Here for the First Time
“Learn to do good, seek justice, correct DEAN MORTON Everything was happening. If oppression, bring justice to the fatherless, someone came in to the Cathedral and we saw plead the widow’s cause.” ISAIAH 1:17 that they had energy and agency, we tried to pull them in. It was about people saying, “Let’s do this.” Then we would find good leadership and they DEAN MORTON We were a tower of white Anglotook it from there. Saxon Protestantism in a Black, Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Dominican neighborhood. We had an extraordinarily varied constituency that we JOSÉ V. TORRES Jim was all over the place but had to answer to. Our first duty had to be serving we loved him. He would notoriously call late the community in which we live. We started at night and want a meeting. “Come on, let’s have the Manhattan Valley Youth Program, programs a talk.” He would brainstorm with you and for families and kids, food programs, a soup you would say yes. He was exciting, and he got kitchen, a men’s shelter, we even had a Cathedral us excited. Because of our youth programs, baseball team. In 1973, we founded the Urban we saw Black and Latino kids come in here for Homesteading Assistance Board, UHAB. At its the first time. 30th anniversary in 2003, UHAB recorded over 30,000 rehabilitated apartments. Homes for THE REV. SANDYE WILSON Jim Morton was the Homeless was conceived at the Cathedral deeply connected to the students. He was always in 1986 and initially financed by business leader looking at how you could connect the reality Leonard Stern. It still exists today, as one of change, and that included changes in the of the city’s largest private housing organization. Morningside and Harlem neighborhood and the The single largest Cathedral social-justice Cathedral demographics, with the gift of the arts. program was The Valley, a seven-day-a-week teenage counseling center started in 1978 THE REV. CANON TOM MILLER The Cathedral by John Bess and Alfonso Wyatt. At its peak, community responded directly to local needs. it served some 4,000 young people, largely As the area around the Cathedral became home from Harlem. to many Hispanic and Latino immigrants. And as homelessness became a critical issue throughout the city, St. John the Divine initiated what THE REV. JESSE JACKSON Jim took the lead would grow to be Cathedral Community Cares. on housing and homelessness. His were among Aspects of the mission included a shelter and the earliest initiatives for urban homesteading. feeding program, immigration advice services, His was one for the first churches in New York and the Crisis Intervention Center—a drop-in to shelter homeless men, even to bring them to the social service located in the base of the south tower. Cathedral’s pulpit. He is a man of the City in the best sense—the human city and the City of God.
Top Group photo of the Manhattan Valley Youth Program. Bottom The Rev. Mary Michael Simpson (center) with her sponsors, the Very Rev. James Parks Morton and Sister Andrea, at her ordination, January 9, 1977. 28
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