The Dorothy Day Pilgrimage
itinerary for a self-guided tour around the Village
In honor of our event at the Catholic Worker Maryhouse on 12/13, we’re unlocking this very spicy piece. RSVP to the event here.
Dorothy Day’s name frequently appears in the pages of this Substack, as she is not only one of our ideological influences but is also one of our patronesses. We’ve been known to invoke the Servant of God’s intercession for the success of our endeavors. Whenever we host events at the Catholic Worker Maryhouse in the East Village, I’ve made it a point to visit the bedroom in which she spent the later years of her life (and died) to pray for our contributors, benefactors, and followers (and frenemies), as well as to pray for her cause for canonization (which is currently being processed by the Vatican).
As a “princess of paradox,” Day’s political, social, cultural, and spiritual vision masterfully weds the seemingly conflicting tensions that Cracks in PoMo attempts to give space to. An anomaly for her unconventional views, merging a earnest commitment to social progress and deep esteem for the wisdom of Catholicism’s spiritual, moral, and political precepts, she was often pegged both as a “radical progressive” and a “conservative prude.”
Day and the CW’s political project—mainly rooted in an anarchistic mode of distributist thought— is often criticized for being utopian, too idealistic, and detached from reality. I concede that this is largely true. Day’s project was more prophetic than realistic; it served to “raise the bar” and incite people to aspire to pursue higher ideals, rather than to be resigned to accepting the current system as it is.
Though her political project may not have been realistic, her lifestyle—dedicated to love, community, serving God and neighbor—was. Her spiritual and cultural ideals, if not her political ones, ought to be taken quite literally. For, as we insist here at Cracks in PoMo, it is futile to establish political (and moral) ideals without first developing our existential (ontological, aesthetic) ones. Thus why we place more emphasis on thought and culture than on politics, and why we (like the CW) aim to be a home to people of diverse political ideologies. We may not all agree on the secondary factors, but what unites us it our commitment exploring to what is most essential: the flourishing of the heart and mind.
People often quote Dorothy when she insisted that people not “call her a saint,” as she didn’t want “to be dismissed that easily.” This was not to say she didn’t want to be canonized (she left that in the hands of God and the Church), but because she didn’t want her lifestyle to be written off as something particular to a separate class of spiritual elites. “That’s the way people try to dismiss you. If you’re a saint, then you must be impractical and utopian, and nobody has to pay any attention to you.” All people can strive to live radical charity and hospitality for God and neighbor.
On several occasions I’ve referenced having led a “Dorothy Day Pilgrimage” around the Village. And while I hope one day to host a Cracks in Pomo Dorothy Pilg for our followers, I thought to lay out the Pilgrimage’s itinerary for those who are interested in walking it on their own time. We’ll include below the pilgrimage stops and the meaning behind them, hoping that those who make it will pray for our platform, for our city, and for the outpouring of love, happiness, and esteem for beauty and truth in our hearts…and if you’re not a praying person, that you’ll keep these intentions in your hearts.
The former site of the Hell Hole bar
(4th Street and 6th Ave)
In the late 1910s, Day lived and socialized among radicals in Lower Manhattan and worked as a columnist for socialist papers like The Call, The Masses, and The Liberator. With sympathies for anarchism and the syndicalist organization known as the Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW, or the “wobblies”), day was an anomaly amongst her peers for her curiosity about religion and spirituality. Never satisfied with their atheistic, materialist worldview, she couldn’t shake off questions about why injustices and suffering existed, and conversely where the beauty she found in nature and the arts originated.
Above all, she was perplexed by the faith of the poor and oppressed whom she wanted to dedicate her life to serving. Amidst raucous nights of drinking, singing, dancing, and intellectual discussion, she was known to throw a wrench into things when she brought up questions about God at bars like the Hell Hole, which drew other figures of note like Michael Gold and Eugene O’Neill.
After rehearsals, or after performances, the usual meeting place was the back room of a saloon on the corner of Fourth Street and Sixth Avenue, nicknamed Hell Hole by its customers. Here Eugene O'Neill, Terry Karlin, an old Irish anarchist who had known the Hay- market martyrs, and whom Gene afterward supported till his death, Hypolite Havel, who died a few months ago in the former anarchist colony at Stelton, New Jersey, Michael Gold, and others, were my constant companions. No one ever wanted to go to bed, and no one ever wished to be alone. It was on these cold bitter evenings that I first heard "The Hound of Heaven," in an atmosphere of drink and smoke. Gene could recite all of Francis Thompson's poem, and would sit there, black and dour, his head sunk as he intoned, "And now my heart is as a broken fount, wherein tear drippings stagnate.” The idea of this pursuit by the Hound of Heaven fascinated me. The recurrence of it, the inevitableness of the outcome made me feel that sooner or later I would have to pause in the mad rush of living and remember my first beginning and my last end.”
—The Long Loneliness, by Dorothy Day
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
……………
Now of that long pursuit
Comes on at hand the bruit;
That Voice is round me like a bursting sea:
‘And is thy earth so marred,
Shattered in shard on shard?
Lo, all things fly thee, for thou fliest Me!
Strange, piteous, futile thing!
Wherefore should any set thee love apart?
Seeing none but I makes much of naught’ (He said),
‘And human love needs human meriting:
How hast thou merited—
Of all man’s clotted clay the dingiest clot?
—Excerpt from “The Hound of Heaven,” by Francis Thompson (1859–1907)
St. Joseph’s Church
(Washington Place and 6th Ave)
Dorothy was known to hang out at the Hell Hole until the wee hours of the morning, after which she’d sneak out to walk two blocks up to St. Joseph’s parish to attend daily Mass with the mostly lower income and immigrant congregants. Following her ardent desire not only to advocate but to live in communion with the poor, she joined them at Mass, praying to understand their faith which simultaneously baffled and fascinated her.
Many a morning after sitting all night in taverns or coming from balls at Webster Hall, I went to an early morning Mass at St. Joseph's Church on Sixth Avenue and knelt in the back of the church, not knowing what was going on at the altar, but warmed and comforted by the lights and silence, the kneeling people and the atmosphere of worship. People have so great a need to reverence, to worship, to adore; it is a psychological necessity of human nature that must be taken into account. We do not like to admit how people fail us. Even those most loved show their frailty and their weaknesses and no matter how we may will to see only the best in others, their strength rather than their weakness, we are all too conscious of our own failings and recognize them in others. A friend who has no formal religion or belief said once to me that surely some such great cataclysm as the Fall must have taken place to explain the evil in the world. Original sin and the gravitational pull toward the animal in man were easy to understand, accepting this fundamental teaching. Certainly I felt again and again the need to go to church to kneel, to bow my head in prayer. It was a blind instinct, one might say, and I was not conscious of praying. But I went. I put myself there in the atmosphere of prayer--it was an act of the will. It seems to me a long time that I led this wavering life, in my ignorance not knowing that we are of body, mind and soul, and that all our faculties can be brought into harmony. I felt strongly that the life of nature warred against the life of grace.
Jefferson Market Library (former site of the Women’s House of Detention)
(10h St and 6th Ave)
Dorothy Day was imprisoned a total of eight times in her life. The first arrest was in DC in 1917 for picketing White House for women’s suffrage, and the last in 1973 (at the age of 75) for protesting in California for Cesar Chavez and his United Farm Workers movement. She was did 30 days in the Women’s House of Detention in 1957 for refusing to participate in a nuclear raid drill, claiming that such drills served to legitimize the immorality of nuclear warfare, and desensitized people to its very real horrors. Determined to make a public witness to her values, she went as far as calling the local police precinct to tell them exactly where she and the other Catholic Workers would be striking, in case they wanted to arrest them.
The Women’s House of Detention was preceded on the site by the Jefferson Market Prison. Both the Prison and the House of Detention housed many notable women whose radical, revolutionary, transgressive, ‘obscene,’ or just plain illegal behavior led to their incarceration there…
Prisoners at the Women’s House of Detention included Ethel Rosenberg, housed during her trial for espionage in the early 1950s for sharing atomic secrets along with her husband with the Soviet Union; Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day, arrested and held there in 1957 for refusing to take part in a mandatory nuclear attack drill, which led to a vigil outside the prison by her comrades during her 30-day sentence; Feminist Andrea Dworkin, held there following her 1965 arrest in an anti-war protest; Valerie Solanas, the author of The S.C.U.M. (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto, held there following her shooting of Andy Warhol in 1968; and Black Panther Angela Davis, held there while awaiting extradition to California when she was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list for aggravated kidnapping and first degree murder for allegedly helping a 17-year old African-American high school student procure a firearm which he used to help three men escape from a California courtroom, during which a judge, the prosecutor, and three female jurors were taken hostage, and the judge was killed.
St. Joseph House
(East 1st St and 2nd Ave)
Part of Dorothy’s mission to offer hospitality and build community was to establish Houses of Hospitality in urban areas and Catholic Worker Farms in rural ones. The Houses provided meals, lodging, and fellowship for those in need, while the Farms welcomed those interested in learning to live off of the land. Day hoped that the Farms could also serve as a response to the overcrowding in major cities, and could be a rehumanizing haven for those disillusioned with the atomizing effect of the city life.
In addition to hospitality, the Farms and Houses placed value on shared work, prayer and worship, political organizing, and time dedicated to intellectual discussions (“clarification of thought”). The two remaining Catholic Worker Houses of Hospitality in Manhattan are the St. Joseph House (primarily serving men) and the Maryhouse (for women). The houses continue to offer food, shelter, community, and weekly meetings, as well as organizing activist efforts.
St. Joseph House was established in 1967 by Day, an influential and provocative Catholic reformer, who purchased the property to create a storefront soup kitchen and a homeless shelter—as well as a space for publishing her popular monthly Catholic Worker newspaper…Over the years, the building’s tenement style configuration has provided utilitarian challenges, however, it has not been significantly renovated or modernized. Instead, shared living rooms and dining rooms simply became makeshift family-style bedrooms—fair game for a weary head in need of a night’s sleep. Several of St. Joe’s fifty-nine regular volunteers also live in these spaces, while others commute in for the day or even once a week.
…Today, it may seem surprising that a community dedicated to living in poverty without defined leadership could survive anywhere in Manhattan. Indeed, St. Joseph House has proven “amazing in its non-changingness,” a phenomenon which volunteers good-humoredly attribute to the appeal of a way of life “so old that it looks new,” as co-founder Peter Maurin put it. While day-to-day operations at St. Joseph House may not have changed much over the years, its surroundings and demographics have. In Catholic Worker Daze, Bill Gifford, a member of the Catholic Worker Movement, recounts his experience visiting the Lower East Side and St. Joseph House during rougher times in the mid 1970s:
“I have seen people asleep on the sidewalk and staggering drunkenly in the street between the cars asking for money. I have seen obvious prostitutes and obvious drug addicts, high on something. I saw (and heard) groups of people loudly arguing with and shouting at each other. And I know that what I have seen is nothing compared to what there is…St. Joseph House and Maryhouse are small oases in this vast desert of human misery.”
Maryhouse
(East 3rd St and 2nd Ave)
When in Manhattan, Dorothy spent most of her time at the Maryhouse. Her room continues to welcome those in need…I remember being very moved by meeting someone recovering from cancer who was staying in her room during the night of the cracks in pomo: the zine Launch Party. Below is a moving retelling of a conversation between Dorothy and her daughter on her deathbed in Maryhouse.
The afternoon turned to dusk, the rain continued, and Tamar, unable to bear the tension, misery, and growing anxiety, poured herself a glass of wine.
"Do you feel bad because of me?" Dorothy asked.
"I wish I knew what to do," Tamar replied.
"It takes so long to die," Dorothy said, and staggered badly when she got up. Tamar supported her as she walked into the bathroom, and she stood in the middle of the room wondering if she would ever see her mother alive again. The pressure in her chest became unbearable, her heart aching as if she could feel her mother's struggling heart in her own chest. Frank tried to get Dorothy to take her medicine.
"You're badgering me; she said to him, and flustered him so thoroughly he left, forgetting to ask her if she wanted Communion brought to her, and because Frank did not bring it, Tamar did not leave the room to give Dorothy privacy to pray. And because Tamar told Forster not to come over- if he had, he would have been there for Dorothy's death-mother and daughter were alone, just as Dorothy had been with Grace. But maybe Tamar had to be the only one there. Of all of them she was the one who could let Dorothy go, who knew how to let her go. And so, one more of Dorothy's prayers was answered - that Tamar would be with her when she died. Just when she reached for Dorothy's wrist to feel for a pulse, just when she realized that Dorothy was gone, the phone rang, then a knock came at the door, and Tamar had had her last moment alone with her mother.
"Shall I bathe and dress her?" Sister Marie Kimball asked. Tamar nodded, and Sister Marie dressed Dorothy in the gray dress Tamar had washed just two days previous. They called the parish priest, who came over and anointed her.
Within the hour we all knew-Forster, my siblings and I, and the entire Catholic Worker network. Tamar talked to as many as she could. she called Marion and said to her two words, "Dorothy's dead." She sat quietly while Frank and the others prayed, feeling nothing but a sense of relief. The suffering was over. At the wake, she sat by the coffin as the women of the house visited. Their fears saddened her.
"They wonder if the house will go on," she said to Frank.
"They must be reassured."
After the funeral and after the crowds had gone--the Day, Batterham, and Hennessy families, the old Catholic Workers and the new, the famous and the forgotten (Forster found himself thinking every time he saw someone famous, "I must tell Dorothy") -Tamar slept that night in Dorothy's bed, for every bed in the house was needed. The emptiness of the room startled her. She woke up in the middle of the night in terror and loneliness.
—Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved By Beauty, by Kate Hennesy
Nativity/Holy Redeemer Parish
(3rd St and Ave A)
Dorothy’s funeral was held on 29 November 1980 in the Church of the Nativity, drawing everyone from bishops, the homeless, social activists, and friends who crowded into the building. The church has a small shrine to Day on the right hand side of the altar.
Dorothy Day's funeral Mass was held in Nativity Parish. And there were, apparently, several odd happenings on that day. A light fixture high in the ceiling exploded dramatically during the Mass. After the Mass, as her coffin was carried out onto Second Avenue, a homeless man ran down the street, burst through the large crowd, and threw himself on the coffin, weeping. That day my friend gave his class at Nativity the morning off, telling his students something Dorothy Day may not have wanted to hear. "Go to church today„" he said, "and see the funeral of a saint.
—My Life with the Saints, by Fr. James Martin SJ
For extra graces/time off of purg
Take the Staten Island Ferry (the one named after Dorothy) to Staten Island and take the SIRR or bus down to Totentville to Resurrection cemetery to see her grave. It’s a tiny little plaque in the ground (very hard to miss), which matches her simplicity and humility of spirit, reading her name, years of life, and the phrase “Deo Gratias” (thanks be to God). Many forget that Dorothy had a deep affection for Staten Island, and spent a great deal of time there.
We highly recommend…
The Long Loneliness, Dorothy’s autobiography
Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved By Beauty, by Kate Hennessy (Dorothy’s granddaughter)
Revolution of the Heart, a PBS documentary on Day’s life
Pope’s Francis’s address to the US Congress, in which he cites Day as one of four Americans whose example we should follow
Click here to make a contribution to the Catholic Worker.
Please consider signing up for a paid subscription to this page for more riveting content. If you’re new to Cracks in Pomo, check out the About page or read up on our Essentials. Also check out our podcast on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube and follow us on Instagram and Twitter.
MASA tortilla chips by Ancient Crunch is offering our followers 10% off their order with the promo code CRACKSINPOSTMODERNITY. Click here to redeem.
Image sourced are hyperlinked (click on photo).