying tonight?” asks Colpitts.

The man shakes his head. “I have no idea.”

The two men direct George to Hope City, a community of 20 homeless people living in tents under the Crawford Street Bridge. Both Joyce and Colpitts live there, on a strip of state land not far from a courthouse. George finds a spare bedroll in Joyce’s tent and crawls in, boots and all.

“Get comfortable,” says Joyce, who covers the man with a blanket.

Since January, Joyce and Colpitts have worked as unofficial outreach workers, helping the homeless find food and shelter during a hard winter and a cold spring. Some 50 people, they say, sleep in the city’s nooks and crannies: on cold benches and warm grates, beneath church steps, on cement floors near the Westin Providence hotel.

“It’s not always safe out here,” says Joyce, homeless for three years. “I’ve been stabbed and shot at.”

Colpitts agrees. Last week, he says, he found a homeless veteran wandering around Kennedy Plaza, his face and shirt a bloody mess. Someone had beaten the 38-year-old man and stolen his bus pass. Colpitts gave him a clean sweatshirt, pants and shoes from Hope City.

“It should be a hate crime to beat up a homeless man,” says Colpitts, “but it’s not.”

WHEN THE TWO men helped found Hope City, they didn’t plan on creating a social-service agency under a rusty overpass.

They and others started camping beneath the bridge in late January, a few weeks after a construction worker found the body of Paul Langlois there. Langlois, homeless for years, died after a bitter cold night. A state medical examiner said he died of heart disease.

“When I saw the gurney tracks in the snow,” says Joyce, “I thought, there’s got to be a better way. No one should die like that, alone.”

Since June, Joyce and other activists — including Brown University student Megan Smith — had been pushing the state to do more to help the homeless. Already, the shelters were crowded because of a bad economy and rising foreclosures.

“We all wondered, what will happen when it gets cold?” says Joyce.

That first night under the bridge, the temperature turned frigid. Joyce and the others huddled under blankets. Their breath formed ice on the tent walls.

Still, “everyone was safe, and everyone was together,” says Joyce. “Instead of waking up alone, we had each other.”

The group reached out to other men and women on the streets.

A woman and her son joined them. So did Ray, a wood cutter raised by foster parents. He lugged two bags of clothing and his Aerosmith CDs to a spot under the bridge.

Roy Myers and his girlfriend arrived from Iowa, looking for work. But Myers, used to earning $16 an hour sawing lumber, could find only a temporary job: holding a Going out of Business sign.

After two weeks, the number of homeless people under the overpass jumped to 16.

A church provided a portable toilet. Someone started hauling their trash away. Colpitts cooked on a camp stove.

In early March, the group elected four leaders to oversee cash donations, enforce rules and hear complaints. They named Colpitts chairman and his girlfriend, Barbara Ferraro, treasurer. Chris D’Ambra, a tall artist in a Matrix-like coat, was named secretary. Jeff Mayers, a 40-year-old veteran, was elected co-chair.

After the vote, Ferraro chided some of the residents for hogging donated bags of McDonald’s hamburgers. “If there’s not enough food for everyone, we share,” she said.

D’Ambra reiterated the community’s rules.

No drinking, no drugs, he said.

That includes guests, said Ferraro. “We live here. These are our homes.”

THE HOPE CITY population — the number changes weekly –– is a small part of the state’s more than 6,500 homeless.

Some of the homeless sleep in 11 shelters in greater Providence and Cranston. But Hope City’s founders have created an alternative culture, a place for those who don’t fit in the state’s shelters.

Some have run afoul of shelter managers or case workers. Some chafe at curfews and regulations. Others say some of the shelters are dirty or dangerous. “People steal your stuff,” says a homeless man. “People fight,” says a woman.

Others can’t always get a bus pass to travel from the shelter in Cranston to Providence, where they can get free coffee, food and help from 40 area churches and agencies. It’s the final irony for some: Staying at Hope City, exposed to rain and wind and snow is more convenient to the services of Providence than a warm shelter in Cranston.

SOON AFTER the media discovered the tent city, donors — church groups, advocates and blue-collar workers — dropped off hundreds of bags and boxes filled with cooked chicken, sugary doughnuts, soup, venison, clothes, water, charcoal, blankets, tents and toothbrushes.

When a food pantry donated a block of frozen calamari, Joyce laughed. “We’re going to have squid salad under a bridge in Providence, Rhode Island.”

One afternoon, a man in a Red Sox jacket dropped off cases of bottled water. Living in a tent is bad, he said. “This could be any of us.”

Inundated with donations, Joyce and Colpitts started giving away clothes to other homeless people on Sundays. On a recent morning, 20 people tried on jackets, shoes and pants piled on three blue tarps near the bridge.

Social-service agencies started showing up, too.

When Sheryl Marshall needed supplies for a 15-bed shelter at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Pawtucket, she stopped at Hope City. She grabbed boxes of noodles, shampoo and toiletries.

“Do you need a first-aid kit?” Joyce asked.

Marshall, the program director for Access-RI, stared at the homeless man.

“You have a first-aid kit?”

PRIVATELY, SOME nonprofit agencies worry about the group’s larger-than-life presence. Money donated to Hope City could go instead to established nonprofit agencies — organizations with a trained staff and beds, they say.

“There’s a natural tension between the social-service providers and the folks at Tent City,” says Jim Ryczek, executive director for the Rhode Island Coalition for the Homeless.

But the two groups should focus on the need for more community-based case management, he says. Homeless people react more favorably to workers in the field. “The shelters serve the vast majority, but there’s a population for whom the shelters are not a good match. We need to find a way to help that population.”

“I applaud their effort,” says Janice Luongo, executive director of Mary House, a social-service ministry at St. Patrick Church on Smith Street, near the State House. “They have a great heart. But they need a plan. To just say I want to help the homeless is not a plan.”

Too many groups offer the same service, she says. “Money is tight. We need centralized distribution.”

And people need homes, she says.

THE ACTIVISTS at Hope City agree.

They are talking to churches and city officials about using foreclosed buildings to house the homeless.

“Hopefully, we can end this,” says Joyce, who grew up in Warwick and went to Catholic schools before he lost a construction job and became homeless.

“We want to take down tents, not add more,” adds Colpitts, who is battling depression and a bad kidney. “But the economy is only going to get worse.”

Meanwhile, the tent city residents shower at shelters and brush their teeth at the Kennedy Plaza bus station. They wash their clothes at the homes of friends, or at the Crossroads shelter on Broad Street. So far, no one has asked them to leave the overpass, closed during the relocation of Route 195.

Nobody likes living in a tent, says 43-year-old Judy McGill, who has struggled with medical problems and years of homelessness. “I hate it. I’d like to be in a home, with a roof over my head. I’m waiting on a list for an apartment, but it’s taking forever. There’s nothing I can do but wait, like everyone else out here.”

pdavis@projo.com