Boston Globe, April 13, 2008: Working. And Still Poor.
In presidential stump speeches, it’s called The Economy. In the state’s poorest city, it’s called a way of life. Charles P. Pierce finds in Lawrence a mother and her four hungry kids, a pastor and his meal center, a barber and his tenuous job, a financial giant doing some good, and a whole city trying to just hang on.
April 13, 2008
As the afternoon declines into evening, the line begins to form. The homeless men come first, battered parkas and beaten shoes, smoking their bent cigarettes down to the filters. The kids come later, the ones who come alone. School let out hours earlier. Their parents locked the house, because if the Department of Social Services dropped by and found the kids unattended while the parents were still at work, DSS could move the children out. So the parents lock the house, and the kids are on the street, and some of them come here and wait in the line. The families with children come last. They walk down Salem Street in Lawrence, down toward the angular new building at the foot of the old Nyhan Bridge, and take their places in line, smaller children climbing on top of larger ones because their mothers are too weary to stop them.
It is almost dinnertime at the Cor Unum Meal Center. Inside, a group of students who have come here from Temple University on a mission trip bustle and laugh. They gather around a table in the pantry, and they listen to the Rev. Paul O’Brien, the pastor of St. Patrick’s Church across the street. The meal center is the brainchild of O’Brien, who once roomed at Harvard with a more famous O’Brien named Conan. Built on a vacant lot that the parish owned, the center has been serving two meals a day to the city’s poor for almost two years now. (Conan O’Brien came early on, to help raise some of the $1.5 million it cost to build the place. Current Red Sox Sean Casey also got involved, while Casey was playing for Cincinnati, through a teammate Casey had at the University of Richmond.) And O’Brien explains to the Temple students that most of the people they will be serving this evening are neither indigent nor shiftless. Most of them work, the way people in Lawrence have always worked, earning money insufficient to their needs.
“It’s wild that, in the United States, there would be so many people who are working who can still be hungry,” he tells them. “Most of the people you see here are working families who can’t make enough to get by.”
The Temple students disperse throughout the building. One of them decides the Beatles will be the music for the evening meal. A few go off to the kitchen. Others put flowers on the tables in the dining room. Clean and bright, with the music blending in seamlessly with the bustle of preparation, the meal center could be any chain restaurant along any highway in America. A Denny’s outside Birmingham, say, or a Bob Evans rising from the fields of Indiana. Except that the food is free. “I would say, honestly, that the core issue here is the dignity of human life,” Father O’Brien explains. “It comes down to the inherent dignity in all of these people that is equal to everyone else’s.”
The doors open at 4:30, and the first group of about 80 people come in for dinner (between 300 and 500 will wander in during a typical night). Unaccompanied children are the only ones who get preferred seating. Everyone else waits patiently outside until tables open up. A man who was once a regular customer now functions as a kind of stern volunteer maitre d’, counting carefully on a clipboard the number of seats he has available. All he’s lacking is a tuxedo and a podium. Jessica Wilson and her four children are in the second seating of the evening. She is in her 30s, and she once worked in a factory, assembling electronic components, until she got hurt and went on disability. She heard about Cor Unum the way so many people in Lawrence do, by word of mouth. A neighbor told her about this place, almost a restaurant really, where she and the kids could come and sit down and eat a meal. Wilson was reluctant. She didn’t want people to know she was eating for free. She didn’t want people to know she had to eat for free.
“I’m still a little hard about that,” she says, “because of the pride thing, you know? I mean, you never know who you’ll run into here. You might run into a neighbor, you know, and what will they think? You didn’t know they came here, and they didn’t know you came here.”
They take a table near the kitchen. NaShawn, the 4-year-old, eats his dessert first, starting with the cake. Tables empty, and tables fill again. The Beatles sing softly about love being all you need, and the people keep coming, a slow and steady stream, across the Nyhan Bridge from one direction, or down Salem Street from the other, deep in the shadows of St. Patrick’s, a huge church built in the late 1800s and dedicated in 1894 through the contributions and labor of thousands of Irish immigrants who came to the town to work in the textile mills. The new families, most of them Hispanic, walk past this enormous monument to earlier immigrant dreams, and they pass by the sign with the schedule of Masses. The sign is in English and in Spanish. Its last line is in Vietnamese. There’s a story in that sign, and, especially, in between the lines of it.
THE MILLS DOMINATE THE CITY. SOME OF THEM HAVE been rehabilitated. Some of them now contain office space, or loft apartments. But some of them are still empty and blank-staring, running for blocks along the Merrimack River. These look like an ancient city unearthed, an archeology of what is loosely called in any election season, but especially in this one, The Economy.
The pundits and the professionals and all the television wise guys who bring to politics the nuanced analysis of an off-track betting parlor, they all tell us this is a transformative election. There’s a woman running. There’s a black man running. And that’s enough for the touts, but so much of the rest of it is just undifferentiated noise. The country is mired in one unpopular war abroad, and in another one that everyone seems to have forgotten. The federal government is bailing out investment houses, and homeowners now look at their mortgages as though someone has handed them a basket of cobras. It’s vain and simplistic to talk about The Issues, as though they were items on a list, but we do it anyway. The War. Healthcare. The Economy. As though they didn’t bleed together, one into the other.
Poverty used to be an issue in and of itself. A candidate named John Edwards tried to make it an issue again this time around, but all anyone wanted to talk about was his haircut, and his house, and his hedge fund, so, somehow, he vanished, and poverty got folded into the great amorphous anonymity of The Economy. (John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, has admitted he doesn’t know much at all “about the economy.”) Meanwhile, someone somewhere determines that they can afford to eat or they can afford their medicine, but not both. Is that The Economy? Or healthcare? The person is a veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder who can’t find a way to support himself. Is that The Economy? Healthcare? The war?
“Fifty percent of what I do is improvised,” says Father O’Brien, “because people’s problems are complicated, because people are complicated. If a person comes in and says, ‘I need money for a security deposit on this new apartment,’ it’d be easy if they just needed that. But it’s ‘I need the money because I have six children and I’m fleeing somebody,’ or ‘I’m dealing drugs,’ and it turns out that even if I get the security deposit, there’s a problem that next month is going to be a worse problem.”
To talk about The Economy is to talk about many different issues, and each issue contains many different, smaller economies. That has always been the case in Lawrence. At the turn of the last century, its factories produced goods estimated to be worth almost $50 million. The wealth did not trickle down, however, to the immigrants who worked in the mills, usually for less than $10 a week. In 1912, the accumulated despair of as many as 22,000 individual economies went into the streets in what has become known as the Bread and Roses strike. It became necessary in our politics to discuss labor and workplace safety. They became issues that drove discussion of The Economy as surely as the tariff had at various points in history. And the process was driven by the small personal economies caught up in the larger issues that made up what today would be glibly called The Economy on television, which is where the election seems to be taking place.
Not much has changed in Lawrence, except the mills have closed and the newer immigrants speak Spanish, or Vietnamese. It is now the poorest city in Massachusetts, its per-capita income $13,360. Approximately 21 percent of the population, and 31 percent of its children, live below the poverty line. There are 80,000 people living in a little over 7 square miles in the city, and its housing stock is so unchanged from its mill-working days that Lawrence still has 11 rooming houses in operation. “I think this is the way Lawrence has always been,” says Mayor Michael Sullivan. “Way back to the strike, those were immigrants who came over because of the jobs, and they were very poor. They were starting up. We’re a start-up city. This is a place where people come to get their start.”
Perhaps the only way to look at what we are told is an epochal election is in the fractal views of it that we get from people’s lives and the places where they live them, the reality behind the noisy pomp and grand rhetoric. In a fragmented country – running itself through another one of its atomized elections, its politics as carefully marketed and niche-driven as the FM radio dial – there has to be a place for the basic, tangled humanity that keeps the whole business from being simply a salesman’s Kabuki. Lawrence is one place to start.
IRONICALLY, AND THERE’S A GREAT DEAL ABOUT Lawrence that speaks to history’s limitless gift for reckless irony, many of the mills now house nonprofit companies set up to cope with the problems that remain ongoing in Lawrence but which really began when the mills stopped being mills. There’s a new service industry here in the places where the textile industry used to be. Around the corner from the Cor Unum Meal Center is a low-lying mill set on a small hill above the street. Fidelity House Human Services is located in some offices on the second floor, the morning light barely filtering in through the wide old windows.
Fidelity House works with 600 people and families in the area in and around Lawrence, mostly families with disabled or developmentally challenged children. The original goal was to find funding for the families to use to make their lives easier, to help them find recreational facilities or after-school programs, for example. But as times hardened over the past two years, the money went for other things. “Now,” says Yvonne Allard, the director of the program, “people are using it to pay their utility bills, the heat, rent. They’re using it for food.”
The density of Lawrence almost guarantees that programs like Fidelity House will miss people it could help. Lawrence always has been overpopulated for such a small piece of land, and Sue Lunn, Fidelity House’s director of children and family services, knows how easily families can get lost in the crowded city. “What makes it interesting,” explains Lunn, “is trying to find the folks that we service. We don’t want them to think we’re just another office in the city. We want them to see us actually living here.”
Not far from this mill, set back from South Union Street behind a bakery, is a complex of two old mills connected by a walkway. There is a day-care center there, and a health clinic, and the offices of Vinfen, another nonprofit, this one dealing with the mentally ill who are living in poverty. A corps of outreach staff goes out, every day, to deliver medicines. “We have to go out to all these places that are single-room occupancies,” explains Jeanne Russo, who manages Vinfen’s Lawrence operations. “We see people with mental health issues that nobody else comes to see, in and out of the rooming houses, and we’ve never had an issue.”
Eileen Igoe is one of the people who goes out into the community to deliver the medicine. The managers of the rooming houses know her, and her clients know when she’s coming. “Some of the stuff that we do, it can get easier the more you do it,” she says. “Once you’ve been to a place, like a rooming house, down in a neighborhood, they know why we’re coming to see them.”
Breaking down this wariness takes a great deal of time. Often, the people with whom the nonprofits are dealing have developed coping strategies that take months to overcome. They are liable to look at the representatives of the nonprofits as indistinguishable from the people who work for the government.
“There are a lot of rumors in the community about what a landlord can do and about what an abusive spouse can do,” explains Michael Rabbe, the supervising attorney at Neighborhood Legal Services in Lawrence. “A woman came in the other day and absolutely believed that, because she was married to this man who’d been beating her terribly, because he was the head of the household, he would get her kids because it was his right. Maybe her friends told her that; maybe he did. It’s very hard to break that down.” And, often, people are too exhausted to try.
“There’s not an easy answer,” says Fidelity’s Sue Lunn. “All the problems take on an edge with the level of economic stress.”
All the issues are woven together in the offices in the old mills – healthcare for the people living in the rooming houses for whom housing is an issue in a jammed old city, the war for all the veterans trying to stay afloat, and all those private economies that are all part of The Economy.
SOMETIMES, YOU CAN SEE THE WHOLE election in a pothole.
Two years ago, Carlos Acevedo came up to North Lawrence from New York City to look for work. Trained as a barber, he’d been tipped to a place called Camilo’s on South Union Street a couple of blocks off Broadway. He was driving home when he hit a pothole not far from the shop and flattened one of his tires. Nevertheless, he moved his wife and his two daughters to Lawrence and rented a chair at Camilo’s from Julio Sanchez, a fellow Dominican who’d bought the place, because he liked the freedom he got to earn his own money.
He agreed with Sanchez that there was a great satisfaction in how people changed when they got a good haircut. The shop struggled. But Acevedo stayed, carving fades and other popular cuts into the heads of the neighborhood kids until he became as much a part of the neighborhood’s identity as the shop itself is. “I stay here because you see so many different kinds of people here,” he says. “Right now, though, it’s tough, because everything is so expensive. The electric. The heat. Gas to get to work.” Then, one night, two years after he’d moved to Lawrence, Acevedo turned down the street toward Broadway on his way home. He hit the same pothole and flattened another tire.
“You got to wonder about the government,” he says. “You’d think they’d have fixed the pothole by now. I think I should call it mine. They should give it to me.”
There are still small businesses here. There are the inevitable chains; there’s a CVS up the block and a Subway in the other direction, but Camilo’s is the kind of place that anchors a block in its history and its personality, even today, when the neighborhood kids sometimes panhandle for food money on the sidewalk outside. So is the diner on Broadway.
In 1934, Charlie O’Neil built what was then called a “lunchcart” in South Lawrence. He was such a presence in the community that the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune covered the grand opening. Aaronian’s Meat and Fish took out an ad in the news-paper, and the story pointed out that Miss Marion Wilson, “one of the city’s most popular young ladies,” would be seeing to the needs of “the fairer sex.” In those days, the opening of a new lunch-cart was a community event equal to any of the corporate ribbon-cuttings that Lawrence sees today.
Charlie’s is still there on a dreary morning in late February, 74 years later. Two guys in a booth are talking politics. They agree that Hillary Clinton looks tired, and try to recall exactly what trouble John McCain once had with a savings and loan. There’s no sense of anything resembling a rush here at Charlie’s, stuck between breakfast and lunch on a day stuck between winter and spring.
Charlie Kazakides had owned his own restaurant in Arlington for 21 years, but he’d had a stroke and, while he was recovering, he says, “I couldn’t work. I lost the trade.” Once he’d gotten better, he looked around for another property. Charlie’s had fallen into disrepair. There had been a fire in 1999, and the previous owner was trying to unload the place. People warned Kazakides about Lawrence, but the diner was a bargain, and he liked the neighborhood. In December, he bought it and became the most recent Charlie to own the place. While it’s still relatively empty, it has its regulars, and there is something constant about that despite all the changes wrought in the city, and in the lives of its people, by what people elsewhere call The Economy.
“It’s all about patience,” Kazakides says. “To have a place where people come to eat good food in big portions, a clean place where they can relax. That’s what diners have always been about.” Sometimes, you can see the whole election in a meal.
AT DUSK, THE SPIRES OF ST. PATRICK’S CAST LONG shadows up Salem Street and partway across the Nyhan Bridge, up toward where the cranes and steam shovels are still clearing the charred and pulpy debris from a fire in January at an abandoned nightclub that spread to 15 buildings and put more than 100 people out onto the street. Across the river, the old abandoned mills that were the economies of their time grow dark first in their windows, as though they die inside every evening. Sunset over Lawrence is a nightly metaphor of history, happening over and over again, the way Eugene O’Neill said it did in the Ireland that chased so many people away into the mills of New England. They were devoured by The Economy there, and the issues of how they survived contained so many little economies that they all took them into the streets and laid the template for a city’s personality that has remained unchanged up to this very evening.
There are still people lined up at Cor Unum, many of them children, as their parents come off work. Inside, the Temple students are dragging just a bit as their shift nears an end. The crowd hasn’t changed much. There are the homeless men in their battered parkas, and the family groups trying to corral the younger children to come sit and eat with the older ones, and the white elderly people who eat slowly, their eyes downcast, as though someone might recognize them and know that they’ve had to come to this place and eat for free. An evicted person sits next to someone with a barely treated gash in her shoulder, and she sits next to someone who was put out by the ferocious multi-building fire in January. Dozens of small, personal economies, blunted and warped and damaged by the hundreds of issues contained within The Economy, come here and mingle.
“Once people get in the door,” Father O’Brien explains, “and they get to experience all kinds of folks, they realize that nobody’s asking questions. If you live under a bridge, and you look like you live under a bridge, then people here probably know that you live under a bridge. But who cares? Once people come in, the transition from wondering about this place to embracing it is pretty brief. Pride is still the single biggest barrier for most hungry people looking for food, particularly for older people. We’ve got Anglos in their 70s, living in studio apartments with two sticks of furniture, eating grade-D tuna, but they won’t necessarily come in here. It’s a continuing challenge for us.”
Teresa Wilson and her children are finishing dinner. NaShawn’s gone back for another piece of cake. This is not like being handed a bag of rice from the back door of a warehouse or government cheese out of a flatbed truck. That was what enabled her first to come into the place, to overcome the pride that’s as much a part of her personal economy as her disability check is, and it’s what keeps her coming back, despite the pride that still burns a little when she walks in the door. “It’s nice and clean and friendly,” she explains. “It’s like a little restaurant. We come because the kids like it. It’s a free restaurant, so we come for the fun of that, too.”
The election doesn’t touch this place, because politics rarely does. “We’ve been open for a year and a half, and we’ve served over 175,000 meals,” says Father O’Brien. “Do you know how many politicians have set foot in this place? Two. Niki Tsongas, when she was running, and Susan Tucker, our state senator, who’s a good egg. Wouldn’t you think that politicians, even crass politicians, would run here to see what’s going on? How do you do this so inexpensively? Who are the people actually working here, and do you think they might want to vote for me?”
The election is just noise, and only dim noise at that. It’s drowned out by the hundreds of issues that run through The Economy like water roaring through a millrace and then driving those thousands of tiny economies contained in those issues the way the water once drove the wheels in the mills. These are the smallest, most atomized parts of a country that is said to be transforming itself in its choice of a president somewhere out there beyond where the night is falling.
One night, not long after Cor Unum opened, director Diane Jarvis went out into the community to drum up business. This required her to seek out people where they lived, indoors or not. She came to a bridge, and, at one end, there were some people living there who had a broken television set up on a card table. It looked like any suburban den, except it was under a bridge. Jarvis talked to those people about the new meal center, invited them to come over to eat. And then one of them pointed a little farther down under the bridge, where there were boxes on the ground, and there were people sleeping in them.
You should try down there, the woman with her own card table told Diane Jarvis. Down there is where the poor people live.
Charles P. Pierce is a Globe Magazine staff writer. E-mail him at cpierce@globe.com.