Shining shelter
Closed for a year, ImmaCare reopens after nearly $5M renovation
ImmaCare, a men’s shelter at the old Immaculate Conception Church in Hartford’s Frog Hollow, reopens after a $5 million renovation. Louis Gilbert, the executive director, says the homeless shelter is now “so much more functional, and respectful to people’s dignity.”
Looking for help after surviving more than a year without a home, Kenny Edwards knocked on the door of the old Immaculate Conception Church in Frog Hollow, which took him in about five years ago. He remembers ImmaCare Inc., a Hartford men’s shelter, being “like hell” then — a “nasty, dirty” place with perennially broken showers and tangles of exposed wiring.
When a staff member brought him out of the cold into the old Gothic church building Tuesday, the place was unrecognizable.
ImmaCare reopened Nov. 16 following a yearlong, nearly $5 million renovation that included replacing the church roof, flooring and plumbing — there are now 10 showers — and rebuilding the sanctuary’s western wall. The shelter has 75 beds, though only 40 bunks are available under coronavirus restrictions.
It’s also equipped now with handicapped-accessible ramps and a sprinkler system. Executive director Louis Gilbert says he’s no longer embarrassed to run the shelter or worried a fire will rip through its 125-year-old wooden frame.
“It should have been closed years ago. It was just a horrible mess. We took care of people, but it was one step away from disaster.”
— ImmaCare Executive Director Louis Gilbert
“It should have been closed years ago,” he said. “It was just a horrible mess. We took care of people, but it was one step away from disaster.
“This is so much more functional, and respectful to people’s dignity.”
Edwards, a two-time cancer survivor who used to work construction when he was well, was pleased as he sat at a folding table in the basement dining room. The clean, fresh building called for respect, and made him feel respected as well.
“It’s gorgeous, beautiful,” he said. Edwards has been homeless since Oct. 24, 2019, the day his wife of four years, Yvonne Smith, was killed near
their Garden Street home, struck by a juvenile in a stolen car fleeing a shootout. Edwards wasn’t on the lease and couldn’t pay the rent, so he was once again out on the streets.
He won’t necessarily stay at ImmaCare. In Connecticut, all shelter placements are made through each region’s Coordinated Access Network, to ensure families, veterans and people living outside take priority.
The network is mostly placing people at the Park Street shelter who would otherwise be sleeping on the streets. They can be some of the most
challenging clients to transition to permanent housing — many with substance abuse and mental health issues, and accustomed to riding out every winter in various shelters.
“That’s a failure for us as a system if people are continually homeless and moving around,” Gilbert said. “There’s some intervention they need and to realize they deserve it, because everybody deserves housing.”
Connecticut’s homeless system promotes keeping people in whatever temporary housing they have as long as possible, and focuses on quickly moving people into transitional and permanent housing.
“Everybody, even the cook, should be talking about, ‘Hey, what’s your housing plan, man?” Gilbert said. “I liken it to the emergency room at a hospital. Nobody goes to the emergency room at a hospital to make friends, hang out and stay there. You go in and get triaged.”
The renovation will help ImmaCare do this work safely and effectively.
Downstairs, the kitchen was bumped out and modernized and the plywood doors of the serving window replaced with wooden, barn doors, handmade by the contractor who oversaw construction.
At first, the contractor had ordered a metal rolling window, standard for kitchens in facilities like schools, community centers and hospitals.
Also in prisons, the shelter pointed out — just the feel they wanted to avoid.
“We are institutional, but we try not to retraumatize clients because a lot of them get set off by things that remind them of jail,” Gilbert said. Sliding open the beige barn doors is a much more friendly sign that it’s time to eat, he said.
The shelter’s 75 beds are also downstairs, though only 40 bunks are available under coronavirus restric
tions. Simpsons pajamas and a San Francisco 49ers beanie hung from one bed post.
Gilbert is still working out how to use most of the church nave, an open space with slender, Gothic columns under a sky-blue ceiling.
In the evenings, restored lanterns light the old sanctuary, which holds just a couple of couches so far. The dream would be to offer a full suite of employment, health and housing services, with permanent space reserved for mental health workers and other outside agencies. Gilbert guesses that would cost a few hundred thousand dollars a year that the shelter doesn’t have.
In the front of the sanctuary, there are now enclosed client rooms and offices
and a conference room, all with ceiling windows that provide views of the original frescos and rib-vaulted ceiling.
Aini Arciniega, 33, sat in one of those offices Tuesday, feeling bittersweet about the transformation of her childhood church where she now manages the housing navigation center.
All her cousins were baptized here. And on a cold day in 1981, her grandmother Estebania Rivera and other ladies of the church decided to open the basement as a winter shelter after finding a man frozen to death outside.
Rivera cooked up hot meals for the homeless, serving the men Puerto Rican rice and pork and chicken. They loved her ham and potato soup, Arciniega said.