By Stacy Torres, author of At Home in the City: Growing Old in Urban America
I never planned to study older adults. Old places that survived waves of gentrification initially fascinated me, as a lifelong New Yorker who had struggled to make ends meet and mourned the loss of beloved neighborhood establishments. Influenced by societal ageism and age-segregation that often hamper intergenerational exchange, studying the later parts of the life course hardly seemed sexy, cool, or cutting-edge to me. But what did I know then? I was in my mid-20s and few people in my family lived to old age.
I soon learned I had more in common than I imagined with the elder clientele who frequented the bakery I’d adopted as a makeshift office. Rather than spend all day at home in my family’s cramped and overcrowded apartment, toiling on my master’s thesis in creative writing, I preferred the company of strangers who also sought relief from isolation. Years later, I’d investigate how these customers, decades older than me, forged social connections in public places that helped them age in place and remain in their homes. In my mid-40s now, I continue to draw on their lessons for creating meaningful bonds in the most nondescript and surprising places, whether a corner cafe, a park bench, or a local watering hole. Though I never wear make-up, I recall a customer named Sylvia’s mantra, “You’ve got to get out of bed and put your lipstick on.” No matter how tired or low I feel some days, I always feel better after going outside, making a home in the city wherever I go.
This passage is excerpted from the introduction of At Home in the City: Growing Old in Urban America
We know belonging matters for elders but less about how, why, and what facilitates a sense of connection and a sturdy network of social ties. How do older people maintain their independence when faced with multiple vulnerabilities? What forms of social relationships exist? How do older people create or resist belonging? In what ways does belonging to a place or a group help people manage crises and everyday challenges? In the chapters that follow, I investigate these questions by examining belonging among elders in New York City, and I uncover how people aged 60 and older struggle, survive, and thrive in twenty-first-century urban America. To understand their experiences of aging in place, I conducted a five-year ethnographic study following longtime residents as they coped with the accumulated losses of neighbors, friends, and family; health setbacks; depression; gentrification; financial struggles; and other everyday challenges.
These pages chronicle how a nondescript bakery in Manhattan transformed into a public living room, providing company to ease loneliness and to lend a sympathetic ear for the monumental and mundane struggles of late life. What may have appeared to the average passerby as an unremarkable cafe with rickety tables and a well-trodden linoleum floor doubled as the bubbling center of an elder social world hiding in plain sight. From years of careful observation, I peel away the layers of this oft-neglected world and explore the relationships and experiences that Western culture often renders invisible, or when it pays attention, frames as a problem.
The ethnographic portrait I offer also moves us beyond stereotypes of older people as either rich and pampered or downtrodden and frail to capture the complexity of late life. While many struggled and a few had wealth, most people I met fell between these extremes. In these neighborhood places, I met people like Sylvia, an 86-year-old Jewish woman originally from Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. Though she had lived in the neighborhood for forty years, she joked, “I needed a passport when I came.” Barely five-feet tall and with a mane of long, dyed blonde hair, which had turned solid grey in later years, piled atop her head, Sylvia’s modest stature belied her strength. She often reflected on the loss of her parents, her husband, her three siblings, her niece, and countless friends. “I’m a veteran without a gun,” she said.
More recently Sylvia faced challenges spurred by gentrification and the losses of neighborhood places she had frequented for decades, such as the bakery. “I don’t want to get evicted again,” she said one day at Pete’s Delicatessen, where she and the other former La Marjorlaine regulars had begun to gather after the bakery closed. She managed the rent increases on her one-bedroom, rent-controlled apartment, while a revolving cast of younger, more affluent neighbors paid double and triple her then $1,650 monthly rent. The urban landscape beyond her door changed with startling speed as gentrification continued its inexorable march. New bars and restaurants sprouted every few months and displaced neighborhood mainstays such as Mr. Wonton Chinese takeout and Niko’s Café. Unlike many of her similarly aged peers, Sylvia could afford to try them but concluded they hadn’t opened for her or for “neighborhood people.” “They’re for a younger crowd,” she said with a resigned hand wave.
“In spite of all the bullshit, I try to remain optimistic,” said Eugene, a 90-year-old white man of Scottish descent, who lived alone in a rent stabilized apartment and frequented the bakery daily. His dignified air obscured mounting challenges in late life. Though he had retired from his position as a trade nutrition-magazine editor, he still dressed as if he were headed to the office every day, wearing a sport or trench coat, suspenders, and button-down shirt. The worn leather briefcase at his side betrayed his work history in publishing. With his gleaming white hair and mustache and ruddy cheeks, he once joked when observing how strangers frequently waved to him that he looked like “everybody’s grandfather or Santa Claus.” During a later stint as a film and television extra, filmmakers tended to cast him as esteemed characters, including as a judge, doctor, boxing referee, and ambassador. He’d appeared in over twenty films as a nonspeaking extra, playing a physician alongside Robin Williams in Awakenings and the ambassador to Hungary in the Benicio Del Toro film Che, his last role. One bakery regular, Eddie, quipped, “They never pick you to be the criminal or the bum, always a judge or a doctor or something. Guess they don’t know the real you. Ha-ha.”