2 Soup Kitchens Close

Hundreds of hungry people have lost two sources of free meals — one permanently, one temporarily — as cold weather sets in, the holidays approach, and the Covid-19 pandemic resurges.

St. Ann’s Soup Kitchen in Hamden abruptly shut its doors at the end of October. Hundreds of people who depended on St. Ann’s Soup Kitchen for five meals a week will have nowhere to get a hot lunch.

St. Ann’s Soup Kitchen had been serving hot lunches Monday through Friday for decades.

The church that ran the soup kitchen directed people to the Community Soup Kitchen on Broadway in New Haven for lunch, and to the Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen (DESK) on Temple Street for dinner.

But on Thursday, the Community Soup Kitchen had to close down because a volunteer tested positive for Covid-19. It will remain closed for two weeks.

That means that at least for the next two weeks — through Thanksgiving — New Haven’s and Hamden’s homeless, and those with homes who can’t afford food, don’t have anywhere to go for a hot lunch.

Breakthrough Church, which is just a few blocks from St. Ann’s in Hamden, is trying to step up and fill the sudden lunch void. It doesn’t have a kitchen yet, though, and still needs more resources before it can start giving out meals.

St. Ann’s Soup Kitchen started in 1989 the basement of St. Ann Church at the corner of Dixwell Avenue and Arch Street. At the time, St. Ann Church was a functioning parish. In 2017, the archdiocese in Hartford decided to consolidate, closing St. Ann and moving its parishioners to the Blessed Sacrament campus of the Christ Bread of Life Parish on Circular Avenue.

Since then, the St. Ann building has remained in the possession of Christ Bread of Life. It has been closed while the church looked for a buyer. Christ Bread of Life continued to operate the soup kitchen out of the basement.

For years, the church looked for someone to buy the building. The plan was that when a buyer came along, either Christ Bread of Life would rent out the basement for a year or two to continue the soup kitchen until it could find another place, or it would find somewhere else to operate.

This fall, Christ Bread of Life finally found a buyer for the St. Ann building. ​“We were hoping that we could keep the soup kitchen there, even if it was for a year,” said church trustee Lorraine DeNicola, who serves in an ex-officio capacity on the parish council. Unfortunately, that was not an option.

Christ Bread of Life Business Manager Bill Ianniello said the buyer, which is another church, was not willing to rent the basement out so that the soup kitchen could continue. He said that as a condition of the sale, Christ Bread of Life had to move the soup kitchen out.

The sale has not yet closed. He said he had to give the buyer an extension while it works out details with the town. The soup kitchen, on the other hand, has shut down.

Lucy Fernandez, who was the chef at the soup kitchen, said church management told her about a week into October that the soup kitchen would be closing by the end of the month, putting her out of a job. She said she served the last meal on Oct. 27.

“Yeah, it was crazy,” she said. ​“It was crazy. And it hurt a lot of people, because no one was expecting it. They can’t just leave them hanging like that. You can’t just let people not have a place to go like that.”

Olga DeWitt, who volunteered at the soup kitchen, said that by the end, it would serve over 100 people every day. One time, she said, she served 185. She said that more people had started to come since the pandemic began. When Thanksgiving rolled around every year, the soup kitchen would give out turkeys to about 200 people.

“What happened was an injustice to the people of this community,” she said. ​“I mean come on, a lot of people depended on us.”

Of Mice And Moving

Before the end of October, if you stopped by St. Ann Church at around noon, there would often be a line snaking around the corner to get Covid-19-safe to-go meals. Now, come lunchtime, the street corner is empty.

On the door leading to the basement where the kitchen is, two sheets of paper printed with red ink have been taped to the door. ​“St. Ann’s Soup Kitchen is now closed,” they read. Below, also in red, are the locations and hours of the Community Soup Kitchen and Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen.

Community Soup Kitchen Executive Director David O’Sullivan said that since St. Ann’s closed, he has seen an influx of clients. He said the soup kitchen saw 25 percent more people this October than it did last year.

For the next two weeks, though, Community Soup Kitchen will not be an option anymore for those who used to get their lunch at St. Ann’s. Even if it were open, it still would not be ideal for some.

Many of the clients who used to come to St. Ann’s don’t have cars, said DeWitt. She said many live in Hamden near St. Ann’s. Many are disabled or elderly, making it difficult to travel down to New Haven for lunch every day. Getting to New Haven on the bus also costs money.

The soup kitchen did not just serve the homeless. Many had jobs, but just couldn’t afford lunch every day, said DeWitt.

The sale of the building was not the only thing that plagued the kitchen in recent months. It also had a mouse infestation. DeWitt said she and others would clean up the droppings every day. An exterminator came, but it did not fix the problem.

To really get ahead of the mice, the parish would have needed to patch holes in the walls, said DeNicola. It did not do so.

Just before the parish notified soup kitchen staff that the soup kitchen was going to close, the health department came to inspect, as it does periodically. It told the parish that it needed to fix the mouse problem.

By then, though, the point was moot, since the soup kitchen was going to close anyway. 

Ianniello said the parish had been searching for another place to hold the soup kitchen, knowing it would one day have to leave the St. Ann’s building. He said he asked other churches in the area, but no one wanted to take it on. He said there would have been complications with renting a space because it would be tough to find a space with a kitchen in the area where it would be okay to have crowds lining up outside.

The Blessed Sacrament campus on Circular Avenue would not work, he said, because it doesn’t have the right facilities — it does not have a professional kitchen like St. Ann’s.

DeNicola said there would have been other problems with moving the soup kitchen to Blessed Sacrament. She said the neighborhood would not have welcomed people lining up on the street outside to get food.

In addition to a soup kitchen, St. Ann’s used to hold a food pantry through the Connecticut Food Bank. Once the soup kitchen closed, the good from the food pantry and the partnership with the food bank moved to the Blessed Sacrament campus. There was a pantry at Blessed Sacrament before, but it was much smaller. (According to Ianniello, Fernandez, and DeWitt, it was meant to serve mostly parishioners. DeNicola, on the other hand, said it had always been open to everyone. In any case, now that the Connecticut Food Bank is a supplier, it has to be open to everyone.)

Ianniello said he looked all over for a place to relocate the soup kitchen to. The Keefe Community Center, which is run by the Town of Hamden, was helping.

“Unfortunately nothing was forthcoming, so then we had to make a decision to close,” said Pastor Cornelius Kelechi Anyanwu. He said that the parish council and the finance council made the decision together to close the soup kitchen without finding a new home in which to continue it. He said that when there is another site for it, the church will help however it can.

St. Ann’s Soup Kitchen got its funding from a number of sources, and a lack of funding was not what prompted it to close. The main source was the archdiocese in Hartford, said Ianniello. Funding also came from community donations and grants. After those sources, the parish provided whatever else was needed.

Anyanwu said that if another church is able to host a soup kitchen, he can recommend to the archdiocese that it funnel its funding there, even if it’s not a Catholic church.

Breakthrough Steps Up

Though Christ Bread of Life is no longer searching for a place to relocate the soup kitchen, Hamden Community Development Manager Adam Sendroff and his staff at the Keefe Center are still looking. If enough people step in to help, there will soon be a new soup kitchen just down the road from St. Ann’s, they said.

Pastor Joseph Carr of Breakthrough Church on Shelton Avenue said he has wanted to open a soup kitchen at his non-denominational church for a few years. The church already hosts a food pantry, which distributes food three times a month.

The church is in a former warehouse building split in two by a thick curtain. One side is for worship. The other is for the pantry and other projects, and hopefully will soon have a commercial kitchen.

Carr pointed to one large corner, currently filled with boxes, where he plans to put the kitchen. The church already has a full array of fridges and freezers because of the pantry. He said he thinks constructing the kitchen will cost about $100,000.

Carr said he had spoken with Ianniello a month or so ago about Breakthrough doing a soup kitchen, but that he hasn’t heard from him since.

Ianniello said he knew St. Ann’s couldn’t move right over to Breakthrough because there’s no kitchen there yet. He said that once something gets up and running, Christ Bread of Life would support it.

Carr said he wants to get moving as fast as he can. ​“Now that I know that they are where they are with St. Ann’s, it’s even more of a push.”

The kitchen cannot be constructed in a day. First, he said, he hopes to start distributing prepared lunches as early as December.

“We can do that,” he said. ​“It’s just a matter of getting the resources in.”

He said the church needs more funding and more partners to pull it off.

Eventually, he said he hopes to be able to serve a hot lunch every day like St. Ann’s did, and also find families who need more support and give them multiple meals a day.

If Carr’s dreams come true, the church would also turn the side of the building currently devoted to worship into Hamden’s first homeless shelter. Breakthrough is already partnering with the town and with Columbus House to be a warming center this winter.

Before the full commercial kitchen and the homeless shelter can become reality, though, the church needs help. Click here for its donation page.