Raising More Than Consciousness Now
By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN
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Fred R. Conrad/ The New York Times
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Ms. Gornick
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Michelle V. Agins/ The New York Times
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PLANNING A SHARED RESIDENCE Vera Williams, on floor; seated, from left, Edith Isaac-Rose, Maggie Cammer, Joan Snyder, Helen Yglesias, Emily Jane Goodman, Alix Kates Shulman; standing, from left, Bea Kreloff, Toby Sanchez, Julia Markus, Nora Eisenberg, Vivian Gornick, Linda Trichter Metcalf.
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ESS GORNICK was an only-in-New-York
New Yorker. The kind of woman who,
living alone at age 90 in a Manhattan
apartment, thought nothing of bounding up to a
police officer, with the back of her sweater half-fastened, and demanding, "Button me!"
The city and its tempestuous motion -- its bus
drivers, cashiers, pretzel vendors, street talkers, dog walkers -- were a perpetual source of
renewal to Mrs. Gornick, a "working-class
toughie from the Bronx," in the words of her
daughter, the writer Vivian Gornick.
When Bess became housebound in the mid-1980's, unable to roam freely, her deterioration
was rapid.
Within herself, she began to drift,
growing listless and withdrawn. "For the first
time in her life she lost definition," Ms. Gornick
recalled.
"My mother had suddenly become a
generic old woman." But one day, Ms. Gornick
brought along a friend to visit, and in no time at
all her mother and friend were deep in conversation. "The change in my mother was astonishing," the writer recalled. "She began to look
again like herself."
Those last years of Bess Gornick's life made
her daughter, who has inherited both her socialist mother's vigor and luminous skin, think
about her own aging, and of the loss of connections that Bess craved. Their situations were
strikingly similar. Like many creative city people, Ms. Gornick lives and works alone, one of
the legions, she has written, who "stare out the
window of a room empty of companionship."
Like many writers and artists, she finds herself
growing old without a pension or benefits.
"I looked around at my own soul," Ms. Gornick said the other day in Greenwich Village,
while engaged in her mother's favorite activities, walking and talking fast. "I discover as I go
on that the loneliness is crippling."
Thus was born the idea for the House of Elder
Artists, or Thea, a confederacy of kindred souls
dedicated to creating an un-retirement home
for female writers, artists, community activists
-- and those game enough to grow old among
them. They envision Thea, as yet unbuilt, as a
sort of Yaddo with superintendents: a nonprofit
residence and cultural center in Manhattan
with 100 rental apartments, many reserved for
people of low to modest means.
To build it, the
group has teamed up with the Women's Housing
and Economic Development Corporation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to women's housing issues, although the project must still surmount major hurdles, from finding a site to
securing financing.
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Michael York for The New York Times
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Helen Yglesias at her summer home in Maine.
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Today, communal living arrangements of various sorts are appealing to a broad group of single
women.
From shared housing, where
housemates are often matched by
nonprofit or religious groups like the
National Shared Housing Resource
Center, to golf resorts in Florida for
those seeking the Dinah Shore lifestyle, housing is beginning to address
profound statistical realities: between 1970 and 1998, the number of
women living alone across the country doubled, from 7.3 million to 15.3
million, according to the American
Association of Retired Persons. In
New York City alone, 41.8 percent of
all women age 65 and older live
alone, versus 20.8 percent of the men.
In many ways, the Gornicktchiks
are following squarely in the tradition of the material feminists of the
19th century, women like Charlotte
Perkins Gilman, who proposed a
feminist apartment hotel in New
York City and campaigned for redesigned spaces that would support
women's public work and end their
physical isolation.
The group currently is made up of
the advocates of yesteryear, as one
puts it, including the novelist Helen
Yglesias, 85, the writer Alix Kates
Shulman, 67; the children's book illustrator and author Vera B. Williams, 72, the documentary filmmaker Lilly Rivlin, 62, and assorted lawyers, judges, painters and Village
leftists, 53 and older.
"You might say, Why now? Why
us?" Emily Goodman, a judge in her
50's, said over Italian food in a Manhattan restaurant one recent evening
with some Thea sisters. They shared
some dishes, rejecting the ones saturated in olive oil as too fattening.
("Are we going to do this at Thea?"
one wondered.)
"We're a group who've always
been involved in movements," Ms.
Goodman said. "If we sat around and
waited, it would never happen."
Ms. Gornick, who pulls up a Murphy bed each morning to make space
for her office at home, speaks of
spiritual isolation as the great, largely unspoken fear. In her 1987 memoir, "Fierce Attachments," she recalls life in the Bronx tenement
apartment building where she grew
up, the connection her mother felt
each time she opened the window
onto the alley, where women were
calling to each other, "the sound of
their voices mixed with the smell of
clothes drying in the sun."
As an old woman, she said, her
mother had an even stronger desire
to connect to the life of the city, but
she became unable to reach out.
"My
mother and her friends got old sealed
off in little apartments," she said.
As more women live alone and
housing costs climb, "shelter poverty" among older women is rising,
said Marci LeFevre, a consultant for
the AARP, resulting in more and
more older women pooling resources
to live together.
"When you think about it," said
Ms. Williams, whose eyes exude
youthful mischief, "it's odd that it
should be unusual that people who've
had great autonomy get together to
think about arranging their lives as
they get older."
In contrast to the glory days of the
feminist movement, middle-age
women prefer sofas to the floor. Thea
has gone through many permutations since Ms. Gornick went through
her phone book three years ago and
invited "almost every woman I'd
known in the past 20 years" to think
about her proposition.
It was probably fortunate that David Letterman was not a fly on the
wall. The original idea was a feminist retirement residence, a concept
that was shot down almost immediately by the room of feminists.
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Carol Halebian for The New York Times
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Vera B. Williams in her studio on West 12th Street.
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Ms. Gornick remembers the conversation:
"Too broad."
"Too narrow."
"Too inclusive."
"Too restricting."
"What, no men?"
The second suggestion was to
make it a residence for women in the
arts. But that didn't wash with the
lawyers. ("What, no men?") The
third idea was to make Thea a residence for women active in political
causes. ("Activists? What does that
mean? They'll think were Communists." "What, no men?") The meetings went on -- and on -- with about
20 to 30 women in attendance. "It
was talk, talk, talk that went nowhere, like an academic faculty
meeting," Ms. Gornick recalled.
Then one night, Ms. Rivlin said,
"Why are we calling this a retirement home? Who's retiring? We
have to be a part of the polis, the city,
and have the city come to us." It was
a galvanizing moment. "Every face
in the room lit up," Ms. Gornick said.
The idea took hold of a residence
organized around a strong shared
public sense of things, in her words,
where writers and artists would give
back to the city and keep their own
working minds alive by inviting the
neighborhood in for master classes,
readings and the like. The preliminary ideas call for a common dining
room as well as studio space and
rooms for public performances.
But the endless tortured discussions about minutiae might have continued to eternity had Thea not
hooked up with Nancy Biberman, a
housing advocate, developer and
lawyer, who founded the Women's
Housing and Economic Development
Corporation and was responsible for
the $23 million transformation of the
vacant Morrisania Hospital in the
South Bronx into a low-income apartment building for 132 families, many
of them formerly homeless.
Ms. Biberman, 52, whose first experience with building was barricading Hamilton Hall at Columbia University in 1968, became a partner
with Thea and the project's developer. To make Thea a reality in Manhattan, she said, as either a new
building or a renovated one, would
cost about $20 million. About $16 million would come from tax-exempt
bonds through the city's Housing Development Corporation, a loan that
would be repaid with rental income
over 30 years.
Thea also qualifies for tax credits,
because it has committed itself to
setting aside 20 percent of its one-
and two-bedroom apartments for
low-income tenants. The sliding
scale of rents would range from $857
to $3,500, including two meals a day,
with residents selected by lottery.
The design would allow spaces for
home health-care attendants, whose
services might be shared.
The women of Thea themselves
will need to raise an additional $2
million. The project is so daunting
that some members of the original
group have dropped out, among them
the writer Susan Brownmiller.
"Fund-raising wasn't my thing, and
the whole project sounded fearfully
expensive," she said.
Given the current real estate climate, would the group consider living outside Manhattan? Ms. Gornick
wouldn't hear of it, convinced not
only of the long-term benefits of
Manhattan's cultural richness but
also of the contributions the group
could make to it. She remembers
once asking her mother, the ultimate
Manhattanite, to consider moving to
Florida. Not long afterward, Ms.
Gornick went there on assignment.
"Ma!" she shrieked into the telephone. "You were right! I hope you
die in a blizzard running for the 23rd
Street crosstown."
Last year, Ms. Biberman said, the
group negotiated for an option to
purchase a piece of vacant land on
West 46th Street but chose not to
pursue it because of a more desirable possibility. "We're pursuing
that now," she said.
The walls of Thea, which could
resemble a gray-haired version of a
60's college dorm, would be resonant
with the rich experiences of women
like Ms. Yglesias, whose latest novel,
"The Girls," is about four sisters in
their 80's and 90's living in Miami.
Ms. Yglesias, who has three children
and five grandchildren, divides her
time between a house in Maine,
where she hires people to drive her
around, and the Markle Residence in
Greenwich Village, an intergenerational apartment building run by the
Salvation Army.
She published her first novel,
"How She Died," at age 54, after
raising a family. "Life intervenes for
many women," she said. "I was
lucky." She remains committed despite the fact that she may not live to
see the project's fruition. Ms. Yglesias, who describes herself as "a
seasoned voyager in the territory of
the aged," continued, "I don't really
think in terms of Thea happening in
time for me, not that I brood."
Like Ms. Gornick, Ms. Williams
regards Thea not only as a personal
solution but as a social model. She
has already pioneered alternative
housing: in 1955, she and a group of
friends from Black Mountain College
in North Carolina got together to
establish a radical cooperative community at Stony Point, N.Y.
Today, she shares a graffiti-spattered waterfront studio in the Village
with fellow artists and, after years
living alone, has begun sharing her
apartment with a roommate. "I'm
not interested in the acquisition of
property or furnishing places," she
said. "They don't fascinate me the
way solving social problems does."
She wasn't sure at first she had the
energy for Thea. "There's a reluctance to make any plans for old age,
because you're reluctant to be old,"
she said. "You need solitude. But you
also need crosscurrents. Here you
would be in a place where you might
be needed by other people, where
there would be others around to talk
about your work. It would be enlivening, harder to get into ruts. "
Most important, she said, eyes
crinkling, "It would be fun."
It would be a place where Ms.
Gornick could continue writing about
"the lovely human bustle at noon, a
density of urban appetites and absorptions." In an essay she describes
the searing New York loneliness
"that engulfs me like dry heat." She
finds an antidote walking the city
streets -- as she hopes to do at age 95
-- grinning to herself at the exhilarating lengths people will go to to
survive, the "50 different ways people struggle to remain human until
the very last minute.
"I join the anxiety," she writes, "I
share the condition. I feel in my
nerve endings the common refusal to
go under."
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