How the St. Francis Breadline provides food to NYC’s homeless—without judgment

Riding the escalator to street level at the renovated Seventh Avenue entrance to Pennsylvania Station, blue skies surround you in the glass canopy above, and the Empire State Building rises in the distance. You emerge from underground into the light with a feeling of destiny. You have arrived.

Much as New York City inspires big dreams, it is also a city of hard realities. Just a few feet from that Penn Station exit, people sleep on the street. Most are ignored or driven off by security guards. But half a block away, outside the Church of St. Francis of Assisi, the St. Francis Breadline has been providing food and community for people in need for nearly 100 years. Both its history and its current staff offer an alternate vision of what it means to arrive in New York City, one based not in wealth but a faith-filled love. 

A Sunbeam Amid Shadows

The St. Francis Breadline was created on Sept. 26, 1930, in response to the Great Depression. In its earliest days, it offered a bit of financial help, rather than food. According to New York Times reports of the era, Brother Gabriel Mehler started placing a sign outside the church on West 31st Street informing people that he would be giving out nickels at 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. The first day 180 people came. A month later they had 10 times that number. The line stretched all the way to Seventh Avenue and halfway around the block.

Other breadlines operated in New York at the time, many of them run by charities and religious groups. But they tended to open in the winter and close in the spring, often with a moral judgment attached to those who still needed help. In April 1930, The New York Times reported, “Breadline supporters…explained there had been a steady decline for the past week in the number of ‘worthy unemployed’ in the lines.” In a statement, those breadlines’ operators said, “It is not our intention to encourage the voluntary idle.”

In contrast, once the Franciscans began their morning breadline, they have rarely stopped. By most accounts, in its 96 years of operation, there has been only one day without the breadline, and that was because Hurricane Sandy physically prevented it in October 2012. Every day during the Covid-19 pandemic they were there. So, too, on the morning after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. During blackouts, blizzards and rainstorms the line has stayed open, serving without judgment everyone who comes. In Brother Gabriel’s obituary in 1940, The New York Times reported that by 1932 they were providing meals to 4,800 people a day.

While the St. Francis breadline began as a ministry of the Church of St. Francis of Assisi, it eventually became its own independent ministry, Franciscan Bread for the Poor, with its leadership chosen by a board of Franciscans. In the 1970s, Michael Carnevale, O.F.M., was put in charge. He soon decided they had a serious problem. “Every day, people got three bologna sandwiches on white bread,” he explained, “which were shoved in these little white envelopes and then put in a box and placed in the refrigerator” to be given out the next morning. As a result they were always cold and soggy.

To convince the breadline’s board of friars that change was needed, Father Carnevale had an ingenious plan. “I got a couple of sandwiches, cut them in quarters and put them on a platter,” to be offered at the board meeting along with his normal platter of cookies. When no one touched the sandwiches, he asked why. “Well, they really don’t look very good,” he remembered them saying. “And I said, ‘Well, if they don’t look good to you, why should we give them to the people in the line?’”

With the board’s approval, Father Carnevale reached out to nearby Manganaro’s, an Italian grocery and deli on Ninth Avenue, which has since closed. For 40 years they provided salami, ham and cheese, and roast beef sandwiches, for which they originally charged the breadline just 25 cents each.

‘Turning Form’

During Father Carnevale’s time, the meal also expanded to include not just a sandwich and coffee but other snacks, all of which were put into bags and passed out to the hundreds who would come. Laypeople started to volunteer to help serve the breadline as well and eventually were hired as staff. Today the breadline’s executive director is Adam Cross, a tall painter with a kind smile and eyes that always seem to be searching those around him, checking to make sure they are doing okay.

Mr. Cross first came to New York from West Virginia to study art at the New York Academy of Art. After finishing his degree, he remained to teach at his alma mater. In 2018, one of his pupils was Brother Paul Lostritto, O.F.M., a past director of the ministry. “He told me what he did,” Mr. Cross remembered. “I thought, ‘Wow, I would love to do something like that.’” A week later he had joined the staff.

He remembers being scared working on the breadline at first. “I wasn’t sure what to expect,” Mr. Cross admitted. But as he came back week after week, he noticed that the people on the line reminded him of the artists with whom he worked. “There’s a sensitivity in a lot of artists,” he explained, “They’re a little different, like a square peg in a round hole.” The people on the line were much the same. Mr. Cross began offering art classes to members of the breadline community, and was stunned at the results. “My idea was to teach them methods, but a lot of them didn’t want that. They knew what to do. It was like being in a studio of artists.”

Recognizing people’s talent and desire, Mr. Cross started a printed newsletter in 2021 to which people on the line could submit art, poetry or other writing. Each week he gives it out. It is also published in English and Spanish online at the St. Francis Breadline website, under the name Street Voices. “A lot of them have nobody to talk to,” explained Ronald Baker, a social work student at Yeshiva College, who works for the ministry editing and creating the weekly newsletter. “This gives them a way to release what they have in their mind and what they’re feeling. It gives them inspiration for the day and faith to keep moving forward.”

In the 1970s, The New York Times reported that the breadline cost $1,000 a week to run. It now costs $3.5 million annually, and includes not just the more than 300 meals and 500 cups of coffee given out each day on 31st Street, but a food pantry that operates three days a week around the block on 32nd Street, and donations of food to other organizations—37,000 breakfast bags a year to social service agencies in Harlem and the Bronx, and 1,200 pantry bags to another food pantry in the Bronx.

Extraordinarily, the breadline has never had an endowment or a development director. “It’s all private donations,” Mr. Cross said with wonder. “People will tell us, ‘I saw this all my life while I was working, and now that I’m retired I want to help.’ It is amazing.”

Father Carnevale, who now serves as parochial vicar at the Church of St. Francis of Assisi, remembers that, in his era, there was an offertory box outside the parish where people could leave donations for the breadline. “This is the flower and fur district,” he explained, where businesses were largely run by Jewish families. “Every Friday, when they went by, the owners would throw in checks.”

Where many put their guard up, both emotionally and physically, around people living on the street, Mr. Cross has a kind of gentle frailty about him, as though he is insistent on remaining open and vulnerable. “What I’m trying to do is really just to be a brother,” he said, “to love them and encourage them.”

At one point, he talked about “turning form,” the artistic aspiration to transform a two-dimensional canvas into three-dimensional life. It is an apt description of how he sees this ministry. People treat the unhoused like “diseased animals,” he said. That cannot help but make them feel like that is all they are: “We need to love them even more instead of driving them away,” he said.

“Jesus is alive,” Cross said. “He gives us love and life and liberty and happiness. That’s what we’re all searching for. I want them to know that love.”

Instruments of Peace

Each morning from 6:30 to 7:45, the line still stretches half a city block, nearly a century after the breadline started. Sometimes it goes even farther. During the pandemic, said Mr. Cross, “The line almost touched itself. It wrapped around the entire block. We were one of the few open food services in town.”

Some who come to the breadline struggle overtly with addiction and mental health issues. But many of the guests also defy the stereotypes that American society tends to ascribe to people who might be on a breadline. Not everyone is unhoused. Some wear work uniforms; others are well dressed. The spirit on the line is generally friendly. Many say hello, thanks, “God bless you,” or have cheerful conversations with staff and volunteers. The population includes many ethnic groups. There are teenagers on the line and people who could be grandparents.

The volunteers, too, represent a spectrum. They include cardiologists and retired bankers from Wall Street, people in their 20s and 30s, new parents. A Pittsburgh businessman volunteers every time he comes to New York for work. Others come in each week from Long Island or New Jersey. Some have been volunteering for decades. Over the summer two young Dominicans came each morning in their brilliant white habits. One of the guests expressed his surprise at this, noting, “Dominicans are a preaching order.” He went on to praise the young men for how kind they have been.

Regina Yogorasa began volunteering in May after she retired. She lives in Queens; to get here by 6:30 a.m. she has to catch a 4:50 a.m. bus, then the subway. She comes three mornings a week. From the first day, she said, it has been a special experience. “There were 273 people. I was shocked,” she remembered. “But I felt so happy serving. I am 70 years old, but I haven’t felt as much happiness as I felt that day.”

A graduate of St. Bonaventure University, Glenn McKeever started volunteering at the breadline 10 years ago and said he always feels better after he spends time serving there: “Like I’ve done something.” Over the years, he has gotten to know people on the line, and they remain in his thoughts when he leaves. “You always kind of wonder how they’re doing or whether or not you can do anything for them.”

Over the years, volunteers have changed the breadline as well. When Bob and Emily Marcelli started volunteering in 2006, the serving process involved handing out the bags of food. It rubbed Bob the wrong way. “It’s like we’re just throwing stuff at people,” he told Emily at the time. “We’re not even making eye contact.”

“The homeless, we ignore them,” says Mr. Marcelli, describing what he sees as a common reaction to people who are unhoused. “We walk on the other side of the street. We shun them. [We say], ‘They’re filthy. They’re dirty. They’re drug addicts.’ No, they’re people.”

He told the breadline’s management he couldn’t be part of a ministry where they didn’t engage with the guests. And as a result of that feedback, the breadline changed its process. Today there are a series of stations from which guests can choose. They offer fruit juices, a deli sandwich, peanut butter and jelly Uncrustables, fresh fruit, a rotating variety of snacks, hot oatmeal containers (with hot water if wanted) and coffee (25 gallons each day), with volunteers and staff serving at each station. In addition to offering many opportunities for interaction, this setup gives attendees the chance to make the meal their own. If they don’t want something, they can say no; if they want more, they can ask.

When Manganaro’s closed in 2012, the Marcellis also offered to take over providing the sandwiches. Bob is a professional chef who studied with James Beard and has opened high-end restaurants. He and Emily also have a business, Marcelli Formaggi, which imports cheese, olive oil, pasta and honey made by his family in Abruzzo, Italy. With nothing initially but the help of their three children, they started making 300 to 500 sandwiches every day at their home in New Jersey.

“A couple of our kids worked in the city,” Emily remembered. “They would come in after work, make them, then one of them would drive them into the city at 1 or 2 in the morning.” Eventually they hired a staff and drivers in New Jersey just to do the sandwiches and deliver them each morning. 

From the start, Bob and Emily insisted on a high-quality sandwich, as Father Carnevale had before them. They bought and sliced the meat themselves instead of using pre-sliced products. They also spent time trying to find the exactly right kind of bread. “I don’t know how many bakeries we went to in Jersey,” said Emily. “Finally we found a Portuguese bakery in Newark. We took one bite and said, ‘This is the bread’.” Bob agreed, citing the tastelessness of most deli rolls: “That was the key.”

Having worked on the line for so long themselves, they were also able to think through the packaging of the sandwich in a more practical way. “We tell our staff, we want you to wrap this so well that when it falls out of a pocket on 31st Street, the person can still pick it up and eat it. This isn’t being eaten by some schoolchild. It’s going to travel all over the city.” 

Sowing Love

Along with Mr. Cross, the full-time breadline staff includes four laymen, a Franciscan brother, and a rotating group of six security guards, two of whom work at the line each morning. 

Tim Harvey, now the operations manager, was working at a senior center when he heard about the breadline and pantry. On the breadline he is usually in the background, making sure the volunteers have the next box of food they need and taking empty boxes away. He is also a master of the quiet joke.

It makes him an easy person for guests to talk to, and also a good partner with the operations assistant, Jason Jon, a wiry musician from Ohio with wide eyes and a ready laugh. Mr. Jon has the gift of being able to connect with just about anyone, and in a way that makes them feel immediately at home. He used to work as a bartender and learned there that small gestures can mean a lot. “When you have a really busy night and you’re serving people at the bar, if you just throw down a coaster, you let them know you see them.” Mr. Jon gets up at 3 a.m., or even earlier some mornings, to travel in from Brooklyn.

When purchasing food for the breadline, Mr. Harvey makes a point of buying extra so that people can ask for more. “That’s why I offer variety, too,” he explained, “different PB&Js, different juices. If they ask for a different juice or an extra sandwich and you give it to them, it brightens up the whole day. It’s like a big moment for them to be able to say, ‘Oh, I don’t want that one. I want that one.’… A little bit of kindness goes a long way.”

Seeing the struggle that some on the line are going through is not always easy. “It feels like all the world’s problems are all right there in a nutshell,” said Mr. Jon. “I don’t want to see it, I want to fix it, and there’s nothing I can do. It sits with me sometimes.” Occasionally they’re confronted by guests, too. “But I know they’re not really yelling at me,” Mr. Harvey said. Often, he observed, “they’re mad at the world or something that happened yesterday. They’re just blowing off steam.”

But there’s a lightness in the way Mr. Jon, Mr. Harvey and fellow staff members Manny Gonzales and Jeff Pennington treat people, one that seems to convey a quiet hopefulness. “I love working with the people,” Mr. Harvey said.

It’s clearly the same for Mr. Jon. At one point two women came up and started talking to him. They called him “Primo,” a nickname sometimes extended to close friends. A little embarrassed, Mr. Jon explained that one of the women often makes him flan in thanks for his help. “It’s incredible. I tell her, you don’t need to do this.” But they do.

His Hard Project

Originally the breadline was staffed each morning by Franciscans. Today, Brother Andrew Dinegar carries on that tradition. Before he entered the Franciscans, he had a business career working for Marriott in Washington, D.C. “I had a good job, but my values got away from me,” he said. “I’d see the unhoused outside Union Station and I’d think, ‘What scum.’ I hated myself, and I hated these people even worse.”

In January 2002, he was awakened from sleep by a voice that told him, “Do something.” For a year he floundered, trying to find a way to reconnect with his faith and the God he knew had spoken to him. Hearing a vocation director describe his experiences volunteering with Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity, Brother Dinegar sought out the order. On his first night at their D.C. home for the mentally ill and terminally ill, he was asked to shower and shave a 37-year-old man who had AIDS. “I was like, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, what?’”

“Then I lathered up his face, and when I was halfway done shaving him, my heart just exploded with love,” Brother Dinegar said. “It was like the Big Bang. My whole life changed.”

Dinegar spent the next seven years volunteering with the sisters. Some days he would call in sick to his job to spend more time as a volunteer. Eventually, he entered religious life himself—first the Alexian Brothers, then the Franciscans.

In the mornings Brother Dinegar is always at the front of the line, talking to the guests as they wait. At well over six feet tall, with close-cropped hair and a sturdy build, he can be an imposing presence. “No one messes with a big guy,” Mr. Jon noted. But rather than intimidating, there is a softness that Brother Dinegar brings. He regularly kids with people, telling them there is a fee for the meal today or calling them out when they try to cut the line in a way that makes them laugh and step back. “You have to have humor, joy and laughter,” he said.

Brother Dinegar also regularly goes out in the middle of the night to see how people without homes who are sleeping in the area are doing. The work is about “presence, companionship, walking this journey with them,” he said. “God’s trying to fix me, but I’m his hard project,” he told one of the guests one morning. 

For the Franciscans—originally of the Holy Name Province, which began the ministry, and now of the newly formed national province of Our Lady of Guadalupe—the breadline remains a cornerstone. “The breadline and the soup kitchens we run elsewhere ground us in our charism as Franciscans,” says Brother Henry Fulmer, chairman of the breadline’s board. “They bring us back to who we are here to serve.”

The Franciscans’ continued presence affects those who work there as well. “The Franciscans I work with are awesome,” Mr. Harvey said. “Their attitude is great. They’re fun, and happy to be here.” He counts them as one of the gifts of working on the breadline. 

Cross points to Brother James Gannon, guardian (a Franciscan term for a religious superior) for the 31st Street community of Franciscans, who comes nearly every morning. “He’s so gentle,” said Mr. Cross. “He’s a former provincial [superior], and here he is working with the homeless. I love that. I think to myself, ‘That’s Francis right there’.”

Some days at the end of the shift, Brother Dinegar can be found sweeping up the bits of debris left over from the morning. There is something totally incongruous about this big bear of a man gently sweeping up bits of paper. But it gives a glimpse into his heart.

“Twenty-two years ago, [even if I had been offered] a million dollars, I would never do this,” he says of his work spending time with the unhoused. “Now they’re my best friends. I wake up in the morning and I smile. I’m going out to see my family.”

A People of Faith

Lorenzo Widget has been receiving food on the breadline for almost four years now. He says that it is more than a place where people come to get food. It is a community where they raise each other up. “You get people here who have been broken and hurt,” he explained. “They need this fellowship. When people come together here, it’s like it becomes a psychological area that builds strength in each individual.” While they might be ignored or avoided by people walking by them in the street, here they are seen and appreciated.

In Mr. Cross’s office hang two pieces of art from guests: one a pencil drawing of Jimi Hendrix bursting with energy, the other a Cubist-like painting of a woman’s face, her eyes uplifted like Mary’s at the Annunciation. He said he finds tremendous holiness in the guests on the line. “I see them sometimes as close to the disciples,” he said. “So many of them have such a simple, strong faith.”

Each week, the breadline newsletter is filled with expressions of that faith. “Lord, I ask that You bless those who have helped me,” wrote Jae Webb. “Help me never take their support for granted, but instead carry a spirit of thankfulness in everything I do.”

On a recent morning, a torrential downpour started just as the breadline began. The street “turned into a river,” Brother Gannon recalled. It is the kind of situation most people flee as fast as they can. But not the guests on the line. “Men laid down in the street to wash themselves off,” he said. “They were like kids, playing in the puddles of rain, washing themselves, laughing, dancing and singing.”

As he spoke about this experience, his eyes got misty. “To see these grown men lying down in the street, letting the water run over them to wash their bodies, then getting up to sing and dance…it’s a two-edged sword,” he said. “On the one hand, they were playing like kids. On the other, they had no shower to go to.”

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Reporting for this story was supported with a grant from Lilly Endowment Inc.

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