The Left Bank

Free lunch? There is such a thing

People who say there's no such thing as a free lunch clearly haven't been to the Free Store.

Set up to make use of the surplus food that cafes and bakeries are stuck with at the end of each day, the Free Store in Left Bank offers people in need the chance to get enough food for a meal free of charge.

The store began life as an art project last year when artist Kim Paton set up shop in Ghuznee St for two weeks, giving out donated groceries to those who needed them.

Seeing the success of the project, volunteer and now managing director Benjamin Johnson set to work making the Free Store permanent.

With more than a dozen businesses now involved, the store has enough food by 5pm each day to have a line outside the doors.

By last week, the Free Store had dispensed more than 12,000 items to 5500 people since opening last December.

In the past month it served 1333 customers, with more expected as food prices rose.

Mr Johnson has seen the store go from strength to strength.

"We have now established a regular supply of food and a stable core of people who come into the store every day.

"We had some amazing reactions. I think the concept is really in the mood for Wellington. "

Mr. Johnson and other volunteers are now seeking to save the free store as a charitable trust to formalize the structure and using the concept of going national.

Run entirely on donations, the Free Store has had support from every corner.

"We run an operation at very low cost.

"We had the space we run in donated by the Wellington Company, so there's no rent to pay and all the workers are volunteers," Mr Johnson says.

"We run the whole thing on about $50 a month and are always having people ask what they can do to contribute."

Central city businesses have donated everything from coffee machines to fridges, as well as their daily food donations.

The focus for Mr Johnson is making sure the store grows at a sustainable level.

"We have to make sure the project grows in step: you need enough food to feed the people who are coming each day.Too much food or too little food are the two problems. This organic growth. "

Some people were afraid that customers would simply take everything, but most people understand others need also the service, Mr. Johnson said.

"People underestimate the nature of good can come out when someone is a good thing going.

Vintage Vivant » Archive » Love on the Left Bank

And with the woman whose image runs through it.

“In the summer of 1967, at 20 years old, I boarded a bus in Philadelphia and headed to New York City. Only moments before, I had found a battered copy of Love on the Left Bank sitting on a sale table outside a used-book stall, across from the bus station. Attracted to anything French, I opened it and was greeted by a dark and intriguing café scene on the grittier side of the City of Light. It was Jack Kerouac, Parisian-style. I was especially captivated by the image of a girl, the likes of whom I had never seen before.It was Vali Myers, the witch gypsy mystic Beatnik reigned in the rain-soaked streets. With his wild hair, kohl-rimmed eyes, waterproof loose, and smoking, she offered herself with abandon and self-containment. It reflects what I aspired to be unconscious aesthetic style, but the style itself. His underworld seemed emblematic of all that I want to achieve in a word, freedom. These images, shot in the 50's by Ed van der Elsken, merged the documentary art. I carried within me as I ventured into new territory and a new life.

In 1971 the same Vali Myers, with a live fox on her shoulder, entered the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel, in New York, where I lived with Robert Mapplethorpe. She was then a tattooist, among other things. Recognizing the girl in the rain-pitted mirror, I gathered my courage and asked her to tattoo a lightning bolt on my knee, and she consented. And so she touched me first as an image and then as a human being, and I am happily branded for life. I still have my tattoo, and those images of an unobtainable but brutally familiar nightlife. They have always been with me, for they are, like Vali herself, unforgettable.

The Left Bank, Writers, Artists, and Politics from the Popular Front to the Cold War

The Left bank, & other stories

Women of the Left Bank, Paris, 1900-1940

The left bank, a play in three acts

From the Left Bank, reflections on the modern French theater and novel