Leah B. scoops cookie batter onto trays in the bakery of the Greenhouse Inn at Misericordia Heart of Mercy, the Rogers Park residential facility for the mentally and physically challenged. Leah has been a community member for 15 years. “I can ice brownies, I can measure things,” she says. “I have been baking since three; my grandmother taught me. My goal is to listen to what people are saying. My other goal is to talk like an adult and not cry at work.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Open since 1990, the Greenhouse is a full-service restaurant, open four days a week for lunch only, where some 20 moderately challenged residents work shifts as waitstaff, sandwich makers, dishwashers, and cleanup crew. Upstairs in the bakery, two dozen more work with professional bakers, volunteers, and developmental counselors to supply brownies, fudge, cookies, muffins, and other pastries for the restaurant, the attached take-out counter, and corporate orders. Selling tins of cookies is one of many programs that raise money for Misericordia. “Last year the bakery made one million cookies for Christmas,” says pastry chef Leisa Hancock. “We were literally working 24 hours seven days a week.”
Meals at the Greenhouse are prepared by professional cooks under food-service director Bob Noga, assisted by volunteers, mostly family of the residents. The extensive menu is eclectic: there’s soup, a salad bar, a hot buffet, and cold and hot sandwiches including bratwurst, a Reuben, and barbecued pork. The buffet might offer chicken da Vinci, baked ham with pineapple salsa, seafood salad, Spanish potatoes, ambrosia, and more. And along with rotating daily specials there’s also shrimp de Jonghe, Greek stir-fry chicken, and fettuccine Alfredo.
Bill is also a poet–in “Living at Misericordia,” he writes: “My thought is like an open field. I haven’t seen a lot of change in my time. I am only one person, a friend, a protector of the whole world.” In the hallway at Misericordia, he recites the poem by heart. When he finishes, Jill smiles and says, “How sweet.”
