SNAPSHOT
A PL ACE TO LINGER
The Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen’s new drop-in center aims to centralize homelessness resources in New Haven. BY NICOLE DIRKS On a mellow afternoon in early April, the Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen’s new drop-in center hosted its soft opening. A sign in an archetypal Homegoods-Mom style hung above my head, fiercely combining both Comic Sans and cursive: COFFEE, PRAYER & CONVERSATION Always welcome here. And it was right, minus the prayer: coffee and conversation dominated the space. Even though clients came for a variety of reasons—food, outlets, Wi-Fi, the bathroom—everyone, it seemed, ended up moving from a water-hungry Keurig to seating areas where other peers and volunteers perched. The space was smaller than I expected—more a room than a floor. It was cozier than antici-
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pated, too, in part due to its furnishings: orange chairs tucked into green-marbled tables, red brick walls, blue-grey-tiled floors interspersed with red-painted support columns, a satisfyingly full bookshelf, and stacked boxes of board games. There was no immediate evidence that the room was formerly home to a dog grooming salon, a (human) hair salon, and a businessmen’s lunch club at various points in time. I volunteered on the fifth day of operation at the new Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen (DESK) location at 266 State Street. It was my first day there. Before, in the few days since opening, only two or three people had wandered in, my supervisor told me––but today, seven or eight clients gradually gathered in the space. After showing me a series of
adorable cat TikToks on his phone, one client, seated by himself with a French vanilla roast from the Keurig, invited me to ask him questions. He provided an answer before I asked any. “It’s hard to find a place to be,” he said. “I’ve been homeless for twenty-five years. I think that’s the hardest thing.”
“It’s hard to find a place to be.” The Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen has provided food assistance out of the basement of the Parish House of Center Church on Temple Street (steps from the Green) since 1987, born from an era of welfare cutbacks that caused a soup kitchen resurgence T HE NEW JOUR NAL
