Seniors rallied on W. 175th Street between Wadsworth and St. Nicholas Avenues to protest city budget cuts to senior services. Photo: Daniel P. Bader
Pearl Stanback doesn’t know what she’ll do when her senior center closes.
Stanback, 75, supplements her Social Security by working at a program at the William M. Morris Senior Center on W. 152nd Street, which is one of 50 centers slated to be closed by the city at the end of the month.
The center serves as a lunch and socializing spot for about 500 seniors a month.
“I live near this center and it’s convenient for me,” Stanback said. “I guess I’ll sit home and look at the four walls.”
Stanback was one of about 100 seniors at a rally against budget cuts to senior programs held on Thu., June 17 on W. 175th Street between Wadsworth and Amsterdam avenues.
Mary Amalbert, the executive director of the Morris Senior Center isn’t worried that the seniors from her catchment area of W.155-135th Street won’t find another center, she’s worried that they will be like Stanback and give up and stay home.
“Our seniors are complacent – they’re at home [at the Morris Senior Center],” she said.
“Some of them won’t even go eat some place out.”
The Morris Senior Center is an annex to the nearby Church on the Hill Older Adults Luncheon Club on Amsterdam Avenue between W. 159-160th streets, and many of the seniors will undoubtedly go there, but many of the services, like Stanback’s job, will not follow them.
“A lot of them depend on it. It’s impossible for them to survive [on Social Security alone],” Amalbert said.
While Fern Hertzberg, executive director of the Fort Washington Senior Center, is happy her center is not on the list to be cut, she worries that the remaining centers will get an influx of seniors with no increase in funding.
“We’ve already had people from as far away as the Bronx coming to check us out,” she said.
Her center serves 150 people per day, when it actually only has funding for 140. She expects 160 a day after the cuts go through.
“You can’t serve 25-percent more people with the same budget,” she said. “There’s going to be someone displaced at the end of the day.”
Senior organizer Siegfried Holzer believes seniors have to take a stand now, because this won’t be the end of the cuts.
“Before you know it the senior centers are going to be gone,” he said. “Don’t cut the senior centers. There must be some other way to do it.”
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