The Grace Full Gospel Mission
Preaching to the homeless in Jesus’ sweet name
“Get in the car,” Dad said.
I was 7 years old and already knew this would end one of two ways: he would take me on a ride, show me some life hack he thought I would need to know, and I’d end up with an ice cream cone. Or, I’d witness one of his predictable failures, he’d self-implode, and I’d get a whipping. Head down, I grabbed my coat and mittens, sulked to the car, and shut the door.
We soon pulled up to a row of run-down storefronts on Joseph Avenue in downtown Rochester, NY, literally on the wrong side of the New York Central Railroad tracks. A familiar-looking man was standing there in a long overcoat, in front of a FOR RENT sign perched behind a filthy plate glass window. Dad and I got out of the car and jumped over the brown, crusty snowbanks to the sidewalk.
“This place looks like a good bet,” the man said. My father nodded in agreement and introduced me to Don Grace. I finally recognized him as one of the mean-spirited and fiery preachers from the Buffalo tent revivals we attended.
Dad and Don started pounding on the door while I shivered in the winter wind. They peered through the dirty window of the door trying to see inside.
“Vat do you vant?”, yelled a quavering old man. Wooden steps creaked as he descended from the tenement above.
“We want to rent your empty storefront,” yelled my father. “We don’t have much money, but can do some work in exchange for rent.”
“Can you fix a boilah?”, asked the man, now at the door.
“Sure,” Dad and Don replied, though I assure you they could not.
“You can have the place for knot-ting if you can fix da boilah.” A key fiddled in the lock. The door swung open to reveal a white-haired, hunched over fellow with a gigantic ring of keys on his belt.
“I’m Abraham Schnitzner. Follow me.” He unlocked a separate door to the vacant storefront and let us in.
The place was a disaster. Rats scurried as soon as he flipped on the light switch. The room was full of broken furniture, the walls were stained with yellow streaks, and thick dust covered every surface. The wooden floor had rotted away in places because of leaks from above. It smelled terrible.
On the bright side, there was no one squatting there. Don and my father walked through the place, nodding in approval and motioning about what might be done. We finally walked back outside and Schnitzner locked the door. “If you can fix the boi-lah, you can have it free for a year.”
Joseph Avenue was once a thriving neighborhood occupied by German-Jewish immigrants. But by the 1960s, drunken homeless men squatted in storefronts or huddled around burning barrels of salvaged wood. Their faces were grizzled, wizened with shocks of hair and flowing beards. Dirty clothes hung on them, lifeless like rags, and they wore gloves with no fingertips, but not to be fashionable.
They existed on the far edges of society and were visited by missionaries from the Salvation Army and the Open Door Mission. They gave the men thick ham-and-cheese sandwiches and, on a good night, a voucher for an overnight stay in the warmth of a local shelter. But despite how hard the missionaries tried, most of these men would eventually die in the streets from severe alcoholism, drug abuse, mental illness or sometimes all three.
Dad and Don were both deeply religious, charismatic men. They also felt they had been specially called by God to preach the Gospel, feed the poor, and heal the sick. Now was their chance…and all it would take is fixing an old boiler.
“We’ll be back tomorrow morning to fix your boiler,” Don said to old Mr. Schnitzner. And then they all shook hands. Back outside on the sidewalk, my father and I hopped over the dirty snowbanks, climbed back into the car and sped home.
That night at dinner, my father announced to us the formation of what he called The Grace Full Gospel Mission. He spent an hour or more trying to convince us that we would be making a real difference in the lives of these men on Rochester’s Skid Row. He talked about how much ‘fun’ it would be for us to get the Mission ready for weekly Sunday sermons. And he told us about his plans to open a soup kitchen in the basement.
My mother let out a familiar sigh. (I swear I could see her mouth the words, “Here-we-go-again...”). All I could think about was how much fun it would be to get Mr. Schnitzner to let me have the giant key ring hanging from his belt. (I do believe this might have been the very beginning of my lifelong ADD attraction to ‘bright shiny things’).
Over the next few weeks, Dad and Don scoured the city for free fixtures and furniture. They found old velvet seats torn out of the derelict RKO Theatre and even moved in a rickety upright piano they’d somehow managed to scrounge. Don’s wife, Virginia, sewed a flag for the Mission. It was pure white, with a crimson Jesus cross inside a blue-purple square and in the upper left-hand corner. It was a stunning piece of stitchery, but I wondered why on earth would we ever need a flag? Would we soon be organizing parades of homeless men?
Like Jesus “washing away the sins of the world”, my Mom and I got to work scrubbing the floors and washing the windows. We threw great buckets of grey-brown water out the front door, washing the winter salt off the sidewalk and scaring some of the sleeping drunks to death.
It took several more days for Dad and Don to paint over the yellowed walls a dazzling pure white (to match our new flag). They also painted the floor deep red (like the crimson Jesus cross) and built a small stage with a simple pulpit off to one side. A used American flag was installed, along with our new Grace Full Gospel Mission flag, at the back of the stage. Dad said these flags would “inspire” the men and maybe even encourage them to get saved.
By some miracle, Don and Dad also did finally fix Schnitzner’s old boiler. But while Mr. and Mrs. Schnitzner basked in the warmth from the now-working boiler upstairs, there was still no heat source for the Mission itself downstairs. After praying for some sort of “heating miracle”, a buddy of Don’s gave him a gigantic old kerosene heater. It was a huge porcelain cylinder thing — a fancy sort of freestanding fireplace filled with gallons and gallons of smelly kerosene. It was bolted down to the middle of the stage–just in case the fire-and-brimstone sermons got a little too ‘real’. Dad and Don installed the last two short rows of RKO theatre seats facing the hulking furnace from both sides. These seats were reserved for family members…so we could stay warm during the sermons — even on the coldest nights.
When it was finally time to welcome the homeless to the Grace Full Gospel Mission, my father grandly opened the door and called to the men on the sidewalks to come in and get warm. As they shuffled by, he told them that if they stayed for the entire service, they'd be fed afterward. The only thing he did not tell them was that the service would be several hours long.
The smallest kids from the two pastoral families curled up in the chairs by the furnace and nodded off into the night as the service droned ever onwards. Don preached and preached, and Dad played the upright piano. The assembled men did their best singing the old hymns that many of them knew by heart. In those moments, it was as if the music was taking them back to another place and time — maybe when they had work or families, attending simple churches in their small rural towns or urban immigrant neighborhoods. After the sermon, some of the men volunteered to be saved, confess their sins to Jesus, or even get some faith healing.
Below the main floor of the Mission was a low basement with seeping stone walls and a pounded dirt floor. Dad and Don turned this space into a soup kitchen. They scrounged a stove, an old fridge, and some other used kitchen equipment. They installed a working sink and set up folding tables and chairs.
Mom and I were in charge down here. During the week before the service, we scavenged for soup bones and vegetables that had been tossed out behind the little market near our house. My father and I made endless trips to the Wonder Bread distributor for day-old bread, and to a local dairy, where he sent me in to beg for expiring milk and big blocks of butter.
On Sundays, before the service, we threw whatever we had into the giant soup pots and stirred for what seemed like hours. Don’s fiery sermons droned on upstairs and we could hear the men coughing and wheezing as they fidgeted in their seats. Some of them couldn’t take it very long with us do-gooders and they would shuffle back outside, eschewing the hearty meal that was promised.
Once Don finally finished, the remaining men got in line and descended into the basement. There was no heat down there, but the boiling pots of soup made it comfortable enough. Mom and I ladled big servings into bowls with heaping chunks of day-old bread and butter. The men didn’t say much as they lapped up the meaty broth. We also brewed pots of sweet black coffee, trying to sober them up — even if only for a little while. For many, this was their only meal of the day.
After all the soup and coffee, they’d shuffle back upstairs, politely thanking us all and return to their abandoned storefronts or to one of the burning barrels on the street.
This went on every Sunday for an entire year. One night, Dad tried to heal some of the men of their various coughs and illnesses. He promised to expel the sickness from their bodies in the form of frogs and serpents. Although I waited and waited to see this amazing feat, the promised deluge of slimy, slithering creatures never actually appeared.
One Sunday night, hands to Heaven by the heater, I finally understood that things at the Grace Full Gospel Mission weren’t going as well as they seemed. There were signs of growing friction. Mom never did warm up to Don. Or to his wife or family. Don was mean and controlling. His wife was always screaming at her rebellious kids. His sultry daughter even tried to burn me once in the basement with her cigarette. Dad began to complain that Don was hogging all the preaching duties, relegating him to just playing the piano and greeting the men.
The Mission’s one-year ‘lease’ had come to an end. Now Schnitzner wanted cash money for rent, but Dad and Don still could not afford to pay him. Their ‘business plan’ didn’t take into account that donations would be pretty much non-existent at a soup kitchen on skid row. The two men finally decided to part ways.
My family would move to the country outside Rochester, where my father could become the preacher he’d always wanted to be. We didn’t know (and didn’t care) what would become of Don and his troubled family.
On our final Sunday, after the sermon and after the soup, Don took down the Grace Full Gospel Mission flag, stuffed it into his briefcase, and drove his family away without saying a word to any of us.
That same night we abandoned pretty much everything we scavenged to create the Mission: the chairs, the kerosene heater, and the piano. We also walked away from the soup kitchen – the giant soup pots, the dirty spoons and bowls still on the tables, and the loaves of day-old bread heaped in giant piles on the floor — an unexpected feast for the rats.
We skulked out into the night without telling Schnitzner or the homeless men that we would never, ever be back.
As my mother helped settle my two younger siblings in the car, I bolted back into the basement and grabbed one of the porcelain sugar bowls from the kitchen. It had a metal lid that flipped open, and a little notch for the handle of the spoon to stick out. To this day, I don’t really know why I went back inside to get it. Maybe I wanted to keep something, some physical memento of our time there? Maybe I just liked the way the lid flipped back and forth? Whatever the reason, fifty years later I still have that sugar bowl and it still serves as a daily reminder of the small efforts we made that year to make some lives just a little bit sweeter.