N.Y. Journal: A constant Christian presence

The Lower East Side, New York, has gone from aristocracy and sophistication to squalor and debauchery and back to aristocracy---but with one constant Christian presence for the past 130 years: the Bowery Mission, which has pulled the homeless from squalor, fed and sheltered them, and helped them mend their lives with God's help.

According to historian Eric Ferrara, speaking at a Bowery Mission anniversary event, before the Mission moved in, the wealthy lived and amused themselves in the Lower East Side. It was once New York's theater district, where America's first ballet performance took place and where its first gaslit theater lit up.

But then waves of immigrants crashed on Manhattan---the Irish, the German---and as the immigrants moved in, the wealthy moved out. The Lower East Side became one of the most densely populated few square miles in the world, with people stacked in flophouses and crowding tenements. The theaters and ballets soon disappeared, and dance halls and saloons took their places. Men brawled, women sold their bodies, and the Lower East Side became "America's greatest or worst vice district," said Ferrara, "depending on who you ask."

But as debauchery moved in, so did the religious institutions and social service groups. The Bowery Mission opened its chapel doors on November 6, 1909, and has hosted the preaching of more than 1 million sermons since. Men with shattered lives have sat in the wooden pews, fenced in on all sides by Scripture verses decorating the painted cinder block walls, hearing sermons from evangelists like Billy Sunday and Billy Graham.

President William Howard Taft appeared on its stage. When Franklin D. Roosevelt visited the mission as a candidate, he preached hope, saying, "I think things are going up, not down." The Bowery Mission helped people cope with Prohibition by offering banquets, and hired motivational speakers during the Depression.

The Mission has seen the neighborhood change: Puerto Rican immigrants moved in, then the beat poets and the artists turned abandoned studios into artist's lofts, and Jack Kerouac would write, "The Bowery Blues." In the 1970s, the neighborhood slid further as the city went bankrupt and people began to flee to the suburbs. Buildings were boarded up and left empty.

The place has come full circle, with rising rents making the neighborhood too expensive for the vibrant artist's culture---or for the social service organizations---that used to live there. Today, the Lower East Side is where you still go for music---the Living Room, Googies, Pianos, the Bowery Ballroom, the Mercury Lounge---but rising rent and celebrities have chased the artists to other neighborhoods. Another homeless shelter now shares a wall with a four-star hotel.

Ferrara, the historian who charted this arc, was once homeless himself. Few understand what it means "to feel invisible, suspect, avoided, and always on guard," he said. But for 130 years now, through upheaval and change, the mission proves that "a man can shed his skin and start a new life."