Jean Singletary arrived in Syracuse in the late 1950s after saying goodbye to her childhood home in Georgia. She moved into Pioneer Homes 67 years ago, and she spent maybe a year living in a different public housing unit before she moved “across the street” in the same complex in 1960, settling in with her children on Weiser Court. Sixty-six years later, in another century, she’s still in the same spot. Singletary will be “94 in October,” as she told me. She has been retired for roughly 30 years from a long career of relentlessly hard work that in Syracuse began with cleaning hotel rooms. It ended, when she was in her 60s, with her retirement from the difficult and critically important duties of serving as a home health care aide. Of the roughly 2,000 people who reside at Pioneer Homes — the oldest public housing complex in New York state — Singletary, now a great-grandmother, has lived there longer than anyone except two other residents, according to Syracuse Housing Authority officials. Ask her why she’s spent an adult lifetime on Weiser Court, and she replies: “I just love this neighborhood.” Because of that, if asked to move, she hopes it won’t be far. Within the next couple of years, Weiser Court and the rest of Pioneer Homes are scheduled to be demolished, according to new interim SHA executive director Jalyn Clifford. She said residents, working closely with caseworkers, will be given a choice of moving into a newly built mixed income neighborhood, shifting into other SHA facilities around Syracuse or using vouchers to find a new spot in private housing. At Jean Singletary’s table, a reminder of gratitude, a blessing that ends: “Make us ever mindful of the needs of others.” Credit: Sean Kirst | Central Current Clifford took over the top role in the SHA last week, following the departure of former Executive Director Bill Simmons. Amid fierce debate about his future — and faced with an SHA board whose power balance no longer offered him support — Simmons accepted an early retirement package worth $274,000. The aftermath of that long and tumultuous sequence of debate makes this a good moment to take a breath and remember who the entire East Adams Street transformation plan — totaling over $1 billion in investment — is truly supposed to represent, in terms of generational support: There’s no better example than Jean McBurse Singletary, a kind of indomitable template of the many thousands who have seen Pioneer Homes as a springboard in their lives, over the years. “She very much embodies the heart of our residents,” Clifford said, “and our residents very much personify perseverance.” Through my work in journalism, I’ve known Singletary for a long time. She is one of those extraordinary elders who live in often-under-the-radar retirement after navigating lives of staggering civic witness and history. Last winter, when photographer Mike Greenlar and I visited Singletary’s apartment, she sat in the kitchen — listening as her two parakeets chattered — while she told us she hoped maybe she would never need to move at all. Things change. By last week, when I stopped by again, she had reconsidered. She has already boxed up many of her things, and she acknowledged that climbing the stairs to reach the second floor of her apartment is putting a lot of strain on her legs. She also loves to cook, and she said she is frustrated because the oven on her old stove doesn’t work. While the SHA has put in a work order to fix the stove, she said her grown children and grandchildren routinely stop by to bring her meals. “The new place, they say there’ll be an elevator,” said Singletary, liking the idea of a swift and easy ride upstairs. While she daydreams about what she could do in a new kitchen with a brand-new stove, her most important concern is that any move won’t require her to move far away, because Pioneer Homes has been the center of her life since she came to Syracuse. Long ago, she would rise early to ride a downtown bus to Carrier Circle, where she cleaned rooms in an old Howard Johnson’s, demolished now. That was difficult work, as was the job she held in a Syracuse pocketbook factory, where she vividly remembers being on the job on the day in 1963 when President John F. Kennedy was murdered. Later in her career, she took on the daily responsibility of providing direct home health care for people who desperately needed it. I asked her about her frequent reflections on those long years of work, when she often cleaned on her hands and knees: Does she thinks about it so often because she misses the structure of her life, before retirement? Singletary laughed, a wonderful light-up-the-whole-room laugh. The answer was exactly the opposite. She wills herself to recall more than a half-century of toil — which began as a child in Georgia, picking vegetables or cotton in the fields – because remembering how it seemed liked that hard work would never end is the only way to appreciate the full sweetness of being retired, even now. “I’m glad I did it,” she said, “because I don’t have to do it anymore.” She grew up on a farm near Hawkinsville, Ga., the third youngest in a family of 11 children. Her relatives still own family land there, she said, but all of her brothers and sisters are gone. At 93, “I’m the only child,” Singletary said quietly. The one school available was miles away. She had to go by foot, she said, “because they had no school buses for Black people.” Her father grew cotton, corn, sweet potatoes and peanuts — she remembers picking fresh peanuts “and putting them on a pole until they dried” — and once she reached 10 or 11, she was already doing what she could to help. Singletary was often in the fields before she left for school and out there again after the long walk home, a life made harder yet by the harsh boot of legal segregation. “It was bad times,” she said of being a child of color, in the Jim Crow South. She dearly loved her mother and father — the example they set, the lessons they taught, their emphasis of being “mindful of the needs of others,” as a copy of a prayer she keeps in the kitchen always reminds her. Yet by the time she was a teen, she knew she wanted out. Singletary was already married when she arrived in Syracuse, as a young woman. Her husband had relatives here, and it was her in-laws who gave her a ride north. “It was December and the snow was up to my knees and I almost went back,” Singletary said. She didn’t. In a way she never forgets, this city was her new start. She and her husband had five children before they separated. Singletary raised those kids on her own at Pioneer Homes, and she recalls a certain excitement, mingled with all the hard work: Downtown Syracuse was really rolling in those days — stores and movies and a lot of places to eat — and Singletary, raised on a rural farm, loved how all that energy was always close. Within the next two years, the existing units at Pioneer Homes, built in 1939, are expected to be demolished. Credit: Mike Greenlar | Central Current “You could walk downtown,” she said, “and it was nice and relaxing to be on South Salina Street.” Over the decades, she built close and lasting bonds with neighbors, whose children and grandchildren felt a lot like family. She particularly loved cookouts and communal gatherings on Weiser Court, which offered stability even as Syracuse changed around her. Singletary felt every minute of the rumbling construction in the 1960s as the nearby Interstate 81 bridges rose above her neighborhood — just as she’ll feel it again when those bridges are brought down in coming years. Several of her kids graduated from high school at Central, a few blocks away on Adams Street, before that landmark building was shuttered in 1975 — which is why she flashed that brilliant smile when speaking about how the place has reopened as a STEAM school. As for her close friends, “the older people died out and new ones moved in,” a sense of loss and change she feels intensely every day. Still, she has no wish to leave Weiser Court. Pioneer Homes remains for her what it has been to countless others: A great destination point, the finale to a quest that began when she was young and in Georgia, a full 1,000 miles away — and then summoned the courage to leave behind almost everything she knew. One thing remains constant: She is a person of deep faith. For years, she served as an usher at the New Beginnings Church. She still loves to listen to Gospel music, with the great Mahalia Jackson her favorite singer, above all others. Singletary is grateful for the way her kids and grandkids stop by to make sure that she is well. Sometimes — at that kitchen table, with her parakeets calling out from their cage — she pauses to try and weigh every minute of what she’s seen, over almost 94 years. Nearing her 93rd birthday, Jean Singletary still sees her life as a great adventure, achieved. Credit: Mike Greenlar | Central Current “I think I’ve had a good life,” Singletary said. If she has one great immediate dream, it’s a simple wish to have her oven working again so she can bake a lemon pound cake, a particular favorite, to share with visitors — even if she insists it could never come close to cakes or pies made by her older sister, the best baker she ever knew. These summer days are sweet and slow, if a bit too hot. She loves spring because the green reminds her of her childhood in Georgia, and she loves autumn “just to look out the window when the leaves get to falling.” As for winter, from the instant it begins she looks forward to the day when the snow stops, though above all else she wants you to know this: Her relatives still own much of the land her parents once farmed in Georgia, and she supposes if she wanted to do it, she could move back. That thought, she said, is never even on the table. She knew what she wanted when she left for Syracuse, and that aspiration remains a dream in action after 67 years at Pioneer Homes. She accepts that a time is coming when she’ll need to give up her apartment, but her mission will be making sure any move she makes will feel essentially like going right next door. “This is home,” she said. “I hope I stay here until the end.” The post Sean Kirst: After 67 years at Pioneer Homes, Jean Singletary hopes her last great move equates to staying there appeared first on Central Current. ...read more read less