What follows is an excerpt from Stacy Torres’ just published book, At Home in the City: Growing Old in Urban America (University of California Press, January 14, 2025).
“A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.”
—Joan Didion, The White Album
“It was evident that we had come without knowing it to our inevitable place.”
— Robinson Jeffers, Poet of California, on seeing Carmel for the first time
We huddled at a corner table on the final day at La Marjolaine Patisserie, a mom-and-pop bakery on Manhattan’s West Side. As snow curtained the windows and icy February air tore through each time the door opened, heavy flakes fell and a little more of the place disappeared. A depleted stock of cakes and baked goods greeted customers. Sooty edges demarcated the ghostly outlines of pastry display cases that had sat for years on otherwise bright white floor tile. The butter-colored walls stood bare but for a leftover Valentine’s Day wreath cradling two fuzzy teddy bears beneath a banner that read, “I Love You.” With a mischievous glint in his eyes, the owner said that he would leave it for the landlord. He had lost his lease after the landlord had sought a much higher monthly rent and renewal negotiations had broken down that autumn. But despite everything, he hadn’t lost his sense of humor about the bitter fight to keep his store open. Buyers for the equipment stripped the kitchen clean, and burly men soon arrived to remove commercial mixers and industrial ovens; weighing over a 1,000 pounds, they had been planted in the same spot for decades. I felt a twinge of disbelief as movers dismantled a place almost frozen in time, which until a few days before, had seemed as enduring as the hulking trunk of a giant Redwood tree or the base of the Empire State Building.
Under ordinary circumstances most people probably would have stayed home. Snowy sludge slicked the sidewalks, and many elder customers couldn’t risk a fall. But neither snow nor rain nor gloom of night kept most regulars away on the bakery’s last day of business. I saw many familiar faces—people I had met since becoming a customer six years before. Eugene sat in the corner. Though he’d proven stalwart on numerous occasions and had recently recovered from a second major hip surgery, his appearance still surprised me. Another longtime customer, Carmen, turned up despite a bad cold. “I had to come for the last day,” she said, brushing snow from her shoulders and shaking off her black hat encrusted with ice. Red-nosed and sniffling, she clutched a balled-up tissue. Rather than trudge two and half blocks home, she took a cab back. Sylvia appeared at her usual time, around 10 a.m., and Lucy followed in the early afternoon.
More people crowded the store as the day grew long, and a few spontaneously erupted into song, as they often had over the years. The sweet strains of “Bye Bye Blackbird” filled the space:
Pack up all my care and woe, Here I go, singing low,
Bye, bye, blackbird,
Where somebody waits for me, Sugar’s sweet, so is she,
Bye, bye, blackbird,
No one here can love and understand me,
Oh, what hard luck stories they all hand me,
Make my bed and light the light, I’ll arrive late tonight, Blackbird, bye, bye.
As their voices harmonized, people seemed to forget the reality of their vanishing surroundings. A little more of the place faded with each passing moment. Where would they go tomorrow? An hour before closing, the store nearly emptied of people and fixtures, Eddie filed in at his usual time around 7 p.m., wearing his favorite FDNY baseball cap. His son had urged him to show up for the last day. “I told him he’d better join the witness protection program if I bust my ass on the way over here,” he said, grinning as he parked his trusty cane by the wall. At his request I snapped a picture of him at his preferred spot by the window. We were the last two to leave.
‘A place belongs to whoever “loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.” ’
As a lifelong New Yorker, I couldn’t help but feel surprised to discover La Marjolaine Patisserie still in existence when I stumbled upon the business in 2004. According to the owner and regular customers, a string of mom-and-pop bakeries had occupied the storefront since 1962, ancient by New York City standards. The bakery storefront hadn’t undergone much renovation in the intervening years, giving the space a preserved-in-amber quality. Eight tables arranged in a rectangle allowed people to dip into any number of simultaneous conversations around them. Handwritten signs and worn plastic-coated tablecloths lent the place a cozy, if slightly shabby, ambiance. Though a few regulars joked about the distressed furniture, creaky chairs, and holes in the tablecloths, the faded decor hadn’t deterred their patronage. In fact, customers’ fierce attachments paralleled the writer Joan Didion’s assertion that place belongs to whoever “loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.”
The bakery sat nestled among three residential swathes: public housing projects, low-equity co-ops, and market-rate apartment buildings that still contained rent-controlled and rent-stabilized tenants. Affordable housing protections had allowed many lower- to middle-income residents to remain in a neighborhood now home to upscale businesses and luxury condominiums. A number of them frequented the bakery, which sat in a one-story block-long commercial retail strip leased by the co-op. Brick high-rises that surrounded the strip housed a large concentration of people, whose numbers compared to a small town’s population. Green lawns and park space with benches epitomized the tower-in-the-park model of housing that predominated during the era of “urban renewal,” when the city tore down tenements to make way for the co-ops and housing projects. These waves of demolition and building construction began in the mid-1940s and concluded in the early 1960s. Ten buildings, each 21-floors high, comprised the co-ops, while the housing projects contained a mix of 7-, 11-, 12-, and 21-story buildings.
Co-op and project residents lived in buildings classified as naturally occurring retirement communities (NORCs), defined in federal law as “a community with a concentrated population of older individuals, which may include a residential building, a housing complex, or an area (including a rural area) of single family residences.” These housing complexes and neighborhoods had not been built purposely to qualify as NORCs; they were not made for older adults, nor was residence restricted to older age groups. Rather, in gerontology lingo, NORC dwellers “aged in place,” meaning that many longtime residents of these buildings and communities never moved out and have grown old there over time.
I began observing social life at La Marjolaine Patisserie first as a customer and years later as a researcher. Over time I noticed that this slice of the neighborhood not only evoked an earlier era in New York City history but also attracted its share of old New Yorkers, men and women predominately in their 70s and 80s, who comprised the bakery’s most loyal customers. They faced traditional challenges associated with old age, such as declining physical mobility; difficulties performing activities of daily living related to personal care, such as dressing; and the loss of friends, relatives, and other social connections. Most had lived in the neighborhood for multiple decades and several for their entire lives. These lifers often attended elementary school together, knew each other’s extended families, and carried mental maps of the neighborhood and the long-demolished tenements they grew up in.
‘They preferred this type of place to a senior center, and the bakery grew into an alternative hub of neighborhood life.’
For retirees on fixed incomes with plenty of time but who often could not walk more than a few city blocks, the bakery served as a convenient gathering spot with reasonable prices and few restrictions on how long customers could linger. Unlike the fictional bar in the television show Cheers, everyone may not have known your name, but they usually offered a friendly hello. People checked on each other, asked about a neighbor’s whereabouts, and waved to passersby. The place served as a clearinghouse of neighborhood information, and older customers caught up on news both good and somber, sharing pictures of grandchildren, updates on neighbors in nursing homes, and notices of wakes and funerals. People dropped in several times a week, sometimes multiple times a day. A few didn’t buy anything. They preferred this type of place to a senior center, and the bakery grew into an alternative hub of neighborhood life where they could develop the kinds of social ties and support that helped them remain in their homes.
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 21st-century urban America. To understand their experiences of aging in place, I conducted a 5-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. Data collection spanned from 2009 to 2014, beginning in the wake of the Great Recession and concluding 7 years before New York City would experience so much devastation as the early epicenter of the United States’ COVID-19 outbreak—a devastation that was unimaginable at the time.
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.
Stacy Torres is an assistant professor of Sociology in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco.
Photo caption: Older woman on the street in New York City.
Photo credit: Shutterstock/XiXinXing
