‘Street priest’ looks back
At 90 and battling cancer, Father Peter Young still fights for the downtrodden
When Bronx anti-racism protesters visited Albany in the turbulent summer of 1968, they went to St. John’s parish, a beautiful neo- Gothic gem serving the city’s gritty South End.
The Catholic church was the home base of the Rev. Peter Young, a “street priest” beloved for housing the homeless, helping addicts and tutoring kids.
The militants told neighbors that Young was their hostage, and they moved to occupy the building, punching Young in the stomach and shoving him against a wall. But despite his gentle demeanor, Young was a Navy veteran, an ex-college football player tough enough to break up dive bar fights.
Young retained a natural athlete’s confidence; he didn’t panic. Within minutes, members of the St. John’s teenage basketball team arrived and ushered away his captors. Young thanked the kids for rescuing him, and one patted Young’s back and laughed,
saying, “We had to, Father — you got the gym keys.”
Young laughs now, remembering something that is so far away, yet illustrates exactly who one of Albany’s most famous priests is. An anchor of his city neighborhood, Young saw the drug addiction and homelessness that enveloped his parish. Sixty-one years ago, he founded what would become a statewide service: Peter Young Housing, Industry and Treatment. The nonprofit has aided thousands from Brooklyn to Buffalo with 117 clinics, in-prison rehab, homeless family shelters (including the Schuyler Inn in Menands), housing for exinmates and mentoring for children. Young was never paid a salary for leading his sprawling organization, only what he received for being a diocesan priest.
At age 90, Young has also battled bone cancer, malignant melanoma, arthritis, quadruple bypass surgery and bum knees that forced him to use a cane. As a retiree, Young still volunteered at his organization until two weeks ago, when he learned he has Stage 4 cancer.
Doctors have ordered Young, who is wheelchairbound, to stay inside the Albany townhouse his mother left him. A correctional officer buddy visits on his way to work. Friends drop in daily. Invariably, Young’s on the phone, helping someone needing a second chance, a haven from danger, a kind voice.
Young says he remains hopeful about an experimental treatment program he’s in via University at Albany.
Even as he is fighting for his life, Young is also still fighting to save his organization for those who need its help.
In 2012, Young’s organization was rocked when it uncovered financial improprieties and reported them to the state. Ultimately, a former chief operating officer was convicted of stealing $200,000. Funding had always come from state legislative member items, contracts for custodial, culinary and construction work and, primarily, contracts from the state’s Office of Addiction Services and Supports. Although Young was exonerated from having anything to do with the malfeasance, the nonprofit’s overall finances were under investigation and OASAS stopped its funding. The network was forced to cut 150 staffers, sell many buildings, and close many programs.
In September, the nonprofit closed its Troy home for 22 ex-inmates; it had provided rehab services for 25 years.
But the nonprofit’s
CEO, Peter Newkirk, is resolute about keeping Young’s calling afloat. While OASAS seemed to be more open to reestablishing its relationship with the nonprofit last year, it is still not awarding the organization contracts, Newkirk said. Now he focuses on trying to get foundation grants, as well as federal and county funding, but it is a constant tightrope walk.
“It’s not financially feasible to save all sites, but I’ll never let the core die,” Newkirk promises.
After retiring from his official role at the nonprofit in 2012, Young gave weekly Mass in a tiny chapel with amber-colored walls and stations of the cross sculptures in a downtown Albany basement. His adjacent office is stacked with cardboard boxes crammed with parolees’ handwritten letters.
Plucked at random, one reads: “Father, My record shows no violence. Clean 4 years, thanx to you. I’m 25 + desperate to change. I need to learn to live right! PLEASE help me be a better man!!! I got no family.”
He helped most correspondents become working family men. He’s haunted by those his nonprofit may be financially unable to house and counsel now.
Growing up in Albany’s New Scotland area, Young prepared for a more carefree life.
As a teen, Young so excelled in a baseball school run by Negro League manager Art Mitchell that the sports legend arranged for his one white student to play in Negro League games. The St. Louis Cardinals invited him to tryouts.
But Young chose to study business on a Siena football scholarship. He and his beautiful fiancée planned to marry after his Navy stint during the Korean War.
Young’s path changed after a 1953 Caribbean shore leave with shipmates who swiftly got drunk. Young was astonished when the men tried to rape a woman they dragged into an alley. Young stopped them and got a beating. Later, the captain asked about his pummeled face. A long conversation ensued about alcoholism. The captain, struck by Young’s insights, urged him to be a priest.
For weeks, as Young guarded the depth chargers, waves crashing all around, he imagined being a married businessman or a priest. “I felt called,” Young said. “The civil rights movement had started; I was young, wanted to change the world.”
His girlfriend was temporarily heartbroken. Young’s best buddy adored her from afar. He comforted her. They married, had children and a wonderful life. Decades later, the former sweetheart summoned Young to her deathbed to perform last rites.
Young held her hand as she died.
Gov. Nelson Rockefeller once asked Young to give him a South End walking tour. Bodyguards trailed them as Young introduced the tycoon to Black pastors, activists, recovering addicts and hard-working residents trapped in terrible housing.
“Alcoholics were expected to get sober before getting into shelters,” Young explained. “It’s almost impossible to get clean in chaos, constantly in physical danger on the streets.”
Rockefeller agreed and let Young create apartments for 150 alcoholics in a shuttered school. Rockefeller also gave Young 16 up-to-code abandoned buildings.
It didn’t stop Young, though, from leading vocal opposition to Rockefeller’s severe drug laws.
Young also founded Albany’s Eleanor Young Clinic, offering treatment for addiction, HIV/AIDS, and mental illness (including PTSD), as well as prenatal-to-postpartum care, counseling for sexual abuse and help for domestic violence survivors.
The center is named for his mother. Young still has the 1932 pastel portrait Eleanor commissioned of him as a toddler after he won Sears’ Beautiful Baby Contest. Young loved his inventor-machinist dad. But he adored Eleanor, a Department of Motor Vehicles employee with far-flung social and political contacts made via volunteer work and serving on Albany’s Human Rights Commission.
“When I’d go to the Capitol, lawmakers said, ‘There’s Eleanor’s boy,’” he chuckled.
Young famously won bipartisan admirers: mayors, lawmakers and governors from Rockefeller to David Paterson. He and Gov. Mario Cuomo met for breakfast to discuss social issues. (“I never got to know Andrew Cuomo,” Young says wistfully.) Last year, TV chef Rachael Ray brought Young on her show to praise him and his work, especially in her hometown, Glens Falls.
Young often tells legislators that his nonprofit “creates taxpayers.” They include Albany’s Monroe Parrott.
Parrott’s mother, who was a respected schoolteacher, was tragically shrewd at hiding her alcoholism. He was at his class of ’79 high school graduation party when his mother died in a fire.
Parrott also learned to hide the heroin addiction he had developed in college.
“When I was arrested for stealing, I was so ashamed of my drug habit. I lied, said I needed money for a gambling problem,” Parrott said.
By 1981, he was in Saratoga County’s Mount Mcgregor state prison. Inmates were in no mood to meet some priest starting in-prison rehab.
“We were gonna break him with hard questions,” Parrott said. “I asked why he bothers spending time with prisoners. He said, ‘To see a fallen man rise again.’ That shut me up.”
That year, Parrott watched “how Father helped prison employees as well as inmates. He gave us hope.”
Parrott became one of Young’s “wounded healers,” leading self-help group meetings and getting his 15 AA members into college courses. Yet he felt depressed when paroled in 1984. Parrott told Young, “I need a job. I need a girlfriend.” Young laughed and said, “You need a first step.”
Parrott lived with his dad while working as a rehab counselor, earning his master’s and launching a social work career. He adopted the recovery survival tactic of filling every minute, playing tennis and basketball to stay fit and enjoy an adrenaline rush.
Now a family man, Parrott still hosts AA meetings in Washington Park, volunteers to counsel juvenile offenders and attends Mcgregor reunions. He often visits Young, whom Parrott sees as an anomaly for a bureaucracy, OASAS, that prefers big-corporation negotiators.
“Father would get a clothing warehouse contract, for example, by agreeing to give half the jobs to (his nonprofit’s) grads, half to local workers,” Parrott explained.
In multiple interviews, Young never mentioned winning a gamut of humanitarian awards bestowed by myriad organizations from the New
York Bar Association to Jewish war veterans.
Parrott summarizes Young’s true legacy: “James Brown is the Godfather of Soul; Father is the Godfather of Recovery. I’m one of thousands who can say Father saved my life.”