He left Florida with what he had, which was not much. He paid $11.35 for a bus ticket to New York City and arrived in the spring of 1943 at sixteen years old, with essentially no money, no connections in the city, and no clear plan beyond getting as far from Florida as the fare in his pocket would take him.
New York was cold and large and indifferent. Poitier slept in a public restroom in Penn Station for at least one period of his early days in the city. He talked his way into a brief stint in the United States Army — the country needed soldiers and was not looking too carefully at the paperwork of a young man who said he was old enough to serve — but the Army discharged him within a relatively short period after he created enough of a disturbance to get himself out.
What he mostly did, in those first months and years in New York, was wash dishes.
He worked in kitchens in Harlem and in the areas around it, washing the dishes and pots from other people’s meals, invisible in the way that kitchen workers have always been invisible to the people eating in the dining room above. He was not miserable, exactly — he was resourceful and curious and already possessed of the particular quality of attention that would eventually make him remarkable as a screen actor. But he was poor and his formal education was limited and the life he was building, dish by dish and shift by shift, was not the life he had traveled to New York to find.