St. Joe's - NYC

 

    When I had time on my hands between helping out at Mary House and adventuring around New York City I often found myself working at St. Joseph House’s soup line.
    Volunteering for their morning meal was the most like the LA CW’s Hippie Kitchen of any Catholic Worker I’ve visited on my recent travels. It's an undertaking that requires both the live in Catholic Worker folks and a crew of volunteers to pull off.
    Monday through Friday someone gets up early to cook the soup, often with vegetables chopped the day before. One of the volunteer tasks is to ladle it into cups and load those into crates to be handed out on the line.

    While that’s going on there’s the various bread projects that need to happen. Crates of peanut butter sandwhiches, balogne and cheese sandwiches, and butter sandwiches are all prepared then individually packaged in wax paper for distribution. There are often bannanas to be seperated from the bunch for easy acces and some mornings an assortment of sweets to wrap too.

    In a similar way coffee with milk and sugar are poured into paper cups and put into crates. A 5 gallon cooler of iced sweet tea is prepared too. They do their coffee and tea “cowboy” style, just throwing the grounds into the pot, letting them cook and then straining them out.

    A little before the serving time of 9:30 the crew gathers for a short prayer before bringing all those crates of food out to a few tables set up for serving where a line of folks, sometimes stretching down and around the corner, are already patiently waiting for the day’s meal.
    After about 45 minutes or an hour the initial rush is kind of over and whatever is left is brought inside and served out of an open window to late comers until everything is gone. Water is available throughout the morning as is the restroom for folks in need.

    On Wednesdays there’s a clothing distribution. It can be hit or miss depending on the quality of donations from the previous week. Sometimes they have a pile of new pairs of underwear and socks and bins full of other clothes to share but other days can be pretty bare.

    This all happens on the first floor of the house, an open space that encumpases the kitchen and dining room. The upper 4 floors house Catholic Workers and others in need of a home, specifically men.
    For years on Saturdays many of the St. Joe’s folks vigil for a just peace and humanitarian aid for Yemen. You’ll find them in Union Square (the place where Dorothy and other first distributed The Catholic Worker newspaper in 1933 and today plays host to a farmers market on weekends) from 11 to noon each week.