That’s a great report from Ian Frazier on the soup kitchen at the Church of the Holy Apostles. He says it’s still operating. Coronavirus hasn’t stopped it. He writes,
Lately, the serving station has been moved outdoors, to the church’s front gate, on Ninth Avenue, near West Twenty-eighth Street. The menu still offers a hot meal but packaged in a to-go sack with recyclable dishes, which are the biggest expense at the moment. [“Still Open”]
He describes the queue of people waiting for a meal:
By ten-fifteen, the line stretched to Twenty-eighth Street, around the corner, and down the long block between Ninth Avenue and Eighth. A soup-kitchen employee in a jacket of high-visibility green was walking along the line and urging those waiting to maintain spaces of six feet between one another. They complied, reluctantly, but somehow the line kept re-compressing itself. A strange, almost taxicab-less version of traffic went by on Ninth—delivery trucks, police tow trucks, police cars, home-health-care-worker vans, almost empty buses. Now and then a dog-walker, masked or swathed in a scarf, passed. The dogs, unconcerned, were enjoying the sunny day. At ten-thirty, lunch service started. The guests (as the soup kitchen refers to them) were admitted to the serving station one at a time, like travellers in airport security. Opening their lunch sacks, they began to eat standing on the sidewalk or leaning against the Citi Bike stands, or they crossed to the courtyard of a public building across the street and sat on benches by a statue of a soldier in the First World War.
Reading Frazier’s piece, I pleasurably recalled his superb “Hungry Minds” (The New Yorker, May 26, 2008; included in his 2016 collection Hogs Wild), in which he refers to the Church of the Holy Apostles soup kitchen as a “work of art” (“There are so many hungers out there; the soup kitchen deals, efficiently and satisfyingly, with the most basic kind. I consider it, in its own fashion, a work of art”).
Based on Frazier’s latest report, I’d say the Church of the Holy Apostles soup kitchen is a work of art that is becoming ever more inspiring.
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In the April 6, 2020, issue, the article titles are in a different typeface than the New Yorker’s standard Irwin, and those titles are shown in upper and lower case rather than the standard upper case. In the previous issue, and in all subsequent issues, the titles are in standard Irwin upper case. What gives with this one-time change?
ReplyDeleteVery interesting. I didn't notice. This issue was so long arriving in the mail that I decided to read and review the online version. The article titles in that version are in Irvin. You ask a good question. Maybe it's an experiment. If so, I hope that's the end of it. I prefer the old style. It's definitely something to keep an eye on. Thanks for pointing it out.
ReplyDeleteA follow-up to my May 18, 2020 query:
ReplyDeleteIn the April 6, 2020, issue, article titles were shown in Adobe Caslon Pro. The next issue, they went back to Irvin.
Then in the May 18, 2020, issue, author names were shown in Adobe Caslon Pro. The next issue, they went back to Irvin, and stayed there for almost four months.
But in the September 7, 2020, issue, both article titles and author names are shown in Adobe Caslon Pro. The September 14, 2020, issue hasn't yet arrived in my mailbox, so I don't know whether September 7 is another one-issue experiment or an indication of something more permanent.
Not sure what's going on with the font changes. I notice that April 6, May 18, and September 7 are all themed issues. Is it a question of occasionally trying for a slightly different look, or is it part of a plan to eventually phase out Irvin? I hope it's not the latter.
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