City Harvest:
A Recollection
What first comes to mind when I think back on the summer of 1982 was the heat: rippled waves rising from the sidewalk and streets, blurring the air, creating a tropical feeling throughout the city, day and night. New York’s streets felt quite different back then. The city still had the enchantment of a bohemian town – the artists and musicians of the late 70’s had transformed the city and one could still feel their effect. Keith Haring was still papering over subway posters and drawing his iconographic images in chalk. Artists would put up their own posters and slogans on the walls. There was a vibrant quality in the air back then, a sense that anything could happen.
And there were the homeless. I was just 18 years old, but it seemed to me that everywhere one turned there were homeless people. Families, single men and women, visible, out on the street, trying to make do, a constant presence that was impossible to ignore. It was the middle of Ronald Reagan’s first term, and I remember feeling a strange disconnect between the certainty and optimism he exuded about our country, versus the misery that surrounded me in the wealthiest city in the nation.
On 57th street, heating vents kept the homeless warm on cold winter nights. Those vents have since been closed, but back then it created a cold weather center for a large homeless population. In the summer, the vents only blew warm air, but the population remained, out of custom. My friend from high school, Wendy Riss, worked at a croissant shop on 57thstreet, and all day long homeless people would stream in, asking for sandwiches. Wendy would then ask the manager, yet the manager would say they couldn’t provide them. They would lose their jobs. But at the end of each day, they would throw the sandwiches out by the hundreds.
One day in June, Wendy couldn’t take it any more. She wrapped up little bags containing two or three sandwiches each, made dozens of them, threw them into a garbage bag and took to the streets. She walked around handing out the bags of sandwiches to the homeless. To her disbelief, it took very little time for her to hand out all of the sandwiches. The demand was that great.
That night, Wendy began to tell me the story of the sandwiches, crying out of frustration at how crazy it was that untouched, valuable food was being wasted throughout the city in this way, every day. Wendy felt that there must be a way to make sure that this excess food wasn’t wasted, to make sure it got to those who needed it most. She was determined to find a solution to the problem. I told Wendy that she had nothing to worry about – the problem had already been fixed. I was certain that there was a truck that picked up that wasted food and went around the city redistributing it to soup kitchens and shelters. She hadn’t heard of it. I told her that I would find it for her and get back to her the next day.
I was living alone that summer, on summer leave from college and taking a video production course at NYU. I was making a video documentary on hunger in New York, and as I was researching the issue, I came across the Yorkville Common Pantry, which was a food pantry in my neighborhood. With an interest in understanding the issue of hunger from the inside, I began to volunteer at the pantry. Not surprisingly, Wendy also started volunteering there shortly after I described it to her.
It was an eye opening experience. The people seeking out food were by no means all homeless. I was shocked at the number of working mothers and fathers who needed food to augment the supply they could afford on their current salaries. One day a man walked through the door, in a crisp seersucker suit and tie, round wire rim spectacles. Looked like a banker. He was an accountant, had lost his job months earlier, and came up to me and very quietly asked in a whisper whether “this was where you could get food”. I was astounded – there was no way I would ever have conceived that this man was hungry based on his outward appearance.
I never found “The Truck” I told Wendy about. Food Redistribution – an idea that had seemed so obvious and essential to me, and so urgent to Wendy – apparently did not actually exist. For days I sat, alone, in my apartment, with a phone and a phone book (this was before the internet, remember), trying to find “The Truck” that transported wasted food to shelters. I think I called Meals on Wheels a half dozen times, certain that they must perform the service. “No, they transported full meals to the elderly and infirm”. I kept asking everyone I could and people kept saying: “It’s a good idea”, but nobody knew had ever heard of it. I couldn’t believe it. My truck didn’t exist. I became determined to make it a reality.
I called Wendy to tell her I couldn’t find the truck, but that my search made me more convinced than ever that we had to make this idea happen. We decided to call our friend Damon Krukowski, also from our high school, who was working in City Councilman Henry Stern’s office as an intern. Surely they would know where the truck was, or if it existed. Damon looked. Couldn’t find it. But he also thought that it was a good idea, and thought that we should meet Henry about the idea. I also called Gretchen Bucholz, who ran the Yorkville Common Pantry. She loved the idea and offered to meet with Wendy, Damon and I to discuss the concept. At our meeting, Gretchen became very enthusiastic about the concept, and offered to let the organization – once started – be covered under the Common Pantry’s Not-For-Profit umbrella policy. She also said she knew just the woman to start up such an organization: a woman who was coming to New York from New Haven that very week to start up the new Yorkville Common Pantry Soup Kitchen – Helen Palit.
Helen was a wonderful woman – a fiery, somewhat eccentric person who could in one breath explain that she had been a professional truck driver and had worked side by side with Mother Theresa in Calcutta. That was just typical of Helen’s life. Helen had actually started a food redistribution center in New Haven based around a local church – something quite similar to the concept we were conceiving. She was coming into the City a few days later and immediately offered to meet with us. She was thrilled to hear that three kids had been working on this project – she had actually been thinking of starting a project in New York similar to the one she had begun in New Haven.
We had a few meetings over the next few weeks to discuss the organization. First order of business was a name. Damon and his girlfriend Naomi Yang (they are now married) spent a night pouring over a thesaurus and came up with two terrific names: Bumper Crop and City Harvest. City Harvest stuck and Naomi, who is an artist and graphic designer, actually immediately started drawing what instantly became City Harvest’s first logo! I still remember designing and printing up the first flyer for the organization – I remember cutting a still-life of fruits from one of my mother’s art books to use for it and being scared as hell that she would find out – obviously this was before computers and scanners were around. Everything was done at the local copy shop, with headlines merely lines of type magnified over and over again, and then cut and pasted.
Helen offered to come with us all to a meeting Damon had set up with Henry Stern in his offices. Henry, though slim, reminded one of a bear. He was an intense and brilliant man. He had an extraordinary memory – it seemed he never forgot a phone number and if you told him your address, he would tell you the cross-street you lived on. We came in to his office with our flyer and story and he set straight to work. He would write a letter to the Human Resources Administration and try to get us a meeting as soon as possible with them. Damon would begin working on a proposal for which we would seek funding. Wendy and I would hit the streets in our neighborhood and ask restaurants whether or not they would join the effort – a kind of home-grown “feasibility study”. Helen made it clear right then and there that if the organization could get some funding to provide her some sort of salary, then she would run the organization. He also asked Damon and someone else in his office to write a press release. Damon went right to work, once again, probably having never written a press release in his life, and under Henry’s tutelage wrote a terrific release.
Damon worked hard on a proposal and budget. Wendy and I, separately, spent days on the hot streets, asking people if they would sign up if such a program existed. Wendy’s experience was almost universally positive. Mine wasn’t. I still remember the very first shop I went into, a high-end gourmet food store right near my house, carrying a clipboard and pencil. I explained the entire concept to the owner. He looked me right in the eyes with steely blue eyes and said, quite simply, “No”. I couldn’t believe it. Maybe he thought it was some sort of scam, maybe I seemed too nervous. I walked out crushed, but thankfully his response turned out not to be the norm. The next person I went to was very positive, as were pretty much all the others. Out of over fifty food stores and restaurants mostly everyone said they would help out if they could.
When the day came to meet with the HRA, our proposal and study in hand, we all went down to Wall Street to a large skyscraper, went up the high-rise elevator and into an imposing board room. We outlined our proposal for City Harvest, with Helen at the helm. They loved it. Told us it was a great idea. The organization had to exist. But they told us not to ask them for money! They said that if we tried to start it up through the HRA that we would be bogged down for years in red tape and paperwork, and that we would waste our time. They urged us to move forward with the project, but to seek private financing.
Back we were at square one. I was worried that the whole thing was just going to fall apart. We went back to Henry Stern for advice. Undeterred, he said “I’ll contact the press.”
For a couple weeks I kept meeting with people, trying to see how City Harvest could get started. I was beginning to lose hope when one day I got a call from Damon. He told me to turn on the TV to Channel 4 – NBC, and wait. And wait I did. No Tivo or VCR’s back then. Then, all of a sudden, just before the six-o’clock news, a news anchor came on to give an editorial. I could not have been more stunned when he started to speak to the camera and clearly outline City Harvest’s goals to the public, and to endorse the organization. And then, on the screen, the words “City Harvest” and the Yorkville Common Pantry’s phone number showed up! I immediately called Helen and Wendy and Damon – none of us could quite comprehend what had happened but we felt it was big.
We all met with Helen and Gretchen the next day. Helen had decided that she would go out on a limb and start City Harvest, at first working from the Common Pantry until she was set up with an office. Calls had been pouring in. Vans donated, office space, furniture, typewriter a phone system… and checks. City Harvest had begun. All of this had taken place over the course of less than two months. Wendy, Damon and I all returned to College for the fall, stunned that our concept had actually become a reality. Helen, alone, went on to build an entire organization from scratch.
Through the years, I kept in touch with Helen as the organization grew, working there some summers and volunteering every now and then to go on runs. I was amazed by how quickly Helen was able to grow the organization in to a vital source of food for New York’s pantries, shelters and soup kitchens. I still remember one summer, visiting the City and calling Helen up to see if she needed any help. It turned out she did: the International Food Fair at the Jacob Javits Center was ending, and many stands had food to donate. It was all gourmet food: caviar, fois gras, smoked fish, dark chocolate, the best quality meats and canned goods. I’ll never forget walking into the Bowery Mission with another volunteer, groaning under the weight of an eight foot long, one foot thick salami from one of Italy’s premiere companies. Some people started to clap. It was one of the most satisfying moments of my life.
That was a long time ago. New York has changed in so many ways… except for the summer heat. The homeless are less visible, but the hungry remain, even increase. I’m fortunate to now be a member of the Board of City Harvest and it’s wonderful to see the organization that Helen built continue to grow and prosper, now operating fifteen trucks working around the clock to move over 20 million pounds of food a year. It’s hard, quite honestly, to comprehend how this could all grow from such a simple idea. Almost as if I had thrown a snowball down a hill, not knowing it would grow into a huge boulder. It boggles the mind. And yet, I must admit, every time I’m in my car and I see a familiar flash of white and green, and hear one of my children yell out “City Harvest!”… a smile forms.
I finally did find that truck.
Jason Kliot
August 22, 2006