Lauria Fitzgerald
Three nights a week, Lauria Fitzgerald loads up a van on Ogden Avenue in the Bronx with 40 or 50 hot meals. Then she drives to the most desolate corners of the Bronx, working the shadows and eaves of the Major Deegan Expressway, where she feeds and clothes drug addicts, prostitutes and the homeless. Her work takes her to within 30 yards of Yankee Stadium, where they celebrated a World Series championship this year. The daughter of a Bronx detective, she now works in the same precinct her father once patrolled, a neighborhood that was home to tens of thousands of Irish immigrants. She is a member of the Dominican Sisters of Blauvelt and works from an agency on Ogden Avenue called the Highbridge Community Life Center.