Good News on Los Angeles’ Skid Row
Jeff Dietrich at the Hippie Kitchen. Photo . It’s Saturday morning, the first day of the month, and that means the line at the soup kitchen where Jeff Dietrich works is down to about 600. For more than 40 years, Dietrich and his wife Catherine Morris have worked at the Los Angeles Catholic Worker Hospitality Kitchen in Skid Row, chopping onions, scrubbing pots, breaking up fights and making friends. “It’s really simple, uncomplicated work,” said Dietrich, who could have worked any number of jobs that paid more than $15 a week. On a typical day, Dietrich and Morris recognize many of the 600 – 1,000 in line at the Hippie Kitchen, as it’s called. Many in line believe Dietrich and Morris own the place. But the couple is among a dozen or so full-time community members running the soup kitchen and living on donations, themselves. Their home is a drafty, 120-year-old, gingerbread Victorian house with 14 bedrooms a couple miles from Skid Row in Boyle Heights. They live with occasional volunteers from around the world and a handful of homeless friends brought home over the years. “The dominant culture tends to deride what we do as worthless,” Dietrich said while plates of black-eyed peas…
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