The influx of capital into William Hernandez’s old neighborhood has marched west, to the Bowery, a neighborhood anchored by the street with the same name that was known throughout the twentieth century for flophouses and shelters. The Bowery Mission at 227 and the Salvation Army at 229 have operated in adjoining buildings for over one hundred years. In the 1970s they began sharing the street with a few commercial enclaves—mostly lighting and wholesale restaurant supply shops—and with the city’s music scene. Punk and new wave found their epicenter at 315 Bowery, at a club called Country Bluegrass Blues and Other Music for Uplifting Gormandizers, better known as CBGB & OMFUG, still even better known simply as CBGB.
CBGB is now a retail spot for the clothing designer John Varvatos (vintage music posters on the wall; $1,298 leather vests on offer) and in either direction, the street is crowded with restaurants, bars, and—increasingly—high-end boutique hotels. Polished, black SUVs idle outside shops and restaurants, ready at a moment’s notice. The Sunshine Hotel, which used to rent ten-dollar rooms with ceilings made of chicken wire, has been replaced on the ground floor by the Bowery Diner, which serves grilled branzino with ratatouille and tapenade for thirty dollars a plate (no substitutions).
But still the Bowery Mission, which anchors the drag, bursts with homeless New Yorkers. The sidewalk in front of the building serves as a gathering spot for men who are freshly showered, rested, and fed—and more men seeking the same.
The New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Mission’s neighbor to the north, inhabits a much newer building that was opened in 2005 and was funded by a Carnegie Corporation grant made possible by Michael Bloomberg. It has seven stories that look like six differently-sized steel blocks casually stacked atop one another. The museum is instantly captivating—and radically incongruous. It has nothing in common with the brick facade and stained glass windows of the Bowery Mission.
The Mission facilities require twenty-four-hour staffing and Matt Krivich is the director of operations. At forty he remains bright-eyed and approachable. His smile is boyish, and the earnest tone in his voice transports me to a black-and-white television show.
He greets me at the building’s reception desk. As we walk back to the dining hall, nearly everyone we pass knows Matt, and many have a question to ask or a message to give—someone is always vying for his attention. We sit at a table, and men come and go—an ongoing series of fleeting conversations, most of which prompt Matt to jot down reminders to himself.
I grew up in Ohio, just outside of Cleveland. Had a great upper-middle-class life, had everything I wanted, probably spoiled. But because of a situation in my family—the family unit broke up. I was young, probably about twelve or thirteen, I was very angry. I became rebellious, met new friends who were also angry and rebellious, maybe didn’t have both their parents in the household, maybe weren’t going to the right schools. We rebelled together and I started a fourteen-year drug addiction.
It started off very innocent, I thought, just weekends with LSD. But then it gradually built up. When I last stopped using I was addicted to heroin. I was homeless. I was in trouble with the law, with various agencies, and at what I thought was the end of my life. I attempted suicide. I wanted to pass. I wanted to be away from this life, away from that pain. I wanted to get rid of myself. And there had been a pastor who found me on the street through a family connection, and he looked me in the eyes and didn’t judge me, didn’t see me as I was, as I saw myself, and told me that he cared for me and wanted to help me if I was ready. It was one of the first times I really saw pure, honest love. It made a lasting imprint on my mind, on my heart. In a sense, I’d never felt that before.
Momentarily I was able to embrace it. He wanted to send me to rehab in Fort Meyers, Florida. But he gave me the money instead of buying me the ticket so I went and used that money to purchase heroin. Ended up back in the streets. The next three months were probably twice as hard. I think I was carrying a little guilt but I also think there was a reason all the doors were shutting around me. It was either death or life and I had to make a decision quickly. And he found me again in the streets. He looked me straight in the face and he laughed and he said, “Matthew, you schooled me but I’m going to help you again. This time I’m going to buy you a ticket. And I’m going to put you on that bus and pray for you and I’ll wave as you’re going down the interstate.”
And it was the beginning of my life being transformed.
I had an amazing experience in Fort Meyers. I spent a year down there. I didn’t know where I wanted to go but I knew I didn’t want to go back to Ohio because that’s where things had fallen apart and I felt that if I went back there it would be too hard or it would be too sad for me. I checked a number of places and the only opportunity for me was an interview here at the Bowery Mission. A friend of mine bought me a one-way ticket to New York City. I had a place to stay for about five days in Garrison, upstate. So I came to the Mission and at the end of the six-hour interview the director said, “We’d love to have you here. When can you start?” And that was great news because if I didn’t have an opportunity I’d have to find a new place to stay in two days. So that’s when I started my internship at the Bowery Mission.
And slowly, gradually, as I’ve been here over eleven years now, I’ve learned more about the Mission and the ministry in New York City and I’ve been given the opportunity to take on additional roles.
Every aspect of the Bowery Mission, in one way or another, seems to fall under Matt’s domain—or perhaps it’s more that he seems willing to take up just about any responsibility in the name of the Mission. He oversees the kitchen, which serves three meals a day, every day of the year, through hurricanes and blackouts. He also oversees the endless maintenance required by a building constructed in 1876, in use twenty-four hours a day.
Matt is usually on the premises for most of those twenty-four-hour cycles—he lives in staff quarters on the property. After ten years alone in the city, he recently married. He and his wife are hopeful children will be in their future.
I think it’s a good example and a good testimony for the men that are in the program to see a healthy family. I want my wife and I to have a healthy relationship but it’s also for the men to see. It’s a continuation of my testimony to them.
I usually start work before seven. I do my rounds throughout the building.
I want to start work before anyone else is really moving so if there’s any issues or anything that needs to be addressed I can get ahead of the day a little bit. There have been fights. There have been days when I woke up and we’ve had people that came at the end of their day and they’re cold and in the morning they don’t wake up. So we’ve had people pass here.
You know, I used to come to New York from Ohio for things that weren’t very productive—and you think of Times Square, you think of Wall Street but you don’t really think of the Christian community. There’s a deep, deep feeling of support in the Christian body here. But also the need is so great in New York City. There are so many opportunities to serve and I can’t imagine myself anywhere else.
We’ve got great relationships with this community. We’ve got a great relationship with the community board. Amazing relationships with the fifth precinct. If we have an issue here and have to call 911, they’re sensitive to the situation. They’re sensitive to who we’re serving here, but also they want to help the person.
My first winter here we had probably 165 men sleeping in our chapel and it’s a small space for 165 men. The fire department came in and I was the only staff member on duty and they looked in the chapel and the captain turns around, he closes his eyes, and he says just make sure there’s a clear egress. He could have easily said you know this isn’t good, we’ve got to count the people and then three people have to leave. But they understand.
We’ve got great relationships with the city agencies. We work with the mayor’s office on a regular basis, various projects. Our first big project was through the mayor’s office, they painted our roof white. It keeps the building cooler and helps us save on electrical costs—heating and cooling bills. All these relationships are what help us do what we do on a daily basis.
Over the last couple of years the neighborhood’s been changing a lot. You know, initially, we weren’t quite sure how that was going to look. What’s it going to look like when we have a museum next door? What’s it going to look like when there’s a Whole Foods on the block? When they start building condos and we have a whole influx of community that don’t know the Mission, that don’t know the history. But what we realized quickly is that it’s an opportunity to share what we do here and an opportunity to share that we can’t do it alone.
We’ve been able to place a number of our men at Whole Foods. There’s a local company that’s just recently started called Heart of Tea and they’ve employed two of our men full time and one of our men part time. I mean our guys are not always the easiest to employ because they’ve got job activity for a couple years and then there’s a five-year gap and then you’ve got job activity for six months, and then another gap. So it’s hard to explain that sometimes. But if the employer knows who we are, they know the staff, they know our programs, they’ve served our men, they’re more willing to take that chance because they understand.
The museum next door, they’ve been supporters as well. They’ve allowed us to use some of their space for one of our events before. They’re currently working with some of our guys. There’s an artist who has a project next door and they’ve invited our guys in to work with them, learn about art, learn about photography, film, and then they’re also receiving a stipend.
In the last five years I’ve seen a drastic change in the rise of homelessness in New York City. I think the latest statistics, and these are statistics put out by the mayor’s office, were over fifty-three thousand people in New York City are homeless. Of that fifty-three thousand around twenty to twenty-two thousand of those are children. And this number is a low number because they’re counting people that are easy to count: people in beds when they do a roll call. But they’re missing people who are in the subways; they’re missing people who are in the tunnels. I know men who come here every day, who live in the tunnels. They’re missing the people who are doubled up, tripled up, quadrupled up, fifteen people in a small apartment. They’re missing a lot of people who are couch surfing and almost invisible. New York City is so energetic and there’s so much going on it’s sometimes easy to forget about that guy who’s on the sidewalk. Or forget about the guy that’s in the park.
For us the need has been growing. Since Hurricane Sandy we’ve seen a drastic rise in the number of people coming for food and shelter. And that’s put a little bit of a challenge on the Mission because this building wasn’t built to do what we do. So we’re sort of busting at the seams. It works but it puts a challenge on our staff and it puts a challenge on the building itself.
Matt suggests I take a tour and gets up from the table. Just as he does there is a man behind him. He is wearing a blue jacket with shiny gold buttons, and he whispers something into Matt’s ear. Matt asks me for a minute and the two of them step away for five. Lunchtime is approaching and the dining hall is abuzz. A dozen or so volunteers from Kentucky bring out stacks of plates—almost all of them are in New York for the first time and they have come to serve.
Matt returns and apologizes because he needs to attend to timely matters. He has brought along a coworker, Julian Padarath, to give me a tour of the building. Julian has a portly frame and smiles immediately. We shake hands. Matt apologizes again and disappears around a corner with a cluster of people trailing him—one of them is the man in the blue jacket, out of place with those shiny buttons.
Julian leads me down to the basement and we enter a room filled with boxes and shelves and racks of clothes. It is Tuesday, which means that after lunch, approximately 150 men will take a shower and then come down to this room—“Blessingdales” to those who know it best—and pick out the clothes they need. If they have an interview they get a suit. In his three years at the Bowery, Julian has noticed a change in the clothing donations that come in:
Now with all the artists and the gentrification and the museum, it’s like a trendy hip place to live. With the neighborhood getting better, the donations get better. We’re getting Armani suits and Versace—it’s crazy.
Julian is in charge of requesting, receiving, and storing all in-kind donations—two thousand pounds of bread a day and beyond. Originally he worked in finance. In 2007, his company relocated to California, and Julian was asked to make the move but opted to stay in New York with his girlfriend. He was happy and in love and worked in finance, so jobs were not hard to come by. Then the financial system crashed and Julian couldn’t find a job; his savings ran out, his engagement ended, and, eventually, he needed a place to live. Friends suggested the Bowery.
I worked fourteen years in corporate finance and I get more gratification since I’ve started working here. I work twelve, fifteen-hour days and I don’t care. I love it here.
Originally from the Fiji Islands, Julian grew up on the Upper East Side, the son of a diplomat.
I had a privileged childhood, I’d never even come down here. This was skid row.
He shows me the chapel, the barber chair, the classrooms where men study for a GED. He shows me the conference room lined with pictures from the Bowery Mission’s 135-year history, including an image of President William H. Taft speaking to over 600 men and another of Willie Randolph serving a meal to likely as many—in fact, pictures of celebrities and politicians and big-time donors wrap all the way around the room. In the corner is the piano of Fanny Crosby, composer of over eight thousand hymns, who played at the Mission when it first moved into the building in 1910.
We step into the food pantry where inventory is stacked on shelves extending to the ceiling. Julian’s favorite donation is lobsters and he estimates the Mission gets five hundred to one thousand pounds of live lobsters every month, mostly seized by the Department of Environmental Conservation for being served too small, or taken from illegal poachers.
Julian makes sure I notice there are few sweets in the pantry.
Matt’s real big on nutrition. We used to have Magnolia Bakery donate tons of three-dollar cupcakes, we’d get bags every day. Matt told me to cut it off. And I was like, “What do you mean?”
He laughs.
He’s all about nutrition. Because guys get too comfortable. When you think of a soup kitchen you think of slop. But we’re able to provide a well-balanced meal with meat and fresh vegetables.
Julian’s eyes widen when he tells me about Thanksgiving, “our Super Bowl,” when tents are erected and the whole block is closed to traffic.
On a regular day we serve nine hundred to one thousand meals, on Thanksgiving we’ll serve nine thousand, so we’ll cook for about four to five days before. We’ll go through about eight hundred turkeys, about four thousand pounds of potatoes and yams. In here it’s filled—you can’t even walk. It’s awesome.
Julian takes me by the nurse’s office, the social worker’s office, the administrative offices. He shows me the quarters for the men who live at the Mission. Eighty beds spread out over three floors.
They are bunk beds, well designed so that the top bunk exits to the right, while the bottom bed exits to the left and each man has one sliver of privacy.
The guys who live in the program, they all have different job functions. Some work in the kitchen, in clothing, in the laundry room, cleaning, mopping—everyone has a job function because we do put a roof over their head, we clothe them, and give them a meal. They live in New York City for free. All we ask is that they do a little work.
We help anyone. We try to keep it structured and have rules in place but if someone comes in and they’re really in need we’ll help them. If they need a shower, are stinking things up really bad, we’ll take them down for a shower. So even if there’s rules, we’ll bend them a little bit.
We ascend the last staircase, narrow and steep, to the roof.
We’ve got Landmark status, did Matt say that? Historic structure. So we’re not going anywhere. In the neighborhood for good.
We emerge outside and are surrounded by rows of barren garden beds, still awaiting warmer temperatures.
Sitting here and watching everything grow is amazing. We’ve got all kinds of stuff, strawberries, vegetables, and kale. It’s funny because there are so many different cultures in the building—a lot of West Indian and Caribbean, and they love their hot peppers so we take requests and have all different kinds of peppers for them.
We walk toward the front of the building and look out at the street below. Julian points halfway down the block at a recently developed condo building whose large box windows dominate the facade.
That building, 250 Bowery, that’s ridiculous. There’s a three-bedroom penthouse on the top going for like $6–$7 million. It’s funny because, when their website went up it crashed because people were trying to get in. And someone blogged, “Gimme a break with the six million dollars. The Bowery Mission is a block away.”
He laughs.
I mean if you’re going to raise a family you don’t want homeless men sleeping on the front of your building. But people are buying them outright. That’s crazy.
Julian turns in the opposite direction, toward the Salvation Army building, which flanks the south side of the Mission.
The Salvation Army was for the Chinese elderly because Chinatown is next door. There’s ten floors but eight of the floors have been vacant for years. We tried to buy the building. Three years ago when they were first trying to sell it, we offered them $14 million—market value at the time. They wanted $24 million, ten over. And they just ended up getting $30 million for it. That’s crazy, right?
I consider the extraordinary range of activity crammed into the building below us, and how much more might be accomplished if the Bowery Mission had acquired the Salvation Army property immediately next door. I wonder how much the Bowery Mission’s building is worth, and how many hovering investors are poised to venture a guess. Julian escorts me down to the building’s entrance. Before we part ways he invites me back to volunteer next Thanksgiving.
I see Matt just as I’m leaving and I stop him to ask about the sale of the Salvation Army next door. Instead he tells me about the new facilities they are opening in Harlem, since that’s where they were able to successfully buy a building. But I press him on the building next door, which they wanted to buy for $14 million and use to expand services in their neighborhood.
The building next door to us was recently purchased and it’s going to become part of the Ace Hotel group. So that will be a little bit of a change for us because of our new neighbors. Right now we work with Salvation Army: if they have resources, they share; and we share if we have. Their staff will come over and do a chapel service and our staff will do the same. We’ve been working together over the years because we’ve been shoulder to shoulder and have similar values and goals of serving the less fortunate. So we’re going to miss them.
People ask us, “Are you moving? Are people going to want you to move?” But we’ve been in contact with the hotel developers and they well realize what we do and they’ve actually said as they’re developing, as they’re under the construction process, “Let us know whether there’s anything that we can do, or if we’re becoming a nuisance for you,” so they’ve opened up that door.
We’re hoping that the people who are running the hotel are open to working with us. We work with a number of hotels here in the city. Sometimes it’s picking up lost and found, sometimes it’s working with their kitchen and we can take food they’re not able to use. There are a number of ways that we’ve worked with hotels in the past and I don’t see there being any difference with our new neighbors.
Things evolve, right? I remember when I was younger we had a forest behind our house. Huge trees that were amazingly tall and over the years I realized that the tall trees were all gone because they had all fallen, but there were smaller trees where the taller trees had fallen and the forest was thicker. When I was a kid I could run straight through it and look up at the canopy. It was amazing. Years later the canopy was gone, there were still trees, but you’d have to wiggle your way through it. That was the evolution of the forest behind our house. And that’s happening here in the city as well. Neighborhoods evolve and I think if you’re willing to be a part of that process you’re really able to enjoy that process and enjoy your city.
Again the man with the shiny gold buttons appears and this time Matt introduces us, passing along my name but not his. The man smiles at me, smiles big, and looks away, presumably distracted by something in the distance, which he follows out of the room. Matt tells me that the mysterious man is one of the developers for the hotel next door.
First-name basis, loves the Mission. You can see their heart for what we do here. You know, yes, he’s thinking about making money but he’s also thinking about the neighborhood.
I tell Matt I’d love to talk to the man with the gold buttons about the hotel and how he sees it fitting into the neighborhood. Matt suddenly looks mildly worried and asks me to stay in place while he chases after the man. When he returns his boyish grin has yielded to a grimace and he tells me that the man with the gold buttons wishes to remain anonymous. Something about that phrasing—“wishes to remain anonymous”—told me these were the man’s exact words, and not Matt’s own, and instantly I admire the framework of seeking anonymity: it makes it feel as though a gift has been humbly bestowed.
Later when I call to ask the Salvation Army about the sale of 225 Bowery, they respond to me as they do to all inquisitors: no comment. When I ask about the previous market rate offer that the Bowery Mission made, they do not respond to my question, or illuminate what factors, other than cash on offer, were considered when choosing a buyer for the building, which has now begun the transition from a shelter to a hotel that is plugged into a chain with locations in Portland, Palm Springs, Seattle, Los Angeles, and London.