The property that has sat vacant for nearly a year is a wonderland of different aesthetics.
Its main room is almost as preserved as the building itself. Its old shelving is still in place only now covered by dust, and old family photos from the store’s owners are pinned behind the counter. The back gives way to a small kitchen, a pink-carpeted living space and a maze of doors leading to the outside: a plot of baked earth cracking under the sun, a collapsing wooden canopy, wispy plants and a surviving tangerine tree.
The empty space in south Phoenix will soon become a community café, a commissary kitchen local food vendors can use and a place for local farmers to sell fresh produce.
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Every day, Brother Dennis Gibbs sits by a window in the living room of his monastery in the San Gabriel Valley and pens a letter or two to people behind bars.
His “friends on the inside,” as the gray-haired monk calls them, have kept up a growing correspondence with Gibbs for more than nine months, sharing an intimate view into life in jails and state prisons during the pandemic.
Many have voiced worry about the coronavirus and “the tenuous feeling of how it’s being managed in the jails,” said Gibbs, 66. They’ve admitted that some aren’t reporting symptoms for fear of being put in isolation.