Bess 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 her, a “working-class toughie from the Bronx,” in the words of her daughter, writer Vivian Gornick.
When Bess Gornick became housebound in the mid-1980s, unable to roam freely, her deterioration was rapid. She grew listless and withdrawn.
“For the first time in her life she lost definition,” Gornick recalled. “My mother had suddenly become a generic old woman.”
But one day, 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 her socialist mother’s vigor, think about her own aging, and of the loss of connections.
Like many creative city people, 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,” Gornick said recently, engaged in her mother’s favorite activities, walking and talking fast around Greenwich Village. “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 non-profit residence and cultural center in Manhattan with 100 rental apartments, many reserved for people of low to modest means.
Although the project must surmount major hurdles, including finding a site and securing financing, the preliminary ideas call for a common dining room as well as studio and gallery space and rooms for public performances and lectures.
To build it, the group has teamed up with the Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corp., a non-profit organization dedicated to women’s housing issues.
Today, communal living arrangements of various sorts are appealing to a broad group of single women.
From shared housing, where housemates often are matched by non-profit or religious groups like the National Shared Housing Resource Center (www.nationalsharedhousing.org), 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 AARP. In New York City alone, 41.8 percent of all women age 65 and older live alone, versus 20.8 percent of the men.
As more women live alone and 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.
In many ways, the group is 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. They include the novelist Helen Yglesias, 85; the writer Alix Kates Shulman, 67; the children’s book illustrator and author Vera Williams, 72; the documentary filmmaker Lilly Rivlin, 62; and assorted lawyers, judges, painters and Village lefties, ages 53 and older.
“You might say, `Why now? Why us?”‘ Emily Goodman, a judge in her 50s, said over Italian food in a Manhattan restaurant one recent evening with some THEA sisters.
“We’re a group who’ve always been involved in movements. If we sat around and waited, it would never happen.”
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’s desire to connect to the life of the city was even stronger, but she became unable to reach out.
“My mother and her friends got old sealed off in little apartments,” Gornick said. “They had lifetimes of insecurities that, as they got older, they were less able to break through.
“The point of THEA, in a way, is to create a place that would save us from ourselves.”
She paused a moment. “If Eleanor Roosevelt hadn’t been married to Franklin, she would live in a place like THEA.”
“When you think about it,” Williams said, “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.”
Like Gornick, Williams regards THEA not only as a personal solution but as a social model. She already has 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. She raised three children there, alongside a pottery and an enamel shop, a woodworking shop and a school.
Today, after years living alone, she has begun sharing her apartment with a roommate, and she shares a graffiti-spattered waterfront studio in Greenwich Village with fellow artists.
“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.”
Williams 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. It’s my idea of what keeps people living, versus having things supremely comfortable.”
Most important, she said, eyes crinkling: “It would be fun.”
In contrast to the glory days of the feminist movement, middle-aged women prefer sofas to the floor. THEA has gone through many permutations since 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.
Gornick remembered 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. 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 we’re 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,” Gornick said.
Then one night, filmmaker 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,” 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 working minds alive by inviting the neighborhood in for lectures, master classes, readings and the like.
