A dozen busy cooks clang pots and pans together in the vast basement kitchen of a regal stone church. There’s a bowl the size of a bass drum filled with pasta and cream sauce, a vat of spinach simmering with bacon, heaping pans of roast turkey, and mountains of fresh fruit and green salad. Dutch apple pies and chocolate cakes are waiting in the wings.
As tantalizing aromas waft through the hall and out to the sidewalks, people begin arriving, maneuvering bicycles, backpacks and overflowing carts down the beat-up steps. The tables fill as companions gather. There is an air of familiarity, comfort and kinship. Off to the side, a bearded man plays a tune with considerable skill and flourish on an ornate, upright piano.
This has been the general scene for nearly four decades at the Sunnyside Community House in the basement of the 108-year-old United Methodist Church on the corner of Southeast 35th Avenue and Yamhill Street. Known as the Hard Times Supper, this free feast has been open to all every Wednesday night, serving up to 150 homeless and marginalized people for the past 38 years.
But on Wednesday, Sept. 11, the last supper was served, and an enduring legacy came to an end. The Sunnyside Community House received a 90-day eviction notice in the spring. It closed for good Sept. 15.
For many, the loss is staggering.
“When people are homeless, they need a place where they can feel normal even for a couple of hours,” said Mike Perez, who has been coming here for 20 years.
“This was the only place I know where, if your significant other is handicapped and needs help in the shower, you could go in with him,” Magpie Blue said. “I was in tears on the last day.”
“I love this place,” diner Timothy Varner said. “It’s special. I don’t know where I’m going to go. They can’t just close it down, but that’s what they’re saying. They had a meeting in the office upstairs, and Pat came down crying. What can we do?”
Pat
Pat Schwiebert is the woman at the epicenter of this 38-year phenomenon. She started the Hard Times Supper in 1981 along with a crew of others. John Mayer, her co-director of services for the past two years, said she has missed only three or four dinners out of some 2,000 served.
Schwiebert brings an unparalleled passion and dedication to the work. A small, energetic force of nature, she is 74 years young and beloved by the community. For decades, she’s been gleaning food, collecting donations and picking up weekly supplies from the Oregon Food Bank to create the constant flow of meals.
“We don’t serve anything here we wouldn’t put in front of our own families,” she said.
Under Schwiebert’s direction, the Sunnyside Community House became a reliable fixture in the homeless community and one of the few places for services on Portland’s east side. Over the past five years, it expanded to include more hot meals during the week, as well as a place to take showers, exchange clothing, get a haircut, take a nap, do laundry, join a writing group, mourn the death of a friend, recharge phone batteries and find help navigating social services. The space also functioned as an emergency winter shelter, housing 50 to 60 people on freezing winter nights.
“This work is not about helping; it’s about serving,” Schwiebert said, “and that’s not hierarchical; it’s lateral.
Schwiebert was born in poverty to a single mother in Pittsburgh.
“The only way we survived was because my grandfather was kind,” she said.
As an adult, she became a registered nurse and worked in the county hospital in Los Angeles.
“I loved every minute of that work,” she said. “I couldn’t have gotten a better education. It was the largest county hospital in the world at that time. It was all poor, disenfranchised, Hispanic and black.”
She moved to Portland when she started her family. Between her and her second husband, John Schwiebert, they have a combined family of four children and six grandchildren, most of whom have grown up serving at the Hard Times Supper.
Pat Schwiebert said keeping the suppers going has been anything but a hardship for her.
“I never had to push myself. When people say, ‘When are you going to retire?’ Do you really retire from something that’s part of you? Do you retire from your family? You don’t. I’m doing what I love. I’m very much at peace. We’ve learned to live simply. Our folks have taught me how to do that.”
Schwiebert and her husband live with few possessions. As military-tax resisters, they have kept to a modest salary for years. They live in an intentional community with about 10 others in Northeast Portland called the Peace House, which is “an official, if not typical, United Methodist congregation known as the Metanoia Peace Community,” according to the group’s website. Peace House also takes in hospice patients and serves as an emergency shelter. Those in need in this northeast neighborhood have been able to access a shower through an outside door. When Schwiebert goes home, she is still hard at work.
Up until a year ago, Schwiebert ran several miles each morning to stay in shape for the demands of her life. Recently, osteoporosis has curtailed her morning runs into morning walks. She believes this consistent exercise regimen, along with the morning worship that begins each day at the Peace House, has given her the physical and inner endurance to continue.
She has tried not to let the constant drum of opposition and the recent eviction affect her.
“You learn to let go, but letting go doesn’t mean it’s all right,” she said. “If you stay angry, it will eat you up and you won’t be able to do the work. You can’t bring anger to the table. You have to forgive.
“But I’m heartbroken,” she said. “I thought I would die here, among my friends.”
Sunnyside United Methodist Church
Retired Methodist minister and former Oregon state Rep. Frank Shields was on hand to help get the food out for the last Hard Times Supper. Shields served as the pastor of the Sunnyside Methodist congregation for 21 years, and in the 1980s, he was instrumental in making sure the fledgling Sunnyside Community House had a secure home in the basement of the church.
“This place is unique in the sense that if Multnomah County, if the government were trying to do this, how much would it cost the taxpayer? This costs nothing, and yet thousands if not millions of dollars in services have been given away over the last 30-plus years,” Shields said.
When Shields was elected to the Oregon Legislature in 1992, he left Sunnyside Methodist. Following his departure, relations between the church, the neighborhood and the Sunnyside Community House deteriorated, and the suppers and services nearly came to an end in the late 1990s.
“The church lost touch with the neighborhood, and they didn’t hear the disgruntled talk until it exploded and complaints had gone to the city,” Schwiebert said. “They were upset about the same things they are today. Just the sight of people on the street was enough for some, and they complained about pooping in the yards, needles, everything they complain about now. I took every one of those concerns seriously. We don’t want to be doing something that will hurt the neighbors. So we had to figure out, is this really happening, and if it is, how often. We found that most of these things had happened, but just not that often. You know what an urban legend is? It felt like the same story kept being repeated over and over until it became huge. The story became that it was happening every day.”
Then Mayor Vera Katz demanded the parties meet and work out an agreement before services could continue.
“We spent months at some of the most terrible meetings you can imagine where neighbors would be screaming at us, saying terrible things about the people we loved,” Schwiebert said. “One by one, our people stopped coming to the meetings, it was so bad.”
Eventually she found herself alone against a room full of angry men.
After several extensions and with no agreement in sight, Schwiebert called one of the opposition leaders and suggested they meet at the Tao of Tea on Belmont and get to know each other.
“We told our stories, just the two of us,” she said. “After about three hours, I asked if he was willing to give it a try, and he said yes.”
All the parties came together for a final meeting at City Hall.
“Up until then, people wouldn’t even look at each other,” Schwiebert recalled. But the mood was different that day. The decision was unanimous to let the Sunnyside Community House continue, with newly agreed-upon rules in place.
“When people stood up to leave, everyone hugged each other. It was unbelievable what happened,” she said.
The next 20 years went more or less smoothly for the Sunnyside Community House. But the church congregation, once one of the largest in Oregon, was dwindling. Five years ago, with only about 17 elderly members remaining, the decision was made to dissolve. Usually when a congregation dissolves, the property is sold by the Methodist Conference, but Schwiebert persuaded church leaders to allow the Sunnyside Community House to manage the building and continue offering services.
“She had a model to keep it going, to renovate the space,” Mayer said. “She was up on ladders painting. She found community partners who paid the bills and enabled the doors to be kept open for homeless services, which was always her priority.”
These community partners included Third Rail Repertory Theatre, Sowelu Theater, PDX Toy Library, Raphael House of Portland, Alcoholics Anonymous and various basketball groups.
The eviction
With the upstairs renovated and rented and the utilities and insurance paid regularly, the Sunnyside Community House felt secure for the past five years. Services were expanded to hot breakfasts, a second shower was added, and Schwiebert and Mayer allowed themselves to dream.
“We’ve known a new congregation needed to come in,” Mayer said, “but promises were made that we would be the heartbeat of what would happen in the building. We were told the right congregation would be found to join us as a partner in this work.”
But this June, with no warning, the Sunnyside Community House received a 90-day eviction notice ordering them to vacate the premises by Sept. 15. The eviction was ordered by the Methodist Conference and by the newly appointed building managers, The Groves Church, a Portland area faith community that was moving into the space.
“We thought we were walking into a very different meeting,” Mayer said. None of the other building partners were evicted.
“The leadership of the church lost a vision for how you really reach out and do what Christ taught, how to take care of ‘the least of these brothers and sisters of mine,’” Shields said, quoting Matthew 25:40.
For volunteer Jim Moiso, former pastor of Westminster Presbyterian Church near the Lloyd Center, the politics of the eviction are complicated.
“When people started camping on sidewalks, it became hard on neighbors,” he said. “I don’t know of a neighborhood that would welcome that. It’s nobody’s fault. It just is. But that doesn’t answer the issue. Where does this segment of our population find belonging? If they were neat and tidy and middle class and didn’t have stuff all over the place, if they showered all the time, they’d be welcome. But that’s not a possibility. They are poor.”
“It’s not a tidy scene,” Mayer said in agreement. Mayer lives with his wife and young children just a few doors down. “I get that people get tired of seeing shopping carts and trailers on the sidewalk. But if collectively our society is not taking care of these people, then we have to. The best thing about this work for me is my expanded sense of who my neighbor is.”
Amy Kleiner is principal of Sunnyside Environmental School, across the street from the Sunnyside Community House. Kleiner said she thinks the presence of the Sunnyside Community House under the guidance of Schwiebert and Mayer created a safer environment. In a recent school newsletter she wrote:
“The impact of this displacement has been hard on the community. Many of the folks who were the ‘eyes and ears’ of the park have physically left, and they’ve shared that the dissolution of this community has caused additional, compounding trauma. Additionally, several families who live nearby have reported an increase in unsafe behavior on the corner. I want to affirm that I, personally, feel the loss of community and some of the folks in the park are unfamiliar to me at this time. For me, an unintended consequence of the displacement of the program is actually the loss of the connection to John and Pat. This has led to more trash and debris piling up, as well as a sentiment of fear and uncertainty among the folks on the corner.”
FURTHER READING: Six letters from Sunnyside: Student perspectives on homelessness
One of the hardest parts for Mayer has been witnessing the collective grief around him.
“Watching what it does to Pat is heartbreaking,” he said. “But it’s rededicated her to the work. Seeing how much Pat wants to serve, how capable she is and how much our volunteers want to give, it feels like a real shame to have that not be utilized in a city that’s in crisis.”
The future
Schwiebert, Mayer, the solid core of volunteers, and the hundreds of poor and marginalized people who have come to rely on the Sunnyside Community House are determined not to lose the special community they have built together over the last 38 years.
“We will do what we have to do in a mobile way. We will do one-on-one support. We will find a place where we can have meetings once a week with our people. We will try to orchestrate pop-up meals and community spaces that will let us have one-offs until we can raise enough money or find a space that will open for us,” Mayer said.
Mayer has created a new website using the groups new name, beaconpdx.org. All donations will go through Metanoia, the nonprofit Methodist congregation to which Schwiebert, her husband and Peace House all belong.
But for now, a legion of helpers are rushing against the clock to fill storage units around the city with load after load of bunk beds, kitchen equipment, tablecloths, blankets, holiday decorations, canned food and a barber chair in hopes of one day having a home again.
“The work is not done,” Schwiebert said, “and I’m not done with the work.”
If you would like to support the ongoing work of the Hard Times Supper, go to kind.fund/campaign/hard-times-supper-needs-a-new-home.