The daughter of traveling performers, Ms. White has been performing in musicals since she was 8, and the language of the medium infects her life narrative. She started out as a “hoofer,” a tap-dancer. She has a theme song: “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.” And as of July 2008, she felt she was “all washed up.”

Image Terri White getting made up in the St.James Theater on Broadway. Credit... Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times

Between gigs on Broadway and singing with Liza Minnelli, Ms. White had always worked for tips in piano bars around the West Village. She was a regular at 88’s until it closed, then found a new home at Rose’s Turn on Grove Street  until it, too, closed. She struggled to get a perch at the few surviving piano bars around town. Heartfelt if campy renditions of American songbook classics were out. Spoofy if campy versions of ’80s pop were in. “They want to bring in the younger crowd,” Ms. White said. “And I’m old.”

She still played one night a week at the Duplex, on Christopher Street, earning enough to keep her phone on and get by on Ramen noodles, and kept some clothing there after losing her apartment. In the park, Ms. White slept on a bench near the bathroom because it made her feel more civilized. She knew some of the longstanding homeless there from her years in the neighborhood (they often tried to bum cigarettes as she smoked on the sidewalk). And she got to know the temporarily homeless like herself.

“Their clothes did not look like they were from Goodwill,” she said. “They looked like they’d had jobs.”

Ms. White never mentioned to the others who slept in the park that she had performed alongside Glenn Close in the Tony-nominated “Barnum,” in 1980; nor did she ask about their pasts. Severely depressed, she was too proud to reach out to social services, and kept the extent of her problems from friends. “Most of them are barely getting by in their tiny apartments as it is,” she said. “People in New York, they need their patterns. You can’t interrupt them.”