A brownstone on East 73rd Street was a sanctuary for Gloria Steinem, the trailblazing feminist who died there on Wednesday at age 92.
But for decades Ms. Steinem’s Upper East Side home was also a gathering space for other thinkers, activists and cultural and political figures who would assemble there to discuss social issues. A meeting held in the living room led to the formation of Ms. magazine in 1971, which Ms. Steinem co-founded, and she hosted her well-known “talking circles” there for years.
It will continue to be used for the purpose of political gathering and discussion after her death, Jill Heller, the director of programs at Gloria’s Foundation, said on Wednesday.
Over the years, Ms. Steinem acquired three floors of the five-story building. The foundation occupies one floor, and the other two are now “poised to eventually become part of the larger Gloria’s Foundation,” Ms. Heller said. Per Ms. Steinem’s own wishes, Ms. Heller said, the foundation will now maintain the home as a permanent space for organizing and activism.
It was a rental property when Ms. Steinem first moved in, in 1967. She shared the unit with her roommate, the artist Barbara Nessim. The two made the space their own, building a loft with a porch found in a dumpster in Connecticut.
Ms. Steinem eventually purchased the unit, and over the years she bought up additional floors of the building, making more room for hosting. Countless writers, celebrities and politicians have spent time there, including Tarana Burke, Hillary Clinton, Alice Walker and Lupita Nyong’o.
“There’s an immediate warmth when you come in the door,” said Synclaire Warren, a feminist activist, who hosted an event with Ms. Steinem in February for Black History Month. The topic was Black maternal health, Ms. Warren said, and discussing it in Ms. Steinem’s home added a feeling of safety.
“I think it’s incredibly hard to talk about some of these topics, from maternal deaths to miscarriages to just not being believed in medical rooms,” she said. “And you have 40 women who’ve never really met each other before talking about how their moms had incredibly hard births, how they’ve had a hard time carrying.”
In July, Adrianne Wright, the founder of the storytelling agency Rosie, held a talking circle there to discuss the effect of algorithms and misinformation on the media landscape. “Other talking circles happen, and they’re in these really posh areas or a conference room with a PowerPoint,” she said, but Ms. Steinem’s home felt more intimate and accessible.
“I remember how soft and worn the sitting areas were, as just a reminder of how many people have sat there and the wisdom that has been gained,” Ms. Wright said.
Ms. Steinem’s home is full of books, letters, photographs and artifacts from her travels. Empty wall space is rare. Ms. Steinem hung a poem Alice Walker had written about her, a photo of her and David Bale (“the friend that I married,” as they called each other) and a letter from “the subversive seven,” a group of waitresses in Hollywood that Ms. Steinem met with in 1971.
There was evidence everywhere of her love for elephants: with elephant sculptures, wall hangings and more. An artwork that depicts a boy reading to an elephant hung above her green sofa. “I remember seeing that, and it being such a grounding image of what it means to listen and of different beings to be together,” Ms. Wright said.
The permanence of the home ran counter to the changing scenery of Ms. Steinem’s early life. As a child, her family moved around frequently, living in a trailer as her father dealt antiques on the road. (“Living in trailer parks is sobering, let’s put it that way,” Ms. Steinem told The New York Times in 2016.) Ms. Steinem would often talk about how as a child she didn’t have a guest room to offer to friends, Ms. Heller said, and so having the ability to offer her home to anybody who needed a space “meant a lot to her.”
“The source of every social justice movement is people sitting in circles saying the unsayable thing and discovering that it’s happened to other people, and if you come together, you can change it,” Ms. Steinem once asserted, according to the foundation.
Ms. Heller said she was in the home the day that Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022. Being surrounded by the spirit of feminist history provided some comfort, she said.
“I was like, this is horrible, but there have been moments like this before,” Ms. Heller said. “There’s been so much good work that we have to look back on and work from, and so I do feel like the space just physically captures that in this weird, magical way.”
In a forthcoming book, “An Unexpected Life,” Ms. Steinem hinted that the legacy of her home would not end with her. She wrote, “I have now lived for more than 50 years in this brownstone, in rooms that have witnessed lives before mine, and will know others after I am gone.”
Alisha Haridasani Gupta contributed reporting.
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