But the others, for whom home is a place on the pavement or over a steam grate, were still out there.

"It's the equivalent of the steam grate and the abandoned building in the city where the homeless sleep."

He refused to cross over the steam grate.

It's fifteen feet to the cracked cement of the alley below, my best target a space between some garbage cans and a steam grate.

For those who stay on the streets, the downtown subway entrances offer an attractive alternative to steam grates and doorways.

There isn't a single one among you who's helped a homeless person sleeping on a steam grate or given a nickel to Lincoln University.' "

We have been bombarded with images of the homeless, wrapped in tattered blankets, sitting on steaming grates across from the White House.

It is that of the homeless, the "street people" who can be seen huddled on steam grates and in doorways in just about every major city in the country.

The display, titled "Third World America," featured a nativity scene in which the Holy Family was represented by contemporary homeless people huddled around a steam grate.

A leading advocacy group for the homeless says it has settled a copyright dispute with the sculptor of a contemporary Nativity scene depicting a family huddled over a steam grate.

The ragged, deranged man shivering on a steam grate symbolizes a costly potential burden for society - but he may also represent something much more positive: thousands of dollars in potential cash benefits from Government programs.

It was built in 1977 to cover a steam grate, part of Vancouver's distributed steam-heating system, as a way to harness the steam and to prevent street people from sleeping on the spot in cold weather.

Jonathan settles onto a steam grate for a night and Nick’s voice explains it represents both sanctuary and trap since getting off it in the night, dampened from the warm steam, can lead to hypothermia.

While it seemed the layout favored horses more accustomed to policing urban streets than rural trails, neither horses from big cities or ones from small towns wanted anything to do with the steam grate or the bus.

Mark Robinson, 37, who had set up camp last night under a sheet of blue plastic on a steam grate near the United Nations, said he found it easier to sleep out in the cold than in a crowded shelter.

One night this week, according to plan, a homeless man will find a suitable air duct or steam grate near Pennsylvania Station, hook up a plastic intake tube that inflates a personal-size plastic cocoon, and crawl into it for a warm night's sleep.

That same day on Martha's Vineyard, a friend surprised me with a gift: a blue-and-white polka dot dress, a saucy Marilyn Monroesque number with a halter top and a flared skirt, designed to play fast and loose with a steam grate.

How about that scene from "The Seven Year Itch" in which Marilyn Monroe's dress is blown skyward as she walks over a Manhattan steam grate, asked Ron Simon, curator of television at New York's Museum of Television and Radio.

A sculpture depicting a contemporary creche of a homeless family huddled on a steam grate is the centerpiece of a legal battle over whether the creator or the patron of a commissioned work of art owns the copyright for it, and thus sometimes lucrative licensing and reproduction rights.

As the Pageant of Peace opened, the Community for Creative Non-Violence (CCNV; an advocacy organization for the homeless led by Mitch Snyder) sued to have a life-size statue of three homeless people huddled over a steam grate included in the event.

Four homeless men warm themselves on a steam grate by the Federal Trade Commission, blocks from the Capitol, during frigid temperatures in Washington.