After nearly three years of waiting and with their financial security waning, Suz Atlas and her partner Mary Groce finally moved from Camden, N.J. to the John C. Anderson Apartments in Philadelphia's Center City on May 1, 2017.
“We couldn’t get here fast enough,” said Atlas, 79, a retired massage therapist. “We don’t know where else we would have gone.”
One of the first LGBTQ-friendly senior housing facilities in the United States, the John C. Anderson Apartments — named for the pathbreaking Black and gay City Council member who died in 1983 — has been called home by nearly 100 people since it opened in 2014. The 56-unit, six-story structure was constructed for $19.2 million on 13th Street near Spruce at the site of a parking facility that had been owned by the city’s redevelopment agency.
