Suzanne's Mom's Blog

Recently, I read an article explaining why beautiful music is often heard flowing from a particular soup kitchen in New York City.

Michael Wilson wrote at the New York Times, “The church’s soup kitchen program fills quickly, bringing a din of chitchat and the scraping of chairs on floor tiles and the thud of trays being knocked against the inside of a trash can. But above it all, each and every weekday, hovers another sound, wholly unexpected: the clear, clean notes of a concert grand piano, there in a far corner. …

“The man at the piano, 61 years old, with a head of cropped gray hair bobbing in time over the keys, plays on, for two hours straight, as anonymous an entertainer as one is likely to find in this town.

“His name is Scott Croly. His most recent job was driving a truck, and that was a while ago. He is just on the roof-over-head side of homelessness, staying at a girlfriend’s house while he looks for work. Suffice it to say that when he first started visiting the soup kitchen some 13 years ago, it was not because they had a piano.”

The piano program, writes Wilson, “started with a former naval cryptographer on the Upper West Side, George Van Pelt, 90, who served in World War II and Korea and, along the way, taught himself to play the piano. He was visiting a friend who helped run a soup kitchen in San Francisco, and pitched in himself, chopping vegetables while a woman banged away at a piano. But the people there enjoyed it. She moved away, and he thought he could do better, and did, and after performing there many times, came back to New York with that old familiar bug bite. Mr. Van Pelt figured, rightly, that soup kitchens weren’t turning away pianists, and he heard about the Church of the Holy Apostles. ‘I gave them a hundred bucks to bribe them to let me play,’ he said. …

“Barry Weiss, a member of the Peace of Heart Choir and a pianist out of the American Songbook, plays on Fridays. A classically trained Armenian pianist, Jeannette Chirikdjian, plays on Mondays after several years of serving food at the lunches.

“ ‘It makes them happy,’ she said matter-of-factly before launching into Chopin’s ‘Grande Valse Brillante.’ ”

Read more at the Times. And watch the  Stephen Farrell video interview with one of the piano players here.

Photo: Andrew Renneisen for The New York Times.
The Holy Apostles soup kitchen in New York has a grand piano.