Frances Goldin, a lifelong preservationist and community activist, died on Sunday in her East Village apartment, according to published reports. She was 95.
As
The New York Times noted, Goldin, who was born in Queens in 1924, "won her first street brawl when she was 11 and as a grown-up never stopped fighting to safeguard her beloved Lower East Side from upscale developers."
Here's more from the
Times on her remarkable life:
An unreconstructed socialist, Ms. Goldin was an advocate for affordable housing and a staunch defender of the poor.
Her activism extended over two careers. In one, she was a civic leader in a vintage neighborhood that was being gussied up with fancy names (“as soon as they said ‘East Village,’ they tripled the rent,” she told The New York Times in 1984) and studded with asymmetrical buildings girdled in glass.
In the other, from 1977, she was a literary agent who represented progressive authors, including Susan Brownmiller, Martin Duberman, Juan Gonzalez, Robert Meeropol, Frances Fox Piven and the New York City historian Mike Wallace. The novelist Barbara Kingsolver chose Ms. Goldin on the basis of her advertisement that read, “I do not represent any material that is sexist, ageist or gratuitously violent.”
Goldin was the founder of both the Metropolitan Council on Housing and the Cooper Square Committee.
Tributes to her on Twitter included...
She is survived by two daughters, Sally and Reeni Goldin, and a grandson.
