A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
All right, here's a funny quote. You can't help getting older, but you don't have to get old. That's from the late actor and comedian George Burns. It could also describe how a senior center in Los Angeles is reimagining how older Americans can thrive. Here's NPR's Allison Aubrey.
ALLISON AUBREY, BYLINE: Wallis Annenberg is the 84-year-old CEO and president of the Annenberg Foundation. Her vision of aging was shaped by some observations that she just couldn't let go.
WALLIS ANNENBERG: I noticed older Americans sitting by themselves in restaurants, in movie theaters, in parks in the middle of the day, and I would think, how sad.
AUBREY: Too many older people seemed cut off from society.
ANNENBERG: Most of society still sees aging as a down escalator, and it's just wrong that old age has become a time of social isolation, and I want to work to change that.
AUBREY: She had a vision for a new kind of space - not just a senior center, but a place to create community and lift people up.
CINTHIA GUTIERREZ: All right. Who's ready for class?
(CHEERING)
GUTIERREZ: Go right ahead, everyone.
AUBREY: The result is a multicultural, intergenerational center called GenSpace in the Koreatown neighborhood of Los Angeles.
GUTIERREZ: Angela, go right ahead. Moon.
AUBREY: Cinthia Gutierrez checks people into a strength and tone class, one of the favorites.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GUTIERREZ: One, one, two - que pasa? Come on, wake up.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GUTIERREZ: Let's go, let's go.
AUBREY: This is a bright space full of windows. The floors are pliable, to make it easy on aging joints. It's one of dozens of classes GenSpace offers each week.
(SOUNDBITE OF PERCUSSION)
UNIDENTIFIED DRUM TEACHER: Hello. Nice to see you guys. Welcome.
AUBREY: From drumming circles and art to green space, working with plants...
AUBREY: ...Even a room for shooting pool...
(SOUNDBITE OF POOL BALLS CLICKING)
LORRAINE MORLAND: Nice.
AUBREY: ...GenSpace feels a bit like summer camp for people fifty and up. For Lorraine Morland, it's become a second home.
MORLAND: If you can just step in a place and have so much fun at our age, it's a wonderful thing. It's like a blessing.
AUBREY: Morland is 68, and she once lived on the streets. After years of hard times, she's turned her life around. She paints and sings in a choir and volunteers for Catholic Charities helping others. She now lives on her own, and says GenSpace is helping her thrive.
MORLAND: We're valued here. They treat us very nice. You'd think we're teenagers again, and they give you love and dignity. It's a beautiful place.
AUBREY: What's unusual here is the mashup of cultures and backgrounds. Mary Collins and Anne Batcheller are retired - one from teaching, the other from the legal profession. They did not like what they saw at traditional senior centers. Batcheller says they made her feel old.
ANN BATCHELLER: Very antiquated, felt not me. Like, I still feel young inside, and I still feel spunky and want to keep moving.
AUBREY: And when she found GenSpace, she found a community of people like her, who wanted to keep learning and doing. She's been able to be both a teacher and a student here, teaching a knitting class.
BATCHELLER: The patience, the encouragement, the support, the acceptance - just a very positive, dynamic, interactive environment, so this, to me, was, like, perfect.
AUBREY: The physical space is stunning. A round atrium with floor-to-ceiling windows cuts through the center of the building, spilling sunlight everywhere, and longevity expert Marc Freedman says it feels metaphorical, too. He points to the late anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson, who wrote about the idea of a midlife atrium - a space to step back from previous identities and think about new possibilities at this stage of life.
MARC FREEDMAN: When I walked through the doors of the GenSpace, I felt like I was seeing the midlife atrium incarnate. There was light. There was air. There was possibility. There was creativity.
AUBREY: There's an explosion of older adults. About 11,000 Americans are turning 65 each day, and that's a lot of people looking to create a new stage of life. Freedman says GenSpace offers up a model.
FREEDMAN: I think it's a prototype for a new kind of institution, a new kind of senior center, which approximates the midlife atrium idea.
AUBREY: For Mary Collins, that idea of a new beginning had been missing. She says she started noticing a while back that people treated her differently now that she's older. She felt unseen.
MARY COLLINS: Every time I go into a restaurant, and it's wide open, and they sit me in the farthest table over by the kitchen.
AUBREY: It made her feel invisible, and it seemed intentional. GenSpace has given her a new self-confidence to ask for a table up front.
COLLINS: I always ask, so what about that table there? And it's very good for me.
AUBREY: Being around peers at GenSpace has helped her fend off isolation and develop new skills, including painting.
UNIDENTIFIED ART TEACHER: Choose your colors. Make sure you have enough paint mixed of that color you like.
AUBREY: Art is both creative and therapeutic, and for Sung Ihn Son, it's helped her cope with the loneliness and depression she felt after her husband died.
SUNG IHN SON: Every day, I touch the different color. That's kind of my meditation.
AUBREY: Ah, so art feels like meditation?
SON: Yeah.
AUBREY: How does that feel? You've got a big smile on your face.
SON: I am learning every day. Different new things make me happier.
AUBREY: And now she's sharing her art with the world.
SON: On the Instagram.
AUBREY: Ah, you're on Instagram?
SON: Yeah (laughter).
AUBREY: GenSpace is a unique model. Members pay just $10 a month, given all the philanthropic support from the Annenberg Foundation. But the hope is to share and spread that work. Mary Collins says she'd like to see one in every community.
COLLINS: I say to my daughter, I don't know what I would do without GenSpace. Every day, it motivates me to get up, and it makes me happy, and it makes me full of life, and it's awesome.
AUBREY: A place to write a new chapter in the atrium of her life.
Allison Aubrey, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHICK COREA'S "WINDOWS")
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