A Grand Design

The Reverend Dan Bonner knows where most of his church members spend their days and nights.

Some drift off to sleep listening to the periodic whoosh of highway traffic on a bridge overhead. Others feel the occasional splatter of bird droppings on their sleeping bags. A few wake each morning at one of the city's emergency shelters.

They work at Labor Force at 12th and Grand, lining up before 5 a.m. for the privilege of earning a modest wage to clean up Kemper Arena after a Comets game or set up folding chairs for conventioneers at Bartle Hall.

At noon each day, a lot of them eat from the buffet line at Grace and Holy Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, just west of Bartle Hall and south of the brand-new Southern Pacific Railroad headquarters. Dinner is when one of the feeding trucks, driven by charity workers, stops by their campsite on the banks of the Missouri River.

They shower at Metropolitan Lutheran Ministries on 11th between Cherry and Holmes, where many store all of their belongings in lockers and pick up their mail.

Bonner also can often find them at the downtown library, milling around out front or tucked in a corner of the stacks reading. Homeless people have nowhere else they can just be, so the library picks up the slack, even though it is not equipped to do so.

"If you carried all of your worldly possessions around in a couple trash bags ... and needed to go badly to the bathroom and would like to clean up, the public library probably wouldn't be the place of choice you would think of to go do those things," says Dan Bradbury, who served as library director for nineteen years before his retirement at the end of January.

It is a problem library staffers have tolerated, trying different policies over the years. There was a time when folks could congregate, smoke and eat right outside the doors. Back then, Bradbury says, entering the library was like "running a gauntlet" through the homeless people.

Sojourners, Bonner calls them. A group of his church members chose that word rather than referring to fellow congregation members merely as homeless.

Latest tallies indicate that more than 4,000 Kansas Citians are homeless. The numbers include nearly 1,000 families who live in emergency shelters or transitional apartments, as well as more than 500 individuals living on the streets or in emergency shelters. Mental disabilities keep some of those people from finding and keeping jobs. Alcohol or drug addiction takes the same toll on others. Some have chosen a life of travel. A few will rejoin society when they receive the right medication or complete rehab. Others will remain on the streets more or less permanently.

They have their own community, advising one another, trading information on where to camp, which emergency shelter is the best, where to find temporary work and where to go to church on Sunday.

For most, that place is Bonner's Grand Avenue Temple, just down the hill from the Federal Courthouse at Ninth and Grand.

"It's a clean place. The food is good," says Jerry Smothers, who says his address is "11-9 clearance." In other words, he lives under a bridge. Of Bonner's church, he says, "They don't push the Lord on you if you're not into it."

On weekends, Grand Avenue Temple serves meals when Grace and Holy doesn't, so plenty of visitors come just for the free lunch. But some arrive early for services, and many have joined, agreeing to attend regularly, to study the Bible and to tithe. They will give the church $1 out of every $10 they make, whether it's from a day of labor or a passerby softened by a cardboard appeal for money. Of the 170 members listed in Grand Avenue's church directory, 104 have no address.

Jose Ramos has been attending Grand Avenue for two years. "This church makes you feel you are really important," he says. "No obligation here. You are just coming to hear the word of God. I consider this the best church in Kansas City. It treats everybody equally."

Bonner wants to extend the church involvement in their lives from Saturday and Sunday lunches and services to every day of the week. He wants to open a center where sojourners can gather during the day to be safe and dry. Doing so, he believes, would decrease pressure on the library -- especially because it's slated to move into its new, $50 million marble home in the former Bank of America building at 10th and Baltimore next January.

The library is spawning several nearby projects. Antiquated office buildings are being reborn as trendy apartments. More lofts are being built along Grand. An expansion of Bartle Hall will begin soon. Plans for a new Performing Arts Center are progressing as well.

All the attention and investment downtown hasn't gone unnoticed by the people who wander its streets after the commuters have driven past garage security arms, beelined for the nearest highway ramps and gone home.

Homeless people talk about the changes when they line up for food or hang out in shelter day rooms. Mostly, the gossip is about what's happened to people everyone knows.