A nondescript brick building at 34-36 East 1st Street is panted light blue and marked with a sign saying “The Catholic Worker.” Here social activist and convert to the Catholic Church Dorothy Day (1897-1980) initiated the St. Joseph Hospitality Church, a soup kitchen/hostel/office for the publication of The Catholic Worker newspaper in 1967. Day took the paper and Catholic Worker’s operations to nearby 55 East 3rd in a building known as Maryhouse in the 1970s, but this building still offers a small amount of rooms and opens up to area destitute for soup from Tuesday through Friday at 10AM. For several years Day herself resided in wouthwest Staten Island in a hosuing project set up by Spanish immigrants in the mid-20th Century; it was razed in 2000.
Dorothy Day’s image is painted in a nearby East 1st Street building with one of her quotations, “Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.”
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