Seniors Hit Jackpot in Venice Marina Manor

When Frances Patterson, 75, looks out each morning from her seventh-floor balcony, her glance falls upon ducks feeding in Venice’s Grand Canal and on the curve of Santa Monica Bay.

She had never expected to end up this way: not during the years she raised a family and worked at office jobs; not later, when she lived alone near her job as a clerk in downtown Los Angeles; not when retirement scrimping took her to public housing near MacArthur Park, where the elderly were sometimes mugged on their own doorsteps.

But for the last four years, Frances Patterson has lived at Marina Manor, a county-owned senior citizens’ complex erected along a Venice canal between Marina del Rey and the beach, amid million-dollar homes and $2,000-a-month apartments.

Patterson pays $144 each month, cherishes her beach walks and panoramic view, and says, “I never dreamed that I’d ever be living by the ocean. I’m living on top of the world.”

She and her neighbors--wheelchair athlete Jim Devlin, former Detroit tool-and-die maker Jimmy Defoe, Cuban immigrant Carmen Butterfield, retired movie director Wendell Franklin, community activist Ruth Memmen and a number of Russian Jewish immigrants--figure they’ve scored the public housing equivalent of winning the lottery.

“I’ll bet you a can of beer you can’t find an apartment like this anywhere in the city for 450 bucks,” says the diminutive, 90-year-old Defoe, proudly displaying his own sweeping view of the bay. “Everybody wants to trade with me, yes sir.”

“It’s gorgeous,” declares Devlin, 52, whose first-floor apartment, one of 12 reserved for the disabled, borders the canal. “The only thing, though,” he says, grinning, “is that sometimes the ducks wake you up in the morning outside your window having sex.”

‘It Was My Dream’

“This is heaven,” exclaims Vivienne Lincolnfelter, 66, a member of the boosters club for the Pioneer Skippers Boat Owners Assn., which sponsors the marina’s Christmas parade. “I’ve always dreamed of living in the marina. Maybe it was the snob appeal. I don’t know. I knew I could never afford to live down here. But it was my dream.”

But if Marina Manor is the answer to a dream for many of its 200 low-income residents, it is the source of frustration for hundreds of other elderly people who may wait for years for an apartment to open up, an event that usually occurs only when someone dies.

“We’re flooded with calls from people saying, ‘I know about the marina, I want to move in there,’ ” said Diane McNeel, director of Los Angeles County housing projects, including 15 that have a total of 1,690 apartments for the elderly.

Applicants cannot apply specifically for an apartment at Marina Manor, and are placed instead on a general waiting list. They usually reach the top of that list within a year and can turn down placement four times, holding out for a more desirable location, before being removed from the list, McNeel said.

“The Manor,” as some residents call the gray, eight-story complex, is separated from the ocean by only two blocks of beach houses over which it towers. It is a short walk from the marina and Venice Pier.

Behind wrought-iron security fences, residents feed ducks from benches in a grassy courtyard and enjoy the morning sun in an open plaza.

It may be the nicest apartment building on the block, 3400 Via Dolce. Opened in 1984 at a cost of $12 million, it certainly is the newest.

The residents make for a diverse group.

“We’re 15% black, we have two types of Jewish people, Chinese, Japanese and a retired Egyptian banker,” said Franklin, the first black member of the Directors Guild of America. “I don’t think everybody would put this, let me say, garden salad of nationalities together and think it would work, but it has worked.”

Residents, many of whom have lived at the manor since it opened, enjoy telling how they came from around the Los Angeles area to their present home.

From the start, officials intended the manor to be a showcase for the county Housing Authority. They purchased 2 acres on Via Dolce for $1.6 million in 1979, and after signing a joint-use agreement with the city of Los Angeles, began construction in 1983.

About the same time, Jimmy Defoe, out for a drive, saw the construction and asked about it. A friend passed the word along to Patterson, who lived, as did Defoe, in a downtown senior project.

“The police used to use the roof of our building for observation of drug dealers,” she recalled with a shudder.

Franklin, assistant director of numerous films--including “Funny Girl” and “The Greatest Story Ever Told”--said he heard about the project after finding that in retirement, with only Social Security as income, he could not afford his Park La Brea apartment.

He thinks that he traded up. “Living here, you don’t feel like you’re in a housing project, because when (friends) drive up, they ask you, ‘How in hell can you afford to live here?’ It’s almost like a country club that goes along with these yuppie neighborhoods.”

Victor Williams, a disabled veteran, said he applied for public housing, thought he was moving to Eagle Rock, “then a lady called and said, ‘You mind living in the marina?’ I said, ‘You crazy?’ So here I am.”

Carmen Butterfield, 68, one of the manor’s newest arrivals, waited two years for a placement. After 13 years in a downtown slum hotel “with many, many insects” and years clerking at a nearby store, her doctor told county officials Butterfield’s asthma dictated cleaner air.

“At that hotel, I have nothing. My children buy the furniture for me,” she said, pointing to a new bedroom set and chair. On her balcony, green plants swayed in a gentle breeze and ducks quacked. “Oh, I like it,” she said.