2024 Honorees
At our annual meeting in 2024, we inducted long-time residents Mimi Wallace, Suzanne Timmerhans, Jesse Uhrman and Paula Doerfel into our 50-year Hall of Fame. The remarks made by Hedy Campbell at the induction ceremony are transcribed below.
Mimi Wallace
Mimi Wallace was drawn to New York City to continue the career in dance that she had launched as a child. At the age of 10, when she was cast as Clara in the San Francisco Ballet’s production of The Nutcracker, and was paid in silver dollars, she was hooked. By 13 she was dancing full-time. She was awarded a scholarship to study with George Balanchine at the School of American Ballet and became a full-fledged New Yorker. In the course of her working life, she studied with Martha Graham and danced in 13 Broadway productions. While recovering from a back injury that prevented her from dancing for a while, she performed on the NBC variety show Hullaballoo, sang with a rock-and-roll band, and traveled the world on tours sponsored by the State Department and the USO, visiting Alaska, Russia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and many countries in Asia. In addition, she spent 20 years commuting to our north, teaching at the Northern Westchester Center for the Arts in Mount Kisco until it folded in 2005. Her desire to teach has persisted, however, and she now makes the drive to North Salem twice a week to teach a dedicated group of dancers at Union Hall, a studio founded by dancer and choreographer Janis Roswick Menken, wife of composer Alan Menken.
When Mimi first landed in New York, she lodged at the Dauphin Hotel, a block south of where the Apple Store now gleams. Next she moved to the West Eighties, into a sun-drenched apartment straight out of La Bohème, complete with eaves and a river view, in a townhouse that also boasted an elevator! Continuing her gradual northern migration, she made her way to W. 102nd St. and Riverside Dr. in the spring of 1973. Because she had three strikes against her when the building went co-op—working in the arts, being single, being female—and couldn’t get a mortgage that would enable her to buy her apartment, she holds the distinction of being one of a handful of renters remaining in her building. In addition to dancing and teaching dance to others, Mimi is an avid reader. The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic are her periodicals of choice; history is her preferred book genre. She still loves to attend performances, especially the Encores series at City Center, which is committed to taking a fresh look at old favorites. The Times Square theater district, which used to feel like home, regrettably no longer appeals to her. When we talked about changes in the neighborhood over the 50 years she’s lived here, Mimi echoed the thoughts of some of other Hall of Fame inductees. The loss of so many of the mom-and-pop shops, especially the greengrocers and the newsstands, is a huge negative for her. She misses getting to know the proprietors of the stores, and recalls that the staff at Pearls knew her favorite dishes. In addition to the loss of variety, she feels the loss of interpersonal contact, which she notices within her building as well. The ubiquity of sidewalk sheds is also a negative change, if a necessary one. She also enumerated a number of positive changes. Overall she thinks the neighborhood looks better. And she thinks that there are more families than ever. The availability of mulching, recycling, and composting initiatives and the presence of produce and Christmas-tree vendors are also improvements. It used to be so much harder to buy a tree, she told me. And the buses are way less smelly and crowded, and much quieter. Unchanged is the divide between the east and west sides of Broadway. The openness of the community and the politics of the neighborhood are also much as they were 50 years ago. And, she admits, the nearness of Zabar’s is a wonderful constant as well. Mimi also identified an interesting aspect of our neighborhood that’s both a similarity and a difference: the makeup of the people on the street. When she settled on the UWS, many of the people she’d pass on the street—and as a dancer, she’s always got her eye on how the people around her move—were European refugees, often out for a stroll as they did their daily grocery shopping. There are still plenty of people strolling, but they’re now from different points of origin. Suzanne Timmerhans didn’t have to travel quite so far in order to satisfy her desire to move to Manhattan. Instead of having to cross the country, she only had to find her way across the East River! As a kid, she’d had plenty of practice, making it a habit to save up her allowance to buy a ticket on the LIRR. After graduating college, she was finally able to become an actual resident, thanks to a fellowship in anthropology at Columbia. When she was accepted, she walked downtown from the campus until she identified a block she felt safe on. The criterion was that she noticed a motorcycle parked outside of a building with a “For Rent” sign in the window; if it was safe enough to leave a motorcycle unattended there, it was safe enough for her. And that’s how she wound up in a big studio with the world’s tiniest bathroom and a colony of cockroaches on W. 102nd St. between West End Ave. and Riverside Dr. Fast-forward a year or so, and the studio suddenly became too small. Unexpectedly, her boyfriend moved in and they needed larger living quarters. Fortunately, a person she knew in one of the townhouses on the east side of West End was looking for someone to take over her lease. Even more fortunately, the boyfriend—now her husband—was drinking buddies with the building’s owner, who agreed to move their application to the top of the pile. A one-bedroom was theirs for $135 a month. It even had a terrace—albeit one that remained unusable until the Alexandria, around the corner on W. 103rd St., was cleaned up years later. After half-heartedly trying to retire several times in recent years, two years ago Suzanne made good on her threat. She gave up what had been a long career working with people with developmental disabilities within a number of private agencies, including United Cerebral Palsy, AHRC, PSCH, and IAC. She’s traveled all around the city as a special-education teacher with a special fondness for taking students on field trips; an administrator; a public speaker; a software coder; and a pioneer in the implementation of electronic health records. She hated working via Zoom during the pandemic and was the first one back in the office once it reopened. Postretirement, she expected to find herself busy with volunteer work, but has found it a challenge to successfully connect with an organization. Meanwhile, she enjoys wandering about with camera in hand, thoroughly exploring a subject—water towers, or birds, or delivery bicycles, as examples—before tackling another. She maintains memberships at MoMA and the Met, takes exercise classes, enjoys visits with her grandchildren, and admits to a fondness for binge-watching Korean TV serials. Like Mimi, she enjoys reading history, although it perplexes her that we haven’t yet figured out how to avoid the violence of war. On the topic of how the neighborhood has changed and how it has remained the same, Suzanne noted that there are more options for grocery shopping than there used to be. She also observed that when she and her husband first moved into their building, repairs were done as needed by trained tradesmen. These days the jack-of-all-trades variety of super or handyman is called in to address problems. The number of empty storefronts concerns her, as does the increase in people sleeping on the streets. Don't get her started on the increasing number of ugly glass towers replacing the older, architecturally interesting buildings. The lack of accessibility at the W. 104th St. post office has vexed her for as long as she can remember and it continues to do so. The West End Ave. streetscape is also unchanged. On the other, more uplifting, hand, she finds the feeling of community in the neighborhood wonderfully the same; people still say hello and smile as they walk along Broadway, as they always have. |
Paula Doefel and Jesse Uhrman
Paula Doefel and Jesse Uhrman are our next honorees. Like Suzanne, Jesse lived elsewhere in the neighborhood before settling into the apartment that ultimately became his family’s home. Also like Suzanne, his migration to the neighborhood was prompted by grad school enrollment at Columbia. Looking for a place to live, he and another Columbia grad student, along with two Barnard students, connected with a Barnard professor who wanted to sublet his nine-room river-view Riverside Dr. apartment while he was on sabbatical. Coincidentally, that professor, Peter Juviler, is also a member of our Hall of Fame; he was inducted in 2013 shortly before his death.
When the sublet was over, Jesse and his classmate took a walk around the neighborhood and found themselves an apartment on West End. In September 1974, they moved in. A few years later, Jesse and Paula met (she was living on the Upper East Side) and decided to get married. Jesse was the last of the roommates still living in the apartment, so the timing was perfect. Jesse is a Brooklyn native and spoke proudly of his father, who was a New York City firefighter. Paula comes from six generations of Brooklynites on her mother’s side; her father was a German immigrant with an abundance of musical talent. He played the piano, the accordion, and the harmonica. Jesse worked for several years as a public-school teacher before embarking on a 41-year career working in various mental-health-related capacities at the Legal Aid Society. For the last 17 of those years he was the head of the criminal defense division’s social-work program. He’s now retired. Paula spent 31 years working in early-childhood education at Columbia Greenhouse preschool and is also now retired. Jesse is an avid athlete. He’s run the New York City marathon 17 times, swum across the Hudson, and completed two Iron Man competitions. He runs daily and walks Stormy, their six-year-old rescue, three times a day in Riverside Park. He’s discovered a love of houseplants, and has cultivated an extensive collection. Paula loves cultural and creative activities and has a collection of pencil sharpeners worthy of inclusion in the Guinness Book of World Records. Jesse and Paula raised their two daughters in their apartment and are pleased that both have so far remained local. One lives in the West Nineties, the other around the corner on W. 103rd. The birth of their second grandchild may prevent their daughter’s growing family from sticking around long enough to become Hall of Fame inductees, but meanwhile Jesse and Paula enjoy being able to duck right around the corner to lend a hand. Both consider themselves very fortunate to live here, away from the tumult of the West Side in the West Seventies and Eighties. Jesse admits that early on he imagined he’d wind up in Northampton, Mass.; he now can’t imagine wanting to live anywhere other than here. Paula, however, harbors a not-so-secret wish to spend some of the worst of our winter weather somewhere in Europe, perhaps Paris or Barcelona. Like our other two inductees, Jesse and Paula identify the liberal attitude of the neighborhood as unchanged since they moved in. In fact, Jess told me our zip code continues to be one of the most liberal in the country, which is important to them both. The longevity of V&T’s is another constant that they’re much attached to; they ate there the day they got married and were there when Paula went into labor. Thinking about the space constraints their daughter’s family faces, they acknowledge that it is now very difficult for a young family to move here. Although they, too, feel the loss of the small shops on Broadway, they’re grateful that big-box stores haven’t filled the void. On the topic of grocery stores, they recall having used them as a source of air-conditioning before they could afford to have one of their own. Remembering that two of their cars were stolen from right in front of their building, and a car seat lifted from their car, they also identify the increase in neighborhood safety as a positive change. We heartily welcome Mimi, Suzanne, Jesse. and Paula into our Neighborhood Hall of Fame. |
