Where did Dorothy Day grow up and live?

📍36 East 1st Street, New York, NY 10003, USA

1897 – 1980

“I was born in 1897 in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in a working-class family. I became a journalist, then a socialist, then a Catholic convert, and in 1933 I co-founded the Catholic Worker movement with Peter Maurin. The Catholic Worker house of hospitality on the Lower East Side of Manhattan — Maryhouse and Saint Joseph House — was my home for most of the rest of my life. We served meals to the poor, sheltered the homeless, and published a penny newspaper advocating voluntary poverty and nonviolence. I was arrested multiple times for protesting war and social injustice, the last time at age seventy-five. The Lower East Side, with its immigrant poverty and its Catholic parishes, was the physical world in which I tried to live the gospel literally.”

👍 LovedThe Catholic Worker community's daily practice of the works of mercy — feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless. The Lower East Side neighbourhood's immigrant vitality. The clarity of voluntary poverty as a spiritual practice.

👎 DislikedThe poverty that voluntary poverty requires one to inhabit rather than merely observe. The government's hostility to pacifism. The difficulty of sustaining a community life over decades.

Map showing where Dorothy Day lived — 36 East 1st Street, New York, NY 10003, USA

🗺️ Approximate location today

Street view of Dorothy Day's home at 36 East 1st Street, New York, NY 10003, USA

📍 Street view today

Sources: Day, D. The Long Loneliness (1952), Harper; Forest, J. All Is Grace: A Biography of Dorothy Day (2011), Orbis Books