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Carl Strock THE VIEW FROM HERE
Mission sees ‘third way’ for Sch’dy
Carl Strock can be reached at 395-3085 or by e-mail at carlstrock@dailygazette.com.

    If you have paid any attention to the efforts to rejuvenate downtown Schenectady over the years, you are probably aware of the constant tension between business owners and bums.
    No, wait, let me rephrase that Not bums, but persons with alternative lifestyles. Or maybe just persons with no apparent place to go. Sometimes persons with no apparent pants. Persons who are downtown not because they aim to purchase a veggie crepe or attend a Proctors musical but because they have nothing else to do and nowhere else to go.
    Historically, downtown shopowners hate these persons, because their presence is a deterrent to people who might possibly want to buy something.
    Women, especially, are believed to be reluctant to windowshop on State Street or Jay Street when they might find themselves in proximity to a citizen with unkempt hair, a pungent odor and a wild look in the eye.
    The bums, to return to shorthand, think they have a right to hang out. The businessmen would like to run them out of town.
    Everyone knows that. But did you know there is a third way?
    Well, there is, and it’s being advanced by Mike Saccocio of the City Mission, along with Phillip Morris of Proctors Theatre, Chuck Steiner of the Chamber of Schenectady, and various local business people, and it is formally called The Third Way.
    It is the simplest, cheapest and most encouraging thing I am aware of in the rebuilding of Schenectady. It consists of bringing the less fortunate citizens together with the business people in ways that serve both sides.
    Does the City Mission take in drug addicts who want to reform, and does it guide them step by step toward straight living? Yes, it does.
    Then local businesses will hire graduates of that program so that both sides have a stake in a healthy and prosperous downtown. One such graduate is already working at Proctors, and another is working at the Hampton Inn, both as cleaners.
    Do the down-and-outers tend to congregate around the fountain in front of City Center, at the corner of Jay and State streets, on warm summer days and create an atmosphere uninviting to peaceable shoppers? Yes, they do.
    Then the City Mission and Proctors will sponsor noontime chess games at that location, and staff members from both organizations will agree to take their brown-bag lunches there, not to drive anyone away, or to browbeat anyone, but just to create a different atmosphere, which in fact happened last summer.
    “Lots of different kinds of people need to share the same space,” says Philip Morris. “To me, cities are dense, complicated places. That makes them interesting.”
    Isn’t that a nice fresh approach to a nagging old problem?
    And there’s more.
    The chess-playing has expanded to the point where a grandmaster from New York City is going to come next summer to give classes in the education center of Proctors, on the lower level, and Proctors will pay the City Mission to serve lunch to the anticipated 50 or 60 students, so that the City Mission’s new Wallace M. Campbell Dining Center is not just a soup kitchen for the less fortunate but more like a community dining hall. How’s that for a neat idea?
    The collaboration is not entirely new. Already Proctors annual Christmas carol program donates $3 from each ticket to the City Mission, and holds a reception at the Mission after the program.
    “It’s not social services vs. business needs,” says Chuck Steiner of the Chamber of Schenectady. “It’s a third way. It’s bringing those two groups together.”
    How else? Well, the Chamber of Schenectady along with the Albany-Colonie Chamber of Commerce runs an annual “Tech Valley” leadership program, which entails community service, and for the last couple of years the 35 or so participants in that program have done volunteer landscaping work at the Mission, thus contributing to Saccocio’s vision of an attractive urban campus, as he calls it, and getting an education in the process.
    Go have a look if you haven’t seen the Mission recently, just around the corner from Proctors. It is not your stereotypical soup kitchen or flophouse by a very long shot. It is a handsome complex of buildings — better looking than the back end of Proctors, if I may say so — with the unified look of an urban campus and with absolutely nothing demeaning or degrading about it.
    This is where people who messed up are helped to straighten out their lives, and it’s also where they become part of downtown’s rejuvenation.
    What I like best about this new effort is the simplicity of it. Saccocio hopes soon to hire a person to help implement it, using, of course, private donations, but it is not one of those programs that seem to exist mainly to provide employment for do-good types. More than anything it is a new way of thinking, a conciliatory rather than a confrontational way of thinking.
    I hate to sound so positive and upbeat about this and possibly tarnish my image, but I can’t help it. Every once in a while something comes along that gives me a little bit of hope not just for Schenectady but for my fellow human beings, and this Third Way is one of them.

Kudos to the City Mission and Mr. Saccocio!!! Thanks for putting so  much compassion, time and effort into the betterment of the community. Good luck and I hope it is a success!

That's funny...women wont window shop just in case they may be faced with someone,,,,,hhhmmm,,,,not of their standard.....but, they will gorge themselves on some greasy pizza and chicken wings, complain about health care costs and pop a zocor.....I dont get it.....again, where are the evolutionists when ya need one???

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Women, especially, are believed to be reluctant to windowshop on State Street or Jay Street

I must be missing something here...where are the stores to window shop at? Well, unless one wants to look in the windows of the movie theater or the bars!

Jay street has art stores and book stores and head shops.....