Ruby Myers doesn't have a lot of extra money.
With her rent, the electric bill and her frequent trips to the hospital to treat her worsening chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, there's little left over to buy a lot of food. Until recently she ate what she could here and there.
But things have changed now that she's discovered a new soup kitchen within walking distance of her home on Barton Street. Now she wanders over to Mountain Mission's new soup kitchen on Sixth Avenue.
“This place used to be a whole lot different,” Myers said.
The soup kitchen's bright blue exterior is a remarkable change from what stood here before. Before Mountain Mission purchased the property about a year ago, the Heart and Seoul Bar & Grill operated there. Myers remembers how the bar never seemed like a safe place to walk by.
From February to September in 2015, there were five shootings at the bar. After the fifth shooting, when the bar's liquor license was suspended, the owner decided to sell.
Enter Mountain Mission.
For years, John Roberts, Mountain Mission's executive director, tried to purchase the property. It's only a few hundred yards from their office, and Roberts was worried about the activity going on there. He figured if his organization owned it, they could get some positive use out of it.
“There were a lot of negative activities going on here, and one day, I turned the news on and we saw that another shooting had happened,” he said.
Within a year, Roberts' staff renovated the bar. They gutted the entire building. They ripped up the floors, hung new sheet rock and built a new parking lot.
“We do have some debt on it,” Roberts said. “We need some help paying the debt off so we can continue offering the services we offered.”
Each day, about 140 people show up between 11:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. for a hot meal. When it opened in October, staff members there only expected about 75 people or so to show up.
“Everything I do here is from scratch,” said Randy Byrnside, the soup kitchen's manager. “We don't use anything frozen. I doctor everything up and make something new every day.”
Most of the people who show up for lunch come from Charleston's West Side, but Roberts said some people drive in from other parts of Kanawha County to receive a hot meal. Some of the people are homeless, but most just struggling to afford a homemade, hot meal each day.
Roberts said that when students were out on Thanksgiving break, the soup kitchen saw a large uptick in the number of people eating.
When people walk in the door, they sit down at a series of tables and wait to be served by the staff. Byrnside thinks it's important for people who come here not to wait in line. He wants to be as respectful of them as possible.
“It's a spiritual and positive place to be. We've got gospel music playing in the background, we have prayer before every meal and, you know we're not a church,” Roberts said.
“We're not going to push anything on people, but we offer positive, encouraging information here. In our world, that is sharing the love of Jesus Christ.”
Reach Jake Jarvis at jake.jarvis@wvgazettemail.com, facebook.com/newsroomjake, 304-348-7939 or follow @NewsroomJake on Twitter.