In Heart of the City, A Free Clinic Lived and Died

BY RAANAN GEBERER

The high cost of health care has always been a major issue. Therefore, it may surprise some that a storefront free health clinic was able to operate in Chelsea during the 1970s.

We’re talking about the Chelsea Neighborhood Clinic, whose address, for most of its existence, was 188 Eighth Ave. It was staffed totally by volunteers, even the doctors and nurses (who also had paying jobs elsewhere). The fact that the clinic had evening hours, unlike most hospital clinics at the time, meant that more working people could go there for services.

There are very few reminders of the clinic in print or on the internet, but the experience of working there formed close friendships that, some that exist to this day.

In the 1970s, Chelsea was much more of a working-class community than it is today, and had a sizeable Latino population. “I did some good work with SRO tenants, people who lived in very small places, as well as some who had larger apartments but who didn’t have much money,” said Martha Seymour, who was a social worker at that time as well as an active volunteer at the clinic.

The clinic was founded around 1971 by two social workers, Seymour said. She joined about a year later. It got some help from the Chelsea Action Center, a nearby anti-poverty organization, as well as New London Pharmacy, which performed lab tests and other services.

It didn’t hurt that, at first, the clinic didn’t have to pay rent — the city basically gave the building to the tenants, who paid a very small fee every year, former volunteer clinic volunteer (and my wife) Rhea Lewin Geberer said. These were the days when building abandonments by landlords in low-income neighborhoods were common.

Lewin Geberer, a retired computer programmer and social-service counselor, remembers the clinic as having a doctor who came once a week, another doctor who came on an as-needed basis, a nurse practitioner and several nurses, as well as non-medical personnel. “If there were clients who had Medicare or Medicaid, we took their insurance, but otherwise, services were free,” she said. Patients who needed more serious care were given referrals.

The volunteers mainly came out of a sense of mission. “I thought there was a need for health care in the area,” said Jay Stockman, who lived on West 16th Street at the time. “St. Vincent’s hadn’t opened its clinic on West 25th Street yet.” That clinic, like St. Vincent’s itself, is gone.

“One of my most passionate causes was universal health care. I was living around the corner on West 20th Street, so it was hard to miss it,” Lewin Geberer said.

What was it like being a volunteer at the clinic? “I started working with the files, then directly with the patients, asking questions, taking a case history,” Lewin Geberer remembered. “We learned how to weigh people, take a pulse, and take someone’s blood pressure. We were supposed to explain to the clients what was going on.”

She also was part of a peer counseling group, helping many of the clients discuss their personal problems — “the idea was one non-professional helping another. The original training group became a supervisory group, where we discussed our cases.”

Seymour adds that “one of the things we did was family planning when St. Vincent’s didn’t do it [because it was a Catholic hospital], although we didn’t do all of the continuing care.”

Not all the volunteers worked in a health-related capacity. Some helped run the endless rummage sales, book sales and fundraising dinners and movie screenings that were necessary that helped fund the clinic. Stockman, for his part, cleaned the place once a week and “did whatever had to be done.”

Linda Longstreet, a legal professional who started volunteering after she moved to the area from San Francisco, was in charge of maintenance. As part of her job, she would search the streets after the clinic closed at night, looking for furniture or other useful items that the clinic could use.

A women’s clinic, held one night a week, began in 1977. It was a separate entity, and much of the energy and effort at the storefront eventually went into the women’s group. “They [the group that ran the women’s clinic] were a little younger, people who had moved into the neighborhood more recently, while we were the older ones,” remembered Longstreet.

Eventually, the building began to charge rent to the clinic, and the book sales and fundraisers became more frequent. It also became harder to attract volunteers. The idealism of the 1960s and early ‘70s, which had fueled the energy and creativity of the clinic, was fading away. And sometime in the early ‘80s, the Chelsea Neighborhood Clinic closed its doors for the last time.