Seniors Say They’re ‘Living on Top of World’ at Marina Site

When Frances Patterson, 75, looks out each morning from her 7th-floor balcony, her glance falls upon ducks feeding at Venice’s Grand Canal, on the curve of Santa Monica Bay, and down the coast, on the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

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 4 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, among 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.”

Like Winning Lottery

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

“This is heaven,” exclaimed 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.”

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.

2 Blocks From Beach

However, 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, 8-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-air 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.

Also striking, at first glance, is the ethnicity of manor residents. Nearly 75% are white, compared to an estimated 50% of the county’s elderly population overall.

Blacks and Latinos, county officials say, often fear isolation from friends and family and refuse to move from projects in their old neighborhoods, despite the lure of low crime rates and the marina’s sea breezes.

But just as often, despite notices at churches, community centers, legal aid offices and in newspapers, they probably don’t even know about the opportunity, said McNeel, herself a black.

“I would be speculating, but there are certain ethnic groups not (aware) enough to take advantage of assistance in this type of program,” she said. About 71% of all county Housing Authority apartments for seniors are occupied by whites, she said.

Racial Mix

At Marina Manor, race is hardly an issue, several said.

“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.”

Others say they sometimes hear racial slurs in private conversations, and one tiny woman, her shopping bag stuffed from an outing, told a stranger: “It’s just lovely here. But the element of people; I don’t know where they went to get them. I guess they didn’t look in Beverly Hills.”

In some ways Marina Manor resembles pricey Westside apartment complexes: It has great aesthetics, but too few parking spaces, and residents tend to keep to themselves.

Thursday night bingo--the tenant advisory board’s latest attempt at an ongoing common activity--is not a big draw. An arts and crafts room, with its own electric kiln, gets little use.

Occasionally a trip to the Hollywood Bowl or an opera performance draws a busload of tenants, but usually they show up in significant numbers only for lunch in the manor’s community room, tenants say.

Keep to Themselves

“I’d say 75% of the residents do not participate in organized social activities, said Memmen, past president of the tenant committee. “We had exercise classes that fizzled,” she said, and another event prompted attendance by “me and the ducks.”

“But we don’t just hang around. We’re not down at the (Venice Beach) gawkers gantlet,” said Memmen, who is active in the Venice Town Council and a member of a community group formed to preserve marine life in nearby Ballona Lagoon.

“We try to keep our privacy and individuality,” she said. “We’re still trying valiantly to get in our cars and go places and take care of ourselves.”

A broad range of educational levels, and a variety of languages, also tend to separate many of the manor’s residents.

“There are some here who are illiterate and some who have college degrees,” Franklin said. But, like many others at the manor, he said that creates no problem.

“This is my home, but I’m not locked into these three blocks. I still live in the world of Los Angeles,” he said.

Intended as Showcase

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

From the start, officials intended the manor to be a showcase for the county Housing Authority. They purchased two 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 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.”