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Part of the Solution

by Alison Barnet
Wednesday Jan 29, 2014

I went to Haley House to ask former Executive Director Kathe McKenna about her new role-Assistant for Special Projects-and we ended up talking about everything under the sun. Bing Broderick, formerly Business and Marketing Director, is now Executive Director. Kathe will be working for him; she doesn't intend to be "the director in the corner."

We sat in the empty soup kitchen at 23 Dartmouth Street; Kathe never saw a reason to give it an upscale name. The space is regularly used by groups such as AA and the South End Seniors.

First among Kathe's special projects is arranging to buy the Haley House Bakery Café building on Dade Street in Roxbury and the parking lot around it. Opened in 2005, the restaurant and venue for community programs has become too small-I know because I once had to sit on a milk crate. Part of the reason for its popularity is that Bing has been a linchpin (a word Kathe likes), welcoming groups like Discover Roxbury and the Color of Film Collaborative.

Haley House, the non-profit institution, has been around since 1966, when John McKenna rented a room on Mass. Ave. and began offering food and a bed to strangers, usually alcoholic men. A pimp upstairs wasn't pleased, and so John invited Kathe, an organizer for Young Christian Students, to work with him out of an apartment on Upton Street, where they practiced the principles of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement, offering hospitality to people on the margins of society. They would serve people, not as social workers, but by being with them. It was, of course, a very Sixties thing to do; the Civil Rights movement, communes, hippies, and tenant organizing were happening all around them.

Those were the days when "homeless" meant alcoholic, and alcoholic men lined up at Police Station 4 or the Salvation Army Harbor Light Center on Shawmut Ave. for a ticket for a meal and a bed. This was Skid Row. It was illegal to drink on the street and, when picked up, alcoholics were sent to Bridgewater State Hospital for sixty days. The Rufus Dawes Hotel, predecessor to the Pine Street Inn, accepted "unattached persons" for the night but saw drinking as a moral issue. Put out early in the morning, these men started coming by Haley House, then on Dartmouth Street. Always looking to be part of the solution, the McKennas soon engaged them in baking bread. It wasn't long before baking bread became a business, and it was an important turning point when "the guys" started teaching the college-educated volunteers who lived upstairs how to bake bread. Some of these men moved in, becoming volunteer staff. Trips to Haley House's organic farm in Winchendon, now sold to a local land trust, was another communal experience.

As tough as the lives of many of the men who came to Haley House were, the neighborhood's roomers were poorer and even "more compromised," says Kathe. Haley House began buying rooming houses and now owns 110 units of low-income housing in conjunction with Madison Park Development Corporation. An early tenant said it was the first time he'd been able to sleep through the night.

Haley House enjoys neighborhood support, although it hasn't always been easy. "Already in my backyard," a 2006 MIT thesis by Caitlin Gallagher, studied NIMBYism, contrasting dynamics in the Ellis neighborhood, where Haley House is located, with the neighborhood around the Pine Street Inn. Haley House, a small operation in a small-scale, slowly-changing neighborhood, didn't pose much of a threat, although, as one resident commented, the neighborhood was trying to 'pull itself up by its bootstraps,' and Haley House was attracting people the neighborhood 'didn't need.'" "Ultimately, Haley House became a combination of benign neighbor and source of local pride," Gallagher concluded.

In the mid-90s, when Haley House replaced its concrete façade along Montgomery Street, installing windows, its relationship with the neighborhood improved. Being offered free bread hot out of the oven helped.

Among the other subjects Kathe and I discussed were bookie joints-a numbers headquarters was once directly across the street-and "affordable" housing. Kathe recently became angry when a woman said that low-income people don't want to live in luxury housing. "Does she think people don't want to live in a nice place," asked Kathe rhetorically, "in a good location, where their children can walk safely to school?"

Many people know about the bakery and the training program for people coming out of prison, but Haley House also works with children. For two years, it has had programs at the McKinley School-first a garden, and now culinary classes. "Haley House," as one writer put it, "has kept food at the heart of everything they do."

Alison Barnet is the author of the recently-published South End Character, which can be purchased for $10 at the South End Food Emporium, 465 Columbus Ave., or at Blunch, 59 East Springfield Street. They do it "for the neighborhood" and make no profit from the book.

Alison Barnet is the author of Extravaganza King: Robert Barnet and Boston Musical Theater. She has lived in the South End since 1964 and has been writing about it for almost as long.


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