Dorothy Day and the Soup Line on Mott Street

In 1933, Dorothy Day stood in a cramped storefront at 436 East Mott Street in Manhattan, ladling soup into chipped bowls. She was a journalist, a convert, a woman who had walked away from a comfortable writing career because she could no longer write about poverty without touching it. The Catholic Worker house she founded with Peter Maurin had no endowment, no board of directors, no strategic plan.…