Highbridge's house of hope

By Steven Gnagni
Managing Editor

About twenty-three years ago, Sister Mary Doris first set foot in Highbridge. After working as a schoolteacher for a number of years, two of her fellow sisters, Sister Ann Lovett and Sister Mary Moynihan, who had started a community life center in Highbridge, convinced Sister Mary Doris to join them. Her task: to help neighborhood residents get their high school diplomas.

She began working in Highbridge in 1980 on a part-time basis, at first helping many youth from the neighborhood who had dropped out of school. Soon, adults from the neighborhood flocked to the class, and she added basic education and English as a Second Language classes. The program grew. By 1982, she came on as a full-time teacher, and soon after Highbridge Community Life Center hired another two full-time instructors.

But Sister Mary Doris, a member of the Sisters of St. Dominic of Blauvelt, an order founded In 1878 and dedicated to helping homeless children In New York City, sensed there was something missing. While she was able to help the students learn, there were some students who had distractions that kept pulling them away from their studies.

“What happened is that some of the women in my class were in a predicament,” she explains. “They were pregnant or they had a young baby, or they were living with a relative, a family member, who was no longer able to put them up. In some cases, they were living in domestic violence situations or their boyfriends or the baby’s fathers were in jail—they didn’t have supports. They used to tell me that they were going to drop out of school, they couldn’t complete the GED program because they had to go live with a relative...and I felt really bad.”

Naturally, Sister Mary Doris wanted to help them.

“I always felt that education was the key, and whatever we needed to do to support them while they were getting that education was important,” she says. “And I thought, ‘Gee, it would be so great if I just had a house, a small building, where I could keep maybe four or five of them.’”

But finding that house was easier said than done. She had the backing of her religious congregation, which in the 1980s started an effort to help women who were homeless. She also had her eyes set on a house next to Sacred Heart Church, at 168th Street and Nelson Avenue. But in the mid 1980s it was occupied by priests that worked for Mother Theresa of Calcutta.

Then one day, she was talking to a parishioner of Sacred Heart, and the parishioner mentioned that the priests were moving away.

“I decided, ‘Let me go find out if we can get this building, so I went to the pastor [of Sacred Heart], who was not too excited about having a shelter in the middle of a school setting,” she says.

She didn’t give up on the idea, though. She paid a visit to the Cardinal of New York City. “I was able to get invited to a meeting where the decision about this building came into play,” she says. After assuring the Cardinal that she and another sister would live there with the women, it was approved. Tolentine Zeiser Community Life Center on Fordham Road agreed to put up the collateral necessary to get the building.

But then Sister Mary Doris faced an important decision. The city’s Department of Homeless Services approved of the building and suggested she run the house as a women’s shelter. She would have to give up her dream of helping her students, but on the other hand, the city funding would make it possible to do much more for the women who passed through the house. In the end, she decided Siena House, as it came to be called, would become a city-funded Tier II women’s shelter.

“It wasn’t the ideal thing,” she says. “Initially we didn’t want to accept the city money. We initially just wanted to go for it, let’s do it our way and let’s do it the way we think is the right way. But we could never do what we do here without the city money.”

Now the women who go through Siena House (named after a Dominican saint, St. Catherine of Siena, an educator and helper of homeless women in the 13th century in Rome) get a host of services. There are two social workers, who help the women with everything from finding social services they need to teaching them about budgeting and parenting; two housing specialists, who help them find a place to live; two full-time cooks; three babysitters; a maintenance crew; and security guards who keep watch on the house 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In addition to that staff, there are two administrators—Sister Mary Doris, the director, and Sister Cecelia Byrnes, assistant director—and a nurse educator, who is funded by a grant.

Over the past 13 years, over 1,000 women have passed through Siena House. Each woman is allowed to bring only one infant with her (because the rooms are small and only have a twin bed and a crib) and some women are pregnant when they come to the shelter and have the baby while living at Siena House. (Though none have been delivered in the house, a few bear the name Siena.)

Sister Mary Doris says over those years she has seen a lot of successes.

“We had a woman who actually graduated from Fordham University,” she recalled. “While she was here, she was struggling a lot, and after she left, she went back to school. She got her degree in social work. And one day, unbeknownst to me, I call down to Third Street Shelter to speak to a social worker there, I was looking for somebody, and she said, ‘Is this Sister Mary Doris? I said ‘Yes.’ She was a social worker down there.”

She admits that there aren’t always happy endings. Sometimes the women return to bad situations after leaving, and sometimes they need more help than Siena House can give them in the time the city keeps the women there—an average of about 6 months.

“It’s hard [to say goodbye to] the ones that you know almost need a little more time, and yet they have to go,” she explained. “You want to say, ‘Wait, we’re not finished with them yet.’ You know that old adage, ‘God isn’t finished with me yet’? Well, we’re not finished with them yet, they need a little more stability.”

In the end, education is still her focus. Siena House used to have a GED program, but now the women are sent off-site to take classes and attend job training. The only thing Sister Mary Doris is missing now is the teaching she started out doing.

“I had a lot of fun doing that,” she says. “I miss teaching a lot actually, but every once in a while I get a little tutoring in here.”

She does a lot more teaching than she realizes.