MY NEW YORK STORY By Ursula Staudinger
y husband and I moved to New York from Germany after I had been recruited as the founding director of the Columbia Aging Center and immediately felt at home. I lived for many years in Berlin, another great city, and honestly feel like an urban creature. But I also love nature. In its way, New York gives me both environments at once. I love my mornings of walking my rounds in Riverside Park, the westward view of the Hudson its spectacular sunsets, and biking along the Hudson River either up towards Westchester or down to Battery Park. And I very much enjoy walking down Broadway running errands or ending a day at Lincoln Center or the Metropolitan Museum of Art. You could live in the Met and never tire of it.
EASY ACCESS So when people ask me where I want to grow old, I can’t think of a better place than New York. After three years in this beautifully green neighborhood bookended by two great parks, it’s no surprise to me why my neighborhood came in at number 2 in a recent ranking of livability. But it’s not just the parks that make it enjoyable. What makes it livable for people of all ages is the easy access to stores, and transportation, the walkability, the opportunities for civic and social engagement, for continuing education and most of all the potential for inclusion of all residents. Unfortunately, affordability of housing—one big factor that plays into livability—is not a term one associates these days with Manhattan or New York. We need to do a lot better on that so that everyone can reap the benefits of aging well while living in “the greatest city in the world” to quote Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. Living so close to Columbia University’s Morningside campus, you might think that my perspective might be skewed toward the younger. Swarms of undergraduates arrive at the end of each August! But the neighborhood is abundant with faculty of all nationalities and ages, and residents who’ve lived here and chosen to stay well into their older age. And taking the No. 1 train every workday up to the Medical Campus of Columbia University and to New York Presbyterian Hospital, where “Amazing Things are Happening,” it feels like taking a trip to the Caribbean as CUMC is embedded in a neighborhood of immigrants from the Dominican Republic. Where else in the world is it so quick and cheap to take that trip? This is what makes living in NYC on the West Side so exciting. Livability applies to old and young, and many different ethnic groups. 94 | OUR CITY, YOUR LIFE | OCTOBER 2016