Catholic Worker odds & ends
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "personalist" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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10:08 am
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PINEAPPLE STREET/BROOKLYN, NY
Opposite ends of Pineapple Street, Brooklyn Heights, NY where Dorothy Day was born in 1897, the third of five children born to Grace Satterlee and John I. Day. Her full name, as listed on her birth certificate, was Dorothy May Day. RS
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11:34 am
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CHERRY STREET/NYC
"I left my suitcase in the office and walked along Cherry Street, under Manhattan Bridge, looking at the tenements that had 'furnished rooms' signs outside."---from THE LONG LONELINESS by Dorothy Day.
This photo, taken on Cherry Street, shows the Brooklyn Bridge in the distance. The Manhattan Bridge is not visible because it is almost overhead. It was here that Dorothy found a furnished room when she left her parents home and found a job at the NEW YORK CALL. The story can be read in the chapter "The East Side" in her autobiography, "The Long Loneliness." RS
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11:02 am
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UNION SQUARE---NYC
This is the southern entrance to Union Square, between Broadway and Park Avenue South where Dorothy Day and three young volunteers sold the first edition of "The Catholic Worker" on May Day of 1933 to a large number of mainly unemployed New Yorkers attending a rally. There were many Communists in the crowd as well as other radicals. Two of the young men ran off when they were heckled by some members of the crowd. For the first issue of the paper 2500 copies were printed; by the end of the year the circulation had risen to 100,000!
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03:47 am
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175 CHRYSTIE STREET
"No one has given a realistic description if our new headquarters, St. Joseph's House at 175 Chrystie Street, and everyone who comes there is shocked at how miserable our surroundings are. If the loft on Spring Street was inadequate and dingy, though spacious, the new site is dingier an smaller. There is a cellar, half of which the landlord uses. When the cellar door fell in, we paid for a new one, seventy-five dollars, so he allows us to use the back of the cellar. Our rent is $275 a month. The ground floor is cemented and impossible to keep clean with hundreds of people tramping in and out each day. We cannot seat more than twenty at a time and others sit on benches toward the front of the store, or go up the one short flight to the 'sitting room' floor where the clothes rooms are, for women and men. On the third floor are offices, and the floors slant, and every time anyone walks across the room the boards shake. From the interstices of the metal ceiling, the rain pours in so that on rainy days we have had three large metal wastepaper baskets filling up with water over and over again. Tarring the roof around the skylight does not seem to have helped much.
Even with all this, given the money for materials a few skilled workers could affect a change, but the clutter and filth would remain the same. It is not just the books and papers and overflow of desks all over the place. All Catholic Workers feel their desk is their home, and all have demanded one, save Peter Maurin alone, who made his knees his desk and his pockets his bookcases.
The filth comes from a pack-rat we have with us, a most lovable guy whom we have known for many years and who is evicted over and over and always returns, with more and more clutter, boxes upon boxes of trash, garbage, old papers, books, bits of furniture, piled in every corner, hallway, toilet, cellar and roof. He rooms in an apartment with two other men, and he has surrounded himself there also in the same way with this inconceivable quantity of trash which it is impossible to get him to move, without all the moral and physical force one can command. And if one is anarchist-pacifist to the unreasonable degree that so many around the Catholic Worker are, an Augean stable is the result of this respect for man's freedom.
Authority and freedom, reason and faith, personalism and communitarianism---all these were the subject of Peter Maurin's discussions, but if you asked him what to do about Kichi Harada or Roy Bug, he would give you a few essays on the Thomistic Doctrine of The Common Good to read and digest which would help you solve your problems and come to your own decision. Peter, having died in 1949, such problems are left to me to solve when I return home from a trip.
So far Hercules has not arrived to solve this problem for us. The thing to do is hire a truck, find out if we can bring it down to the river to load on one of the garbage barges to be taken off to some far off dump to be used as fill, or burned, or both. They have lost some beautiful swamp land which was a game preserve, and where even wild orchids grew, by such city efficiency. But this line of thought would lead one to give up and to wander away and become a desert father, and we are a family, which includes Roy Bug and must stick together. The only thing is to be ruthless and energetic and start afresh. Is there anyone ruthless and energetic around the CW?
But this outward show of destitution is nothing compared to the destitution suffered by those whose plumbing is out of repair, whose toilets overflow, who have no sixty dollars to call a Roto-Rooter to unstop the pipes and drains.
And of course there are always the problems of lice and dirt in slum tenements with neither bath nor shower. Such is our life in the city, and it is a gigantic effort for the destitute to try to live decently, a Herculean effort.
If we comfort ourselves that we are sharing in some small way with the misery of the migrant worker and the slum dweller by enduring these things, our places on the land, being loved, taken on an aspect of true comfort. There is always work to do. Young and old, able and disabled contribute to the common good. And if some of the problems of personal dirt and disorder remain with us even there, they are more easily handled, and fresh air, sky and green trees are all around us.
The Catholic Worker headquarters remain in the city because our work is here, and it is where people can find us. Visitors abound to the extent that it is hard to get work done. Mail piles up that needs to be answered, there are meetings to go to, and meetings each Friday night. There is a mysterious attraction in the great city for the young. So we remain in the cities, the gutter sweepers of the diocese, working yet beggars, destitute yet possessing all things; happy because today the sun shines, there is a symphony on the radio, children are playing on the streets, there is a park across the way and a church around the corner where we receive our daily Bread. 'Lord, I believe, help Thou my unbelief.' So please 'give us our daily bread,' and the money we need to keep up with our rents."---from the June, 1961 entry in ON PILGRIMAGE; THE SIXTIES by Dorothy Day
175 Chrystie is the building in the center with the green awning. This photo was taken in 2008. RS
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06:22 pm
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THE CHARLES STREET HOUSE
"St. Joseph inspired the priests of St. Veronica's on Christopher Street to make inquiries among their parishioners about a house suitable for our purposes. On a Monday they told Dorothy about a large house, long abandoned...By Friday we had left 438 East 15th Street and had moved to our new location at 144 Charles St. which was on the outskirts of Greenwich Village...A solitary ailanthus tree grew across the street. It was the one contact with nature that we had on our new block. A few feet away from the tree was the Charles Street police station."---from "Wings of the Dawn" by Stanley Vishnewsi. Published by The Catholic Worker.
The building at 144 Charles Street was demolished long ago but the building with two tall towers in this photograph at one time housed the Charles St. police station that Stanley mentions. Some years ago it was converted into luxury housing. This photo was taken in 2008. RS
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05:14 am
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JOHN STANLEY ON MICHAEL HARRINGTON
In response to an essay by Maurice Isserman on Mike Harrington in the New York Times John Stanley wrote:
"Editor Monday, 6-22=09
Book Review
NY Times
620 8th Ave
NY 10018
Dear Editor,
Interesting essay on Mike Harrington by Prof. Isserman. Who chose the photograph? Fascinating choice. A bit
mocking perhaps? 'Deep Thinker?'? Lots of photographs of Mike. Are there some from his White Horse period, mid-50's? He led some of us from the old San Remo to the Horse, when he made his budge from the Catholic
Worker at Chrystie and East Houston, just a block east of the Bowery, then a cloaca of human degradation that
was framed, in part, by the Third Avenue 'El' which rumbled over it, sending down on to it large, liquid blue-white sparks.
At the Horse he spent a few 1950s years working out his politics (and studying German) first with editors of
the Commonweal, such as Bill Clancy, and then moving on to Bogden Denitch an others.
We always knew he was bright; could argue circles around many of us; too clever by 'alf, others might suggest. Harrington and his comrades found it prudent, (the premier natural virtue), to temporize and make sure everyone knew you were on the right side of the anti-Communist Crusade, which, of course, the Neo-Holy Alliance of Capitalist Christendom won in the early 90s. Meanwhile, generations of Americans suffered the radical deprivation of health care, housing, education, et cetera. An almost unfathomable scandal, almost as depraved as what we inflicted on Vietnam and other helpless places, death toll in the many millions. It, of course, 'all goes together,' as Eric Gill famously said. We used the blood of the oppressed to print our money!
Mike Harrington put too much of his intelligence, and considerable personal charm, into the anti-Communist Crusade. Was the socialist Soviet Russia a paradise on earth? Of course not. The neo-holy Alliance deformed it too radically by making incessant war on it, from the moment of its birth. How often in US Memorial Day speeches are Doughboys, who died fighting the Reds in the early days of the Russian Revolution, mourned or even mentioned? They're buried there. This is where our wealth went, starting in 1917, fighting the anti-socialist crusade.
It is a scandal, deep as the darkest grave. The neo-holy Alliance spent most of the 20th century either fighting socialism or fighting the Fascists, whom we originally raised up to fight the Reds. Just think now, early in the 21st century, we in America might have universal (socialized!) health care. Mike Harrington gave too much comfort to the enemy---and our own ruling class is truly our enemy. Did he write some good things? Of course. But, I'm afraid he rested on his oars and didn't do enough to struggle against the tide.
With respectful good wishes,
John Stanley
NYC
PS. I met Mike Harrington in the Spring of 1954. I knocked on the door of the Catholic Worker, then at 223 Chrystie Street, just off East Houston Street, and he answered it, greeted me, gave me coffee, and engaged me in conversation. I was teaching at Villanova (University), my alma mater, class of '49, where I attended on the G.I. Bill. (I had served in uniform in the ETO, 1941-45.) I didn't know it, but Mike was just about to leave the CW. A couple of years later (for about two years) I knew him at the White Horse Tavern, famous as the watering hole of the poet, Dylan Thomas, when he was in New York, before he died in 1953."
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06:56 am
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SELF-EXAMINATION BY AMMON HENNACY
"Am I a pacifist because I never liked shooting and hunting? Am I an anarchist because I did not want to come out second best in political strife? Am I a vegetarian because I am squeamish about blood, and not out of love for animals? Do I refuse to pay taxes because I want to be 'different' and thus important in this respect, when I have failed to become 'important' in the accepted ways of the world? How much is ego and how much is principle? When I take the absolutist stand and criticize those who 'chicken out,' how much of this is vain glory and how much of this is true principle? Standing out of my self and looking at this guy, Hennacy, just who is he? When I say that I do not care what others say about me, is this true serenity or callousness?
What started me off of the beaten track? I made the mistake of asking questions of a Baptist minister and he told me to go and hear the great evangelist, Billy Sunday. I did so, and it was so awful that I became an atheist. The preacher who baptized me told me not to read a certain paper. I read it and became a Socialist. In solitary I had only the Bible to read and in time I became a pacifist and a non-church Christian. Too much government in prison made me relish Tolstoy's ideas and I became an anarchist. Later, a withholding tax came and I quit my job and worked as a transient for eleven years rather than pay taxes for war. Berkman, Debs and Dorothy encouraged me in the one-man revolution which incidents or accidents had started me on.
To grow, I got away from my family, although I was always helped by the steadfastness of my mother. Contact with the State helped make me an anarchist; churches were always more of a stumbling block than a help to me.
Now if the reader has time he can make an attempt to look at himself, his motives, and deeds, or his lack of action. He can discover his strength and his lack of strength---and proceed onwards, if possible.
Reading over the above I realize that there is a modicum of truth in these detractions I make of myself. Just how much is true it is difficult to tell. Reading this over ought to keep me from being arrogant. Some people have told me that without my saying a word, just to see me doing these things upon which I pride myself, is enough to upset them, for they know they should be doing some of these things, at least, and they do not do them. Therefore my very presence before them denotes arrogance and spiritual pride. This is supposed to be a very great sin. My reply has been: 'What do you want me to do, go and get drunk, or get a gun and shoot someone and thus show my fallibility? ' If you want to live up to your ideal you have to run the risk of thus being accused, an you ought also at times 'come out of yourself' and accuse yourself.---from THE ONE-MAN REVOLUTION IN AMERICA
Ammon Hennacy at the age of 76
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11:09 am
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THE NEWBURGH, NY CATHOLIC WORKER FARM
This photo was taken around 1950 I think but by whom I don't know. It was given to me by Agnes Bird McCormack. The man in the white shirt is Jack English, who ended up as a Trappist monk and priest at the Abbey of the Holy Ghost outside Atlanta. The man in the foreground facing the camera is Tom Sullivan, house manager and editor of the CATHOLIC WORKER in the late Forties and early Fifties. The woman in the right rear is Kay Brinkworth. RS
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03:57 am
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115 Mott Street---NYC
"In April, 1936 we moved from 144 Charles Street to 115 Mott Street. An elderly reader of the paper offered us the use of a rear tenement building and two store fronts facing the street. We were able to rent additional rooms in the front of the building... Dorothy, when she went through the building, rejoiced over the fact that each room had an open fireplace that was in working condition. 'We can at least keep warm this winter, she said...We can pick up all the wood we need from the push cart markets...We won't have to spend too much money on coal.' "---from WINGS OF THE DOVE by Stanley Vishnewski.
On the far left of the picture is "Big Dan" Orr. The short elderly man in the center is Peter Maurin. On the far right is Gerry Griffin and the taller man next to him in the dark suit is John Cort. I can't identify the others in the picture. This photo was given to me by Agnes Bird McCormack and is now in the CW archives at Marquette Univ. RS
The photo below is also 115 Mott Street, now a part of Chinatown. It was taken in 2008. RS
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08:02 am
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A YOUNG DOROTHY DAY IN NEW YORK
"In June 1916, I left the University of Illinois for good...The family was moving to New York again...In a few months I would be eighteen. I lived at home while I was looking for a job but as soon as I found one that autumn on the NEW YORK CALL, the Socialist paper, I left to take a room down on the East Side."---from "From Union Square to Rome" by Dorothy Day, Orbis Books 2006.
"Even though I made fun of 'the diet squad of one' in the column I wrote for the paper, I was surprised myself at how cheaply one person could live, once having given up the kind of standards set up by a family such as mine."---from THE LONG LONELINESS by Dorothy Day, Harper & Row, 1952
Dorothy Day is the taller of the two.
They are holding copies of the CALL.
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08:10 am
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DOROTHY DAY AND HER BIOGRAPHER
The date of this photo is uncertain. It was probably taken at the farm in Tivoli, NY.
From left to right---William D. Miller (the author of DOROTHY DAY; A Biography, New York, Doubleday, 1982 and A HARSH AND DREADFUL LOVE, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement, New York, Liveright, !973.), Martin Corbin (CW editor), and Dorothy Day---all now deceased.
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10:19 am
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ALLEN TATE ON DOROTHY DAY AND "BACK TO THE LAND"
Poet Allen Tate, one of the "southern agrarians" and husband of Dorothy's friend, novelist Caroline Gordon, wrote another southern poet, Donald Davidson, in 1936: "I also enclose a copy of a remarkable monthly paper, The Catholic Worker. The editor, Dorothy Day, has been here, and is greatly excited by our whole program. Just three months ago she discovered "I'll Take My Stand," and has been commenting on it editorially. She is ready to hammer away in behalf of the new book. Listen to this: The Catholic Worker now has a paid circulation of 100,000! She offers her entire mailing list to Houghton-Mifflin: I've just written to Linscott about it. Miss Day may come by Nashville with us if the conference falls next weekend. She has been speaking all over the country in Catholic schools and colleges. A very remarkable woman. Terrific energy, much practical sense, and a fanatical devotion to the cause of the land."-----quotation taken from WHOLE EARTH, Summer 2000,RS
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06:21 pm
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POLLY HOLLADAY'S RESTAURANT
This is a photo of Polly Holladay's restaurant at 135-137 MacDougal Street in New York's Greenwich Village. The young woman sitting at the table in the foreground in the white blouse was Virginia Noah Forrest who was the third wife of Berkeley Tobey. They were married from about 1916-18. Shortly after they split up Tobey married Dorothy Day. They were married for about a year, during which time they went to Europe where Dorothy wrote her autobiographical novel, "The Eleventh Virgin." Dorothy undoubtedly knew this restaurant. It was Polly Holladay's son Louis, who upon deliberately taking a drug over dose while sitting in Romany Marie's Saloon near Sheridan Square with Dorothy Day, Charles Demuth, Eugene O'Neill and Agnes Boulton, died in Dorothy's arms.
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12:15 pm
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ST. MICHAEL'S CHAPEL
"10:30 St. Michael's for Russian Mass. Met Helene Iswolsky there, and we had coffee with Lyons Carr and wife and children after Helene came over to Chrystie St. ----Sunday May 15, 1955 entry in Dorothy's diary
St. Michael's Russian chapel, a Uniate church on Mulberry Street, was next door to St. Patrick's Old Cathedral and just a couple of blocks from the Catholic Worker headquarters at 223 Chrystie Street. Dorothy, Ammon Hennacy, Michael Kovalak and others of the CW community often attended the Sunday liturgy there. Helene Iswolsky, who taught Russian language and history at Fordham University, who was one of Dorothy's dearest friends, also attended the liturgy at St. Michael's on occasion. Helene's father, Alexander Iswolsky, had been foreign minister to Czar Nicholas II and later the Russian ambassador to the French Republic. Helene once introduced Dorothy to Alexandra Tolstoy, the daughter of the Russian novelist. The Countess said to Dorothy "Helene has fallen into bad company" and then turned her back on Dorothy. Years later Dorothy was also snubbed by Eleanor Roosevelt. RS
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08:22 am
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REVIEWS OF AMMON HENNACY'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY: THE BOOK OF AMMON
"The last of the great old-time non-conformists....He is a fast-talking, wise-cracking saint of non-violence who has written his autobiography with glorious naivete in a kind of Grandma Moses prose...It is an American document of unquestioned sincerity. His dedication to peace is of nearly Gandhi proportions, and his appeal for common sense in our mixed-up society the purest Tom Paine. This is primitive Christianity of a most aggressive and exhilarating sort...He remains undaunted, witty, an authentic and fantastic character and one-man revolution throughout this remarkable book."----William Hogan in the San Francisco Chronicle.
"He is in the classical tradition of Jefferson, Thoreau, Debs."---Ward Moore in The Nation.
"Ammon is a man of vision...He is, what he is attempting to be, a one-man revolution...The story of his prison days will rank with the great writing of the world about prisons."---Dorothy Day in the Foreward
"You are transported almost physically through his life...He must be the only writer alive who can spellbind the reader with a description of how to irrigate alfalfa"---Paul Swenson in The Deseret News of Salt Lake City
"Utah's one-man revolution injects Crusader zeal into autobiography... a remarkable piece of personal reporting..the mild demeanor of this quiet gray man is hard to justify with popular understandings of anarchy, which Hennacy practices with a vengeance."---E.H. Linford in the Salt Lake Tribune.
"Ammon Hennacy calls himself a one-man revolution, and the record supports his claim. He has the necessary resources for single-handed and permanent insurrection, at any rate a ticklish conscience, ready indignation, a quick tongue, unlimited courage, and great tactical inventiveness...Mr. Hennacy's style is garrulous and innocently self-centered...The wonder is that in Mr. Hennacy's case, the effect is infinitely touching and attractive. What price art when artlessness works so much better? His doctrine and example...call for something more than affectionate condescension...We are not gods and must work within a human time scale. And that means taking up again the dangerous instrument of political revolution, forewarned and chastened by Ammon Hennacy's testimony."---Emile Capouya in The Commonweal.
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10:14 pm
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CONTEXT
"...even if Dorothy Day and her followers were wrong in every single point, her merit will always remain the fact that she has transferred that peculiar immediate social consciousness of the early Communists right into the center of the Church, that is to say she has made innumerable Christians deeply aware of the social injustice right in our midst, Christians with the highest aim who otherwise would never have been aware of the urgency of the social question."----Karl Stern in THE PILLAR OF FIRE, Harcourt, Brace and Co., New York, 1951
"As early as 1934 or 1935 it was considered eccentric in literary circles not to be more or less 'left.' Between 1935 and 1939 the Communist Party had an almost irresistible fascination for any writer under forty. It became as normal to hear that so-and-so had 'joined' as it had been a few years earlier, when Roman Catholicism was fashionable, to hear that so-and-so had been 'received.' "-----from George Orwell's essay "Inside the Whale."---Harcourt, Brace, 1954
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10:00 am
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DOROTHY'S FUNERAL
Dorothy Day's funeral Mass was held in this building (Nativity Church) on lower 2nd Ave., NYC, around the corner from Maryhouse in Nov. 1980, Cardinal Cooke met the coffin at the church door and blessed it with holy water.RS
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01:14 pm
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MARYHOUSE/NYC
"Abbot John Eudes on his way to France visited us today and was delighted to see the House his gift had purchased for us, this old music school which is large enough for 50 women."---Dorothy Day in her diary entry for Nov. 28, 1978 from The Duty of Delight, Marquette Univ.2008.
Dorothy occupied rooms on the second floor behind the three windows at the extreme right of this building. It was there that she died in 1980. RS
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09:30 pm
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THE APARTMENT ON CLEVELAND PLACE
A month after I got to the Worker ( in 1959). someone found an apartment for me on Cleveland Place just around the corner from Hattie's , two rooms on the second floor above a small restaurant counter, looking west onto Lafayette St. and filled with the sound of heavy traffic...Dorothy Day...was to share this apartment with me when she was in town; much of the time she traveled..." Judith Gregory in "Some Memories of the Catholic Worker.
The apartment was in the yellow building just above the blue awning. RS
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11:53 am
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PETER MAURIN/ TALKATIVE AND DEVOUT
"He enjoyed discussions that lasted until two or three in the morning and never considered the time wasted in talk 'for the clarification of thought.' He himself slept until ten and then fasted until midday mass at St. Andrew's Church down on Duane Street, near City Hall, about a four-block walk from the house."---Dorothy Day in PETER MAURIN, Apostle to the World, by Peter Sicius, Orbis Books, 2004
"When I wanted to talk to Peter about our work, uninterrupted by telephone calls or visitors, I often met him at St. Andrew's Church."---Dorothy Day in LOAVES AND FISHES, Orbis Books
This photo of St. Andrew's was taken in 2008
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