Rice, stew, cornbread. Rice, stew, cornbread. There's a comforting repetition to serving food at the Denver Rescue Mission. From behind the cafeteria window, I can see only the tops of the heads of the hungry as they pass in single file. Rice, stew, cornbread onto a metal tray and out the window. Four hundred times in just under 45 minutes.
With its dingy brick façade and neon-lit "Jesus Saves" cross, the Denver Rescue Mission's Lawrence Street shelter is perhaps the city's most recognizable skid-row landmark. The shelter serves three meals a day — at 5:30 a.m., noon and 8 p.m. — with lines forming much earlier than that, lines that seem to stretch farther down the block with each passing month, yet another indicator of the deepening recession.
At an operation like this, it's all about filling as many bellies as possible, as quickly as possible. "This is seven days a week, 365 days a year," says building director Josh Geppelt. The Christian charity has two other facilities in Denver that provide free meals, but the Lawrence Street shelter serves the most by far. A few years ago, the daily average was about 700; these days, the meal count regularly hits over 1,000. Figuring in upticks during Thanksgiving and Christmas, plus a food-bank program for needy families, the facility is providing over 400,000 meals annually. And even then, the Denver Rescue Mission is not the only game in town. There's also the Good Samaritan Shelter, the First Presbyterian Church, the Catholic Worker House and others.
Before dinner — when the 300 men who've managed to get a bed on the top floors mingle with everyone who'll just get a meal — the cooks show me around the kitchen. Almost all of the food is donated. Maurice Jones, who has worked here for two years, takes me through the walk-in freezers that hold large packages of bulk cheeses and various meats sent from local supermarkets and restaurants, which will someday turn up in a mass recipe. "You've got to learn how to be creative with the food," says Jones. Other rooms serve as pantries for donated canned goods, which are sorted by type into plastic bins labeled "chili" and "chicken soup." Using whatever is available that day, the cooks will do their best to whip up a meal big enough for an army.
Cook Kim Allison, who has a tag that says "Sous Chef" pinned to his white coat, takes pride in making do with what they have. In the '80s, he owned a French fusion restaurant in Denver, he says, but that was before he fell hard for the bottle and wound up on the streets. "But now I work here and think only about the food," he adds. That, and the people who will eat that food.
The kitchen crew focuses on putting something warm and filling in people's stomachs before they have to head back out to the cold sidewalks. Trays go out, trays come back. Rice, stew, cornbread. When the line finally ends, the tables are quickly cleared, and I watch the cooks wander back into the walk-ins, already planning. They have to be ready for 5:30 a.m. tomorrow.