In a not-yet-gentrified neighborhood south of downtown Los Angeles, bells from Blue Line trains break the silence of a sunny fall morning, while a stale stench inflitrates the nose. Stagnant puddles - clogged with Styrofoam cups, yesterday's soggy newspapers and unmentionable refuge - clog dark gutters.
Gentrification has not yet found the gritty neighborhoods of South Park and the Garment District. The percentage of residents living in poverty here is twice the average of the rest of L.A. Practically all students at the local elementary school are eligible for free or reduced-rate lunches.
This is the area and the population served by St. Francis Center, the 35-year-old nonprofit religious corporation located near the middle of a broken Hope Street block of mostly painted-over brick warehouses, wedged between Washington Boulevard and the Santa Monica Freeway.
Less than a half-mile northwest rise the gleaming glass-and-steel towers of the new emerging downtown, increasingly populated by upwardly mobile urban pioneers. But there are no high-rise condos, corner Starbucks or organic Whole Foods markets here. Only down-and-out homeless individuals trying to survive on the street and struggling working-class Latino families who live nearby in ever-shrinking inner-city enclaves of low-rent, run-down apartment buildings. Center workers park their cars behind a high iron fence topped with razor wire.
Across the stained-and-cracked asphalt street today are four blue dome pup tents. From time to time, an unshaven face peeks out to check what's happening. Nearby, two men are curled up on the sidewalk, bracing their backs against the front of buildings.
A line has already formed in front of 1835 South Hope Street. Mostly men, they stand patiently, shoulders hunched and hardly speaking. When some of their early-rising comrades come out the glass doors, others, holding tickets, are ushered into the single-story, white stucco building with the front mural of the brown-robed saint.
Inside, it's a whole different world. Bright colors abound, like the huge homemade "Welcome" wall painting bordered by hand-prints, along with an Our Lady of Guadalupe mural and hanging white cloth banners with stick-kids surrounding the St. Francis Center logo.
Smells of simmering beans and rice mix pleasantly with brewing coffee. The men and occasional woman move single file along a stainless steel serving counter, where five stationed workers load their trays with hot food, pastries and drinks, along with wrapped sandwiches and bottled water. They walk to eight round tables, covered with red and blue tablecloths. In the café-like setting, there is more chatter. Still, the homeless diners rarely stop chewing and drinking, all too aware of the growing line outside.
Rice and beans
Sitting at a back table, John Sarria from Elmhurst, New York, is eating rice and beans, sipping milk and taking big bites from a glazed donut. He has tuna salad, turkey and pastrami sandwiches tucked away in his coat pockets.
The 34-year-old man has been living at a shelter downtown, but just got back together with his wife and two daughters. Describing the relationship as "up and down," he talks about a life on the skids he's desperately trying to change.
"Before I start hunting for a job every morning, I come right here and have my breakfast and get sandwiches for lunch," Sarria reports. "The food is pretty good, and, hopefully, I can show my wife I'm not the typical homeless person she thinks that I am. I'm just trying to find a way to bring my family back on track."
At the next table over, Curtis, who prefers not to give his last name, is also wolfing down rice and beans. His pockets, too, are stuffed with sandwiches. "The food is very good," he observes.
For two years, the 64-year-old African American native of Monroe, Louisiana, has been coming almost every day to the St. Francis Center. And every Wednesday, he avails himself of the center's "hygiene day" by taking a shower.
"Your breakfast you can eat here, and you get your sandwiches, your water and your milk, and it'll help you later on when you get hungry," Curtis points out. "So you don't have to worry about, 'Where am I gonna get something to eat?'
"They also give you clothes, shoes, socks, cosmetics if you need them. Plus medical help. They check us right here in the back of the place. A lot of us would be lost if they didn't have a place like this. We wouldn't know where to go."
Father Noonan's legacy
"Right here in our backyard, people are wandering around hungry, homeless and hopeless - that's all wrong," wrote Father Hugh Noonan shortly after he started the St. Francis Center in 1972.
While in residence at nearby St. Joseph Parish, the Franciscan priest, teacher, writer and creator of the nation-wide radio and television program "Hour of St. Francis," witnessed firsthand the growing number of homeless individuals and poor families who knocked on the rectory's door desperate for food and financial assistance. With the help of members of the Third Order of St. Francis, he began handing out donated food and clothing from a small building next door to St. Joseph's.
After Father Noonan died two years later, Lay Franciscan volunteers kept the street ministry going in his memory. In February 1997, the center moved its expanding humanitarian operation from Santee Street to a warehouse on South Hope Street.
After 35 years of operation, St. Francis Center has served 2 million meals to the homeless, given away 600,000 bags of groceries to poor families, and sent hundreds of children to summer camp.
Through partnerships with local merchants, businesses and nonprofits, the center has more than doubled its services in recent years. A number of California-based foundations also offer support, including the Carrie Estelle Doheny Foundation, Ralph M. Parsons Foundation, Ahmanson Foundation, Daniel Murphy Foundation and the Weingart Foundation.
Last year, $800,000 in donated food alone was distributed. But besides meals, groceries and clothes, St. Francis Center also provides case management, educational programs for youth, senior outreach, medical and dental assistance, legal aid plus forums.
As assistant executive director under executive director Gerald Gumbleton, Jill Remelski oversees all of these services and programs. Walking through the center's back warehouse with the 24-year-old University of Southern California graduate, one is struck by the amount of supplies needed to keep this antipoverty operation going six days a week.
Making ends meet
There's a burly male volunteer hemmed in on two sides by banquet tables covered with rows of white plastic bags. At his feet lay piles of empty cardboard boxes. Without looking up, he methodically goes about filling each bag with canned goods and other groceries.
Side rooms are stacked nearly to the ceiling with unopened boxes of assorted items. In another area, there are bigger boxes overflowing with toys, household goods, even infant car seats and strollers. The center has purchased them from the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank for the amazing price of 18 cents a pound.
The metal walk-in freezer and refrigerator, however, are probably the most impressive part of the warehouse tour. They're also stocked with boxes and paper bags that another volunteer, Nestor from Verbum Dei High School, is rushing to fill before families and seniors show up at the center.
Back in the front room - which has been transformed from an intimate café to a staging area where mothers come for groceries - Remelski glances around for a last-minute check.
"It's a race against time from serving the homeless breakfast to handing out groceries to families, and one day a week to seniors, too," she says. "Sometimes this is our after-school area also when two events are going on at once. In addition, we have our community meetings in here."
The former Alpha Delta Phi sorority member started volunteering at St. Francis Center the summer after her sophomore year, quickly learning how to do mass mailings. After graduating in 2005 with a degree in business entrepreneurship, the Pasadena native and graduate of La Salle High School took her marketplace lessons to 1835 South Hope Street fulltime.
"I learned to run a small business at USC, and I run this business like it was my own," Remelski explains. "I get to make ends meet here and try to stretch every dollar as far as it'll go. Every dollar that I save I know is going directly to the people we serve. And that makes it a real fun task to do.
"It helps when you fall in love with an organization before it starts becoming your job. But I like the fact that every morning I get to walk through the front room and I get to see the people we serve at breakfast. I get to see that we're packing groceries for families and handing groceries out to seniors. And I get to see the kids when they come after school."
With a grin, she adds, "I knew I didn't want to work in a big organization and find money to put in its pocket. This is a lot more rewarding. So I'm in it for the long run."
Remelski points out that St. Francis Center belongs to only 5 percent of the Los Angles Regional Food Banks' customers who both operate a food pantry and serve meals.
"Hygiene" Wednesdays, when showers and toiletries are available for men and women, are another special feature. Socks and underwear are always handed out, along with sweatshirts in winter, shirts in summer.
The center directly serves families in 27 nearby apartment buildings, most of which amply qualify as slum housing, notifying residents about health clinics and other local social service events.
Fruits and vegetables
Sadly, business is booming. Since the first of the year, breakfasts have increased from 125 homeless men and women served on a typical day to 175.
"So we're thinking that we're probably going to have to start opening 20 minutes earlier," Remelski says. "Our street actually changed a lot recently. Maybe there were five to ten people out here. But in the past few weeks it's just gone through the roof, and I think it's because of everything going on on skid row."
The number of poor families seeking assistance has also risen dramatically. Fifteen is normal, but yesterday 39 mothers came knocking. "That's a lot of families for us," she explains. "We ran out of both dry groceries and fresh produce."
Improving the daily diets of family members is a primary goal of the Albertson's Fresh Rescue Program, which supplies fruits and vegetables to St. Francis Center. This summer the center even sponsored a "cooking camp" for kids at nearby Los Angeles Trade Tech College, showing its would-be-chefs how to prepare nutritious meals.
"We really tried to use the camp as a push to get families to eat healthier," says Remelski. "We want them coming back for fresh vegetables and milk."
By 11 o'clock, Brenda Higgs is ready to head home to her apartment, four blocks away on Flower Street, with three bags of groceries. In one there's two loaves of Orowheat bread, a head of lettuce, a cantaloupe, tomatoes, ice cream and chopped ham for sandwiches. In another are fresh-looking cucumbers, bell peppers and nectarines plus a container of cottage cheese. The last bag has toilet paper, paper towels and soap.
It seems like a lot of food, but the 50-year-old grandmother says it will probably only last about a week with three hungry grandchildren and her fiancée to feed. "I'll get my food stamps at the beginning of the month and that'll last me for the first two weeks," she reports. "And St. Francis will help me out the other two."
"But it really helps us because there's five in my household and they eat a lot," she adds with a chuckle. "The food is good. If it wasn't good, I sure wouldn't be coming here."
Dolores Mireles has brought along her nephew to help carry home groceries she got today from St. Francis Center. The 37-year-old single mom with four boys has been unable to find housekeeping or nanny work for five months.
But she's been coming to the center for three years, even when she was employed. Her low wages were never enough to pay the rent and utilities, and still have cash left over for clothes and food. What really helps her out is when the center has toilet paper and soap to give away, and maybe a pair of shoes that fits one of her kids.
"I come because I'm without no job and I don't have no money to buy food," Mireles reports. "They help mothers to be a little bit more comfortable with their kids. With kids it's very expensive. Sometimes you pay your rent and you don't have any money for buying food."
After-school empowerment
By three o'clock, the front room has once again been reconfigured - this time to accommodate about 15 children who walked here from school. A bunch of boys at a round table are joking around, but also occasionally staring down at opened textbooks and workbooks, getting up the moxie to start their homework.
Close by are girls being helped by a USC coed volunteer with sunglasses raised up on her blonde hair. But the girls already have their pencils out and are seriously writing away on worksheets.
In a back room, older students are just beginning the weekly photography class of Venice Arts, an after-school mentoring program that guides low-income students through hands-on experiences with the arts.
All of this falls under the YES (Youth Empowered for Success) program, which not only supports disadvantaged students by giving them a badly needed place to study after school, but also introduces them and their parents to thinking about the possibility - through scholarships and financial aid - of going to college.
Vincente "Tito" Alvarado seems to be the focus of attention at the boys table. The 11-year-old sixth-grader started coming to St. Francis Center last year. Now he walks the seven blocks from John Adams Middle School with three or four of his friends almost every school day.
"First I have a snack - water and yogurt, or whatever they put out," he reports. "Then I just start my homework, science and math mostly, and talk to my friends. When I don't understand something, I ask one of the adults for help."
Before Tito found out about the center on South Hope, he would usually just go home and watch TV before hitting the books.
"But there wasn't anybody there to help me," he explains. "So when I got in trouble, I just kept on going, and waited for my older sister and brother to come home. Because my mother and father only speak Spanish, so they couldn't help much."
Tito stays until the center closes at six o'clock on Wednesday and five the rest of the week. He has also gone on fieldtrips to Disneyland and Dockweiler Beach, where he really enjoyed cooking hot dogs over an evening campfire and munching on "smores."
Better still, at school he's getting a lot of As.
"I really like it here because you can have fun with the other kids and get help with your homework," Tito says. "They help you get good grades. I want to go to college so I can get a nice job and work like other people. I might go to one in San Francisco. I want to see how that city looks." St. Francis Center is located at 1835 South Hope St; Los Angeles, CA 90015. On the web: www.sfcla.org. Phone: (213) 747-5347. |