Photo by Alex Boyd

The old men and women in Stacy Torres’s new book, At Home in the Big City: Growing Old in Urban America, (UC Press; $29.95), are not like the original members of the Grey Panthers, the organization founded by Maggie Kuhn in 1970, when Black Panthers defied racism and injustice and created role models for both the young and the old. Torres’ old folks, all of them New Yorkers, don’t stage dramatic protests against ageism and don’t lobby elected officials to protect social security.

But in their own quiet ways they’re fiercely committed to destigmatize the word and the concept of “old” and to expand the notion of what it means to be 65 in the US today with a tattered safety net and a housing market unfriendly to anyone on a fixed income.

Torres herself isn’t old but she has been drawn, she says, to feisty old people and old places for most of her adult life. A professor of sociology and nursing at the University of California in San Francisco and a first-generation college graduate, she takes to heart the plight of the old people she meets, observes, listens to, watches carefully and befriends. Torres does not use the real names of the old people she meets, though many are no longer alive. From a legal perspective, the publication of names would not be an invasion of privacy, though Torres seems to be thinking more about the arc of human dignity than laws on the books.

To gather material for her book, she spent years in New York City at a bakery, a sandwich shop and a McDonald’s where old people gathered to create communities and to make nurturing connections. Not surprisingly, they aimed to maintain their own independence and preserve their autonomy even as they hungered for a........

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