A little boy waved the small “vote Obama” sign he had constructed out of cardboard and blue crayons as he stood in front of First Mary Magdalene Temple in Crown Heights, where a line of the homeless and the unemployed waited for their weekly bag of groceries.
The line was not long. Even with several Central Brooklyn food pantries and soup kitchens closed for Election Day, those that remained open were not overflowing with clients.
“Today there were 142 people who showed up,” said Bishop Shirley King, who organized Magdalene’s food distribution program. The number was less than the typical 150 to 200.
“I don’t know,” King said. “Maybe people wanted to vote.”
No Soup Today
Similar scenes played out today across Brooklyn’s food pantries and soup kitchens. God’s Battalion of Prayer Ministries, a Brownsville church that serves hot meals to those in need, closed its kitchen doors and transformed into a polling site. But it was a different scene across the street at Christian Fellowship’s food pantry – the line was longer than usual.
Lucile Walters, Christian Fellowship’s food coordinator, said that her employees had served just about the same number of people as they normally do. She speculated that the people who usually stopped by for canned corn and canned peas were waiting to vote. Walters believes that, today, her clients would prefer a place in the voting line to a spot in the grocery line.
One client, Ivona Adrien, devised a strategy that would let her cast her vote and get her weekly bag of groceries too. “I got up early,” said Adrien, who had cast her ballot in Central Brooklyn first thing in the morning then stopped by a food pantry on Flatbush and Church, only to find out it was closed for the day. Despite her frustration, Adrien managed to reach the front door of Christian Fellowship by 8 a.m.
Adrien wasn’t the only voter in the crowd. Of the fifteen people on line at 10 a.m., four had already pulled the lever. “The line is usually down the block,” said Pat Case, who voted in the morning.
