Between North Franklin Street and Main Street in Hempstead you could do a lot of things. You could buy sneakers from Street Gear; you could grab breakfast at the deli; and if you push past the clear doors of 247 Fulton Avenue, you could go upstairs and find a place of worship.
After the Sunday morning service at Reigning in Life Training Center, I met with Pastor Curtis Riley. He’s been living in Hempstead for 42 years and now at the age of 56 he sat before me clad in an off-white suit and olive dress shoes, beaming. We were going to talk about Hempstead and he knows it well. Looking back to when Hempstead first began to buzz with thoughts of revitalization years ago, he felt that the people of the time were not ready for change. He said they were devastated by malls that rose up and chased stores away, skewing taxes and raising concerns. He mentioned revitalization projects going on today that totaled billions of dollars.
“It’s still taking longer than it should because we should’ve been at a shovel in the ground,” he said.
Looking at the map below with all of its red points- a neighborhood dotted with churches- I thought of the blotch of the recent death of Dante Quinones Wright, a teen recently gunned down in Hempstead. I asked the pastor about the high crime rate that stained the same streets lined with churches.
“Unfortunately…we focus on getting people to heaven but we haven’t taught people how to live on earth,” he said, “I was guilty of that.”
To focus on the latter he founded the Hempstead Rebirth Community Development Corporation. While he said that pastors should not be involved in political structures, he believed that it was a shared responsibility of pastors to educate their people to get involved in what they are called to do. For this to materialize, the churches have to get along.
“Let’s get back to ‘It takes a community to raise a child’,” he said. “Let’s get back to those philosophies instead of just ‘do you’.”
Churches in Hempstead
