Bridge Bread Bakery

Bridge Bread is a bakery and a social enterprise at the same time, and it is difficult to describe one without the other. The non-profit exists to give restorative employment to people who are homeless or housing insecure – work with a wage, a schedule and a trade attached, rather than a handout – and the bread is how it pays for that. Bakers are hired from among people the ordinary labour market has written off, trained on the job, and supported with help finding and keeping housing.

The numbers the organisation gives for its first thirteen years are around 125 people employed, with roughly three quarters of them still housed and still in work afterwards. That is the figure the bakery is actually measured by, and it is a good deal harder to achieve than a tray of cinnamon rolls.

The bake shop sells bread first – the loaves are the backbone of the operation and go out to wholesale customers around the city as well as over the counter – alongside cinnamon rolls, bagels, cookies and cakes. The cinnamon rolls in particular have a reputation that reaches well beyond the neighbourhood.

Since October 2017 the shop has occupied the old Vandora Theatre building at 2639 Cherokee Street, one of the street’s surviving early cinemas and a building large enough to hold a working bakery behind the retail counter. The move put Bridge Bread on the eastern, food-and-music end of Cherokee Street, a few blocks from the antique dealers, and the organisation has since opened a second bakery in the Delmar Loop.

For a visitor to the Row it is worth the walk east: the bread is good on its own terms, and buying it does something that most bread purchases do not.