2022 Honorees
Bill Williams
At our annual meeting in 2022, we inducted four long-time residents to our 50-year Hall of Fame: Sheldon & Fran Fine, Janet Doeden Hansen, Leilani Straw, and Bill Williams. The remarks made by Hedy Campbell at the induction ceremony are transcribed below.
Like several of our other Hall of Famers, and countless New Yorkers, Janet Doeden Hansen was drawn to New York by the allure of the theater. Janet shared with me that she’d started singing and dancing even before she’d learned to walk and talk! She moved here from her family’s 90-acre farm in Honey Creek, Wisconsin, after finishing college, at first couch-surfing with her freshman college roommate, who was renting on the Upper East Side, and then finding her own place in a room with shared bath and kitchen on W. 109th St. While she tested the theatrical waters working at various repertory companies over the ensuing years, she lived in both the East and the West Village, eventually returning to the Upper West Side with her college boyfriend and soon-to-be-husband, William, landing in an apartment on Riverside Dr. between W. 101st and W. 102nd Streets. In 1968, through a family connection, they got a tip that an apartment was becoming available on W. 102nd St. between Riverside and West End, and that’s where she and her family have lived since.
Janet ultimately realized that although she may have had sufficient talent to make it in show business, she lacked a critical skill: a drive to constantly self-promote. She shifted gears but continued working in theater, becoming the coordinator of the Actors Studio, and then managing Warren Robertson’s acting school and the Actors Repertory Theater. She also worked at an education think tank, earned her master’s degree in music education at Columbia’s Teachers College, served as a public-school music teacher, and gave private piano lessons. She’s written plays and children’s musicals and launched BAiP’s play-reading group with Ozzie Alfonso, from which the Blooming Stage Players sprang in 2014. They performed her play "Geriatric Survey", which she directed, in 2015. She also participates in the memoir-writing group. Janet has enjoyed exploring many other parts of the world throughout her life, including Mexico and Canada, South and Central America, and Asia, Africa, and Europe. She is justifiably proud of her professional accomplishments, and equally enthusiastic about those of her daughter Nadja, whose joie de vivre brings her much pleasure. Nadja works as an art museum educator at the Morgan Library & Museum and runs her own art-tour business, and Janet believes Nadja’s passion for art was awakened early as a result of their living in this culturally rich city, and their many trips to Europe together have deeply enhanced it.
When I asked Janet about how the neighborhood has changed, she commented, “Gentrification has made its mark more and more.” She misses long-gone small local shops and bars--one called Flynn’s in particular, which served a large portion of warmth and community along with a beer or a cocktail—restaurants, and movie theaters. The cultural life that originally drew her to New York “is still fabulous, but less accessible because of how much tickets now cost.” She’s nonetheless delighted to be able to start going to live performances again.
Our next honoree is Bill Williams, who also found his way to New York City from afar: Havana, Florida, is his hometown. While in college at Florida State University, he realized his calling was farther north and transferred to Parsons School of Design. Also like Janet, his first “home” was with a friend who’d preceded him to New York City; in his case it was an apartment in the West Eighties. He remembers loving New York City from the start, and was especially fascinated by the subway, riding in the front car so he could look out the window whenever possible. He bounced around a bit before finding a forever home in the Broadmoor, and recalls feeling a little trepidation about moving so far uptown, never realizing that when he looked at his “sunny two-room apartment,” it would be his home for so many years. He admits to having said--in jest!--to a friend, referring to Netta, the Contessa, and the other older women who congregated every evening in the building lobby, “Someday we’re going to be those old people looking askance at others as they come through the lobby!” He also never anticipated that he’d find a partner in the building: Bill met Doug almost 30 years ago while each was walking his dog.
Bill graduated from Parsons with a degree in industrial engineering and used his expertise while working for Macy’s and Revlon. He then shifted gears and enrolled at NYU, earning his credentials in computer programming and then working in the financial services industry. He continues to use these skills, working as a volunteer for organizations such as the Wagner Society of New York and BAiP; he’s a member of BAiP's tech squad, helping sort out problems for others who are less computer-savvy. He’s undertaken to learn how to produce 3-D renderings and is pleased to discover that he has an affinity for it. He participates in a book group as well as several BAiP groups, plays the piano, and, before the pandemic, enjoyed attending museums, especially MoMA, where he liked to “mingle with the Europeans and have lunch at the café on the second floor.” He also enjoyed performances at the Philharmonic and the Met. Although he often spends weekends out of the city, he admits that he’s always eager to get back to the noise and grit.
Like so many other Hall of Famers, Bill misses the movie theaters and the small shops on Broadway, especially the green grocers and the restaurants serving comidas criollas y chinas. Despite the changes in the shops, though, he feels that it still has “the same character and characters.” Similarly, he feels West End Avenue and Riverside Drive have the same atmosphere as they did when he moved in 50 years ago. Although he has, as he unwittingly predicted, become one of the older residents of his building, there’s no longer an inviting seating area in the lobby nor a group of people inclined to congregate there, so looking askance at the youngsters has not turned out to be his fate!
Leilani Straw, our next honoree, credits family road trips to New York from her home in Flint, Michigan, for her longtime residency here. Although sometimes she got stuck babysitting for her two younger siblings in their hotel room while her parents went to see a play, sometimes she drew the long straw and got to accompany her father to the theater. The seed was planted! It germinated for many years, until she graduated from college and arrived on the Upper West Side in 1963 to pursue a graduate degree in social work at Columbia.
Leilani at first lived in a variety of places, including dormitories and starter apartments, ultimately winding up at 308 W. 103rd St. In what seems to be a familiar story line, a friend who lived around the corner on West End Avenue mentioned that there was an apartment available in her building. With the friend’s help, Leilani avoided having to pay off the super in order to get to see it, as was common practice at the time. She didn’t hesitate to sign the lease and has been the tenant of that apartment on West End ever since.
After working for some years in child welfare, Leilani was presented with a fortuitous course change. The agency she worked for downsized, which she interpreted as an excellent opportunity to leave. Her husband, Gregory, had been studying for the U.S. Foreign Service exam, and encouraged her to do the same. She passed the test, and they launched a new international life together, enjoying posts in the Azores, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Cape Verde, an archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean west of Senegal. Leilani and her husband capitalized on each of their foreign posts as a means for exploring far and wide.
Since her retirement in 2006, Leilani has been kept very busy by BAiP: she’s been a board member, served as president and treasurer, audits the “(Y)our Longer Life” class at Columbia, and participates in a variety of groups. She considers the availability of “so many friends and so many activities in walking distance” an enormous benefit of the neighborhood, especially during the pandemic. She has tutored students at Semiperm, the Settlement Housing Fund residence on W. 102nd St. between Broadway and Amsterdam Ave., which houses previously homeless women and children until they develop sufficient skills and resources to live independently. She also participates in long-term research studies relevant to brain function. Having lost two dear relatives to Alzheimer’s, she views her involvement in research studies as “a way I can give back.” Like Janet and Bill, she’s very glad to have been able to begin attending live performances again, especially theater and ballet.
As others have described to me, one of the biggest differences she sees in the neighborhood is that one can now safely walk along W. 103rd St. between Broadway and West End Ave., which was impossible when she moved in. She, like many other longtime residents, misses some of the old shops and restaurants, including the Abbey Pub and Bit of Bengal, which was where she and Gregory had their first date. Something that has remained constant is the quality of her neighbors. Having known someone who lived in the neighborhood before she moved in was a terrific advantage. “It’s never been difficult to make friends, organize neighbors, or get a helping hand when needed,” she recalls.
Last, but certainly not least, among the Class of 2022, are Sheldon and Fran Fine, the only ones of our honorees tonight who did not move here from far away. Shelly is a Bronx native who moved into the neighborhood in order to be nearer to his wife-to-be, Fran, who was born and raised right here in the neighborhood. Once they married and had children, they needed more space, but found it by moving into the apartment next door; their street address has remained the same for the entirety of their nearly 50-year marriage. Although Fran declined to be interviewed, she’s earned honorary inclusion in the Hall of Fame.
I talked for a long time with Shelly about the many ways in which he is deeply involved in our community. It would be hard to find a project that he hasn’t influenced in one way or another. He’s the current president of WSFSSH (West Side Federation for Senior and Supportive Housing), which was formed in 1976 and opened the Marseilles in 1980, one of the critical steps that resulted in the improvement of the conditions on W. 103rd St. WSFSSH also operates the Red Oak residence on W. 106th St. and almost two dozen other facilities for older people, people with physical disabilities, grandparents raising grandchildren, and others. He’s been on the federation’s board of directors since 1979! Since 2007, Shelly has served as team chief of the Upper West Side’s Community Emergency Response Team. He’s also active on Community Board 7, and was very recently instrumental in the initiative to redesign and rebuild the playground on Amsterdam Ave. and W. 105th St., which is now completely inclusive. He is the current commissioner of the New York City Age-Friendly Commission. He’s also an active member of the congregation (and former chair of the board of directors) of the beautifully restored Young Israel of the West Side on W. 91st St. The complete list of boards, projects, and campaigns that he’s participated in during the last 50 years is astounding! In fact, Shelly laughed as he told me that former New York City Councilmember Ruth Messinger once told him, “Shelly, you’re on too many boards!” You can read about some of Shelly’s additional accomplishments in our profile of him, published in the Spring 2022 issue of our Newsletter . . . before we even knew he qualified for the Hall of Fame.
It was only when I asked Shelly about hobbies or pastimes that I discovered that his community-based activities are his hobby. He has maintained a professional life in education that spans more than 50 years and has taken him throughout the New York City public school system, both geographically and hierarchically. He’s been a teacher, a principal, and a district-level administrator, and has implemented science and math programs of all sorts system-wide. He had a hand in the creation of the Anderson School. Currently he works as an educational consultant for Metamorphosis Teaching Learning Communities.
One of the biggest changes in the neighborhood that Shelly identified echoed Leilani's remarks about the improvement of W. 103rd St. Shelly told me that the Westsider once called the stretch between West End Avenue and Broadway the most dangerous block on the Upper West Side. He also commented that both of their sons, now grown and with wives and children of their own, couldn’t afford to stay in the neighborhood; clearly the cost of living here has changed dramatically. And, speaking of children, when he and Fran moved in, he recalls, there were few children in the area. That demographic has changed a great deal as well. The residential character of the neighborhood has remained a constant, as has Riverside Park, which became plainly apparent to him during the pandemic, when he and Fran walked all over the neighborhood, logging between three and five miles every single day.
Please forgive me a brief self-congratulatory moment: Shelly also remarked that the Block Association, which was being founded in 1971 just as he was moving into the neighborhood, has continued to be a great asset. He complimented our organization for “bringing people together, keeping people in the loop beyond what they can themselves pay attention to on a daily basis, and looking out for the area beyond the beautification of the tree wells.”
Thank you, Shelly, for the compliment to the Block Association, and welcome, Shelly, Fran, Leilani, Bill, and Janet, to the Hall of Fame.
Janet ultimately realized that although she may have had sufficient talent to make it in show business, she lacked a critical skill: a drive to constantly self-promote. She shifted gears but continued working in theater, becoming the coordinator of the Actors Studio, and then managing Warren Robertson’s acting school and the Actors Repertory Theater. She also worked at an education think tank, earned her master’s degree in music education at Columbia’s Teachers College, served as a public-school music teacher, and gave private piano lessons. She’s written plays and children’s musicals and launched BAiP’s play-reading group with Ozzie Alfonso, from which the Blooming Stage Players sprang in 2014. They performed her play "Geriatric Survey", which she directed, in 2015. She also participates in the memoir-writing group. Janet has enjoyed exploring many other parts of the world throughout her life, including Mexico and Canada, South and Central America, and Asia, Africa, and Europe. She is justifiably proud of her professional accomplishments, and equally enthusiastic about those of her daughter Nadja, whose joie de vivre brings her much pleasure. Nadja works as an art museum educator at the Morgan Library & Museum and runs her own art-tour business, and Janet believes Nadja’s passion for art was awakened early as a result of their living in this culturally rich city, and their many trips to Europe together have deeply enhanced it.
When I asked Janet about how the neighborhood has changed, she commented, “Gentrification has made its mark more and more.” She misses long-gone small local shops and bars--one called Flynn’s in particular, which served a large portion of warmth and community along with a beer or a cocktail—restaurants, and movie theaters. The cultural life that originally drew her to New York “is still fabulous, but less accessible because of how much tickets now cost.” She’s nonetheless delighted to be able to start going to live performances again.
Our next honoree is Bill Williams, who also found his way to New York City from afar: Havana, Florida, is his hometown. While in college at Florida State University, he realized his calling was farther north and transferred to Parsons School of Design. Also like Janet, his first “home” was with a friend who’d preceded him to New York City; in his case it was an apartment in the West Eighties. He remembers loving New York City from the start, and was especially fascinated by the subway, riding in the front car so he could look out the window whenever possible. He bounced around a bit before finding a forever home in the Broadmoor, and recalls feeling a little trepidation about moving so far uptown, never realizing that when he looked at his “sunny two-room apartment,” it would be his home for so many years. He admits to having said--in jest!--to a friend, referring to Netta, the Contessa, and the other older women who congregated every evening in the building lobby, “Someday we’re going to be those old people looking askance at others as they come through the lobby!” He also never anticipated that he’d find a partner in the building: Bill met Doug almost 30 years ago while each was walking his dog.
Bill graduated from Parsons with a degree in industrial engineering and used his expertise while working for Macy’s and Revlon. He then shifted gears and enrolled at NYU, earning his credentials in computer programming and then working in the financial services industry. He continues to use these skills, working as a volunteer for organizations such as the Wagner Society of New York and BAiP; he’s a member of BAiP's tech squad, helping sort out problems for others who are less computer-savvy. He’s undertaken to learn how to produce 3-D renderings and is pleased to discover that he has an affinity for it. He participates in a book group as well as several BAiP groups, plays the piano, and, before the pandemic, enjoyed attending museums, especially MoMA, where he liked to “mingle with the Europeans and have lunch at the café on the second floor.” He also enjoyed performances at the Philharmonic and the Met. Although he often spends weekends out of the city, he admits that he’s always eager to get back to the noise and grit.
Like so many other Hall of Famers, Bill misses the movie theaters and the small shops on Broadway, especially the green grocers and the restaurants serving comidas criollas y chinas. Despite the changes in the shops, though, he feels that it still has “the same character and characters.” Similarly, he feels West End Avenue and Riverside Drive have the same atmosphere as they did when he moved in 50 years ago. Although he has, as he unwittingly predicted, become one of the older residents of his building, there’s no longer an inviting seating area in the lobby nor a group of people inclined to congregate there, so looking askance at the youngsters has not turned out to be his fate!
Leilani Straw, our next honoree, credits family road trips to New York from her home in Flint, Michigan, for her longtime residency here. Although sometimes she got stuck babysitting for her two younger siblings in their hotel room while her parents went to see a play, sometimes she drew the long straw and got to accompany her father to the theater. The seed was planted! It germinated for many years, until she graduated from college and arrived on the Upper West Side in 1963 to pursue a graduate degree in social work at Columbia.
Leilani at first lived in a variety of places, including dormitories and starter apartments, ultimately winding up at 308 W. 103rd St. In what seems to be a familiar story line, a friend who lived around the corner on West End Avenue mentioned that there was an apartment available in her building. With the friend’s help, Leilani avoided having to pay off the super in order to get to see it, as was common practice at the time. She didn’t hesitate to sign the lease and has been the tenant of that apartment on West End ever since.
After working for some years in child welfare, Leilani was presented with a fortuitous course change. The agency she worked for downsized, which she interpreted as an excellent opportunity to leave. Her husband, Gregory, had been studying for the U.S. Foreign Service exam, and encouraged her to do the same. She passed the test, and they launched a new international life together, enjoying posts in the Azores, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Cape Verde, an archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean west of Senegal. Leilani and her husband capitalized on each of their foreign posts as a means for exploring far and wide.
Since her retirement in 2006, Leilani has been kept very busy by BAiP: she’s been a board member, served as president and treasurer, audits the “(Y)our Longer Life” class at Columbia, and participates in a variety of groups. She considers the availability of “so many friends and so many activities in walking distance” an enormous benefit of the neighborhood, especially during the pandemic. She has tutored students at Semiperm, the Settlement Housing Fund residence on W. 102nd St. between Broadway and Amsterdam Ave., which houses previously homeless women and children until they develop sufficient skills and resources to live independently. She also participates in long-term research studies relevant to brain function. Having lost two dear relatives to Alzheimer’s, she views her involvement in research studies as “a way I can give back.” Like Janet and Bill, she’s very glad to have been able to begin attending live performances again, especially theater and ballet.
As others have described to me, one of the biggest differences she sees in the neighborhood is that one can now safely walk along W. 103rd St. between Broadway and West End Ave., which was impossible when she moved in. She, like many other longtime residents, misses some of the old shops and restaurants, including the Abbey Pub and Bit of Bengal, which was where she and Gregory had their first date. Something that has remained constant is the quality of her neighbors. Having known someone who lived in the neighborhood before she moved in was a terrific advantage. “It’s never been difficult to make friends, organize neighbors, or get a helping hand when needed,” she recalls.
Last, but certainly not least, among the Class of 2022, are Sheldon and Fran Fine, the only ones of our honorees tonight who did not move here from far away. Shelly is a Bronx native who moved into the neighborhood in order to be nearer to his wife-to-be, Fran, who was born and raised right here in the neighborhood. Once they married and had children, they needed more space, but found it by moving into the apartment next door; their street address has remained the same for the entirety of their nearly 50-year marriage. Although Fran declined to be interviewed, she’s earned honorary inclusion in the Hall of Fame.
I talked for a long time with Shelly about the many ways in which he is deeply involved in our community. It would be hard to find a project that he hasn’t influenced in one way or another. He’s the current president of WSFSSH (West Side Federation for Senior and Supportive Housing), which was formed in 1976 and opened the Marseilles in 1980, one of the critical steps that resulted in the improvement of the conditions on W. 103rd St. WSFSSH also operates the Red Oak residence on W. 106th St. and almost two dozen other facilities for older people, people with physical disabilities, grandparents raising grandchildren, and others. He’s been on the federation’s board of directors since 1979! Since 2007, Shelly has served as team chief of the Upper West Side’s Community Emergency Response Team. He’s also active on Community Board 7, and was very recently instrumental in the initiative to redesign and rebuild the playground on Amsterdam Ave. and W. 105th St., which is now completely inclusive. He is the current commissioner of the New York City Age-Friendly Commission. He’s also an active member of the congregation (and former chair of the board of directors) of the beautifully restored Young Israel of the West Side on W. 91st St. The complete list of boards, projects, and campaigns that he’s participated in during the last 50 years is astounding! In fact, Shelly laughed as he told me that former New York City Councilmember Ruth Messinger once told him, “Shelly, you’re on too many boards!” You can read about some of Shelly’s additional accomplishments in our profile of him, published in the Spring 2022 issue of our Newsletter . . . before we even knew he qualified for the Hall of Fame.
It was only when I asked Shelly about hobbies or pastimes that I discovered that his community-based activities are his hobby. He has maintained a professional life in education that spans more than 50 years and has taken him throughout the New York City public school system, both geographically and hierarchically. He’s been a teacher, a principal, and a district-level administrator, and has implemented science and math programs of all sorts system-wide. He had a hand in the creation of the Anderson School. Currently he works as an educational consultant for Metamorphosis Teaching Learning Communities.
One of the biggest changes in the neighborhood that Shelly identified echoed Leilani's remarks about the improvement of W. 103rd St. Shelly told me that the Westsider once called the stretch between West End Avenue and Broadway the most dangerous block on the Upper West Side. He also commented that both of their sons, now grown and with wives and children of their own, couldn’t afford to stay in the neighborhood; clearly the cost of living here has changed dramatically. And, speaking of children, when he and Fran moved in, he recalls, there were few children in the area. That demographic has changed a great deal as well. The residential character of the neighborhood has remained a constant, as has Riverside Park, which became plainly apparent to him during the pandemic, when he and Fran walked all over the neighborhood, logging between three and five miles every single day.
Please forgive me a brief self-congratulatory moment: Shelly also remarked that the Block Association, which was being founded in 1971 just as he was moving into the neighborhood, has continued to be a great asset. He complimented our organization for “bringing people together, keeping people in the loop beyond what they can themselves pay attention to on a daily basis, and looking out for the area beyond the beautification of the tree wells.”
Thank you, Shelly, for the compliment to the Block Association, and welcome, Shelly, Fran, Leilani, Bill, and Janet, to the Hall of Fame.
