Down In Water Street

In the shadow of Manhattan's waterfront, where saloons outnumbered churches and the streets ran thick with men who had lost everything, one missionary spent sixteen years behind the doors of the Jerry McAuley Water Street Mission. Samuel Hopkins Hadley was no stranger to ruin himself - a former drunkard who found faith in these very same gutters - and he brought that hard-won understanding to his work among the city's most forgotten: thieves, prostitutes, derelicts, and men whose only sin was that the bottle had won. This is his unsentimental account of what it actually took to save souls in a city that chewed up the weak and spit them out. Hadley writes with startling honesty about failures, about the men who slipped back into the river, about the victories that came not in grand miracles but in small, stubborn moments of grace. Neither a revivalist's triumphalist screed nor a depressing catalogue of urban misery, this memoir stands as a rare document: aineteenth-century working man writing honestly about working with the poorest of the poor. It endures because it tells the truth about rescue work - that it is exhausting, heartbreaking, and worth doing anyway.