Dugout is still the place to find food, comfort
The story of how a training session turned into a haven where 600 people find warmth daily
David Williams is known as the Soup Gangster at the Dugout in Gastown, a safe place where people in the Downtown Eastside can come to for hot food, good company and a chair in a warm corner.
“My soup is four-star soup,” said Williams, a one-time cook. “Just layers and layers of flavour.”
He’s been volunteering at the Dugout for a couple of years. It’s the front line, as he puts it, of a war against addiction, mental illness and homelessness.
“There is no judgment at the Dugout, there’s no attitude,” Williams said.
“And it’s all because of Mr. Burrows, he’s the architect of the Dugout.”
Bob Burrows, the Dugout’s founder and 52 years later still its treasurer, is a fascinating study in altruism, public service, Welsh choir singing and, in his early days, as a bush pilot who took his United Church ministry to remote lighthouses, logging camps and dozens of other remote ports of call from his base in Alert Bay.
He became a United Church minister after earning a BA in ethics from the University of Toronto, a master’s in divinity at the United Church’s Emmanuel College in Toronto, followed by postgraduate studies at St. Andrew’s University of Scotland, a nice gig for an avid golfer.
But it was in Toronto during a six-week training session that the idea for the Dugout was born. It was 1967 and the trainees had to spend three nights on the street in Toronto, with $5 in their pockets. It was January. It dipped to -30 overnight.
“We called it the plunge,” Burrows said. “It was freezing cold, but most upsetting of all was there was no place to go sit down and be warm and dry.”
There was shelter inside the train and bus stations, but you weren’t welcome, he said. “You were a bum. It was horrible.”
He came back to Vancouver, talked to a DTES council made up of the First United Church, St. James Anglican, Holy Rosary Roman Catholic and Central City Mission, and they said ‘make it happen.’
“We wanted to provide a beer-parlour atmosphere, but have coffee instead of beer,” he said. “A group of (church) volunteers scraped and painted the place to get it ready.”
In December 1967, just months after “the plunge,” the Dugout opened its door. It has been serving soup and offering a haven every single day since — 600 people a day enjoy its hot meals and comfort.
Burrows and another minister had a box of small change they had received for presiding at weddings, and through that they “paid” the volunteers with a pack of smokes, 36 cents and a voucher for a threecourse meal at the old Lenity Cafe on East Hastings.
The Dugout is still in its original building. The rent was $75 a month and the landlord never raised that rent in 10 years, Burrows said, even as adjacent rents skyrocketed as Gastown was reborn.
The owner put it up for sale in the 1970s because he was in his 90s, and the city bought the property.
“All the merchants in Gastown were like this when it was put up for sale,” he said, rubbing his hands together. But Burrows talked the city into buying the property and it owns it to this day.
Local grocery stores and bakeries supply the food, worth between $400,000 and $500,000 a year, Burrows said. Private donors provide most of the $100,000 a year it takes to pay utilities and operational expenses, including the equivalent of two salaries for managers.
The city and the Central City Foundation also chip in.
“The reason this worked 52 years ago and the reason it still works today is the volunteers,” Burrows said.
The staff seem to love their volunteer work.
Peter Stewart, a painter by trade, spent two weeks in a shelter a block from the Dugout after his divorce ages ago. That’s when he discovered the Dugout.
“I saw it, I lived it,” he said of life in a homeless shelter. “Some days people walk in here and they don’t even know what time it is, what day it is, what time of year it is.”
He’s seen miracles of compassion from his fellow volunteers, he said. And, as others do, he points to Burrows as the architect of that compassion.
“Bob is a very passionate guy, he has a good heart,” said Stewart, one of three people who makes the soup along with Williams and Charles Lockwood. “He is the hardest-working man I’ve ever seen.”
And his co-chef’s claim to being the sultan of soup?
“Haha, he wishes. People tell me my soup is the best. Charles makes cheese soup, David’s has meat, mine is vegetarian.
“And altogether, we have the best soup anywhere.”