Gloria Steinem Dies at Upper East Side Home at 92

Gloria Steinem, the writer and activist who became the public face of the American women’s movement, died Wednesday at her home in New York City. She was 92. For Upper East Siders, it’s a neighborhood loss too: Steinem lived in the same brownstone for nearly six decades, and she was still adding to her footprint there as recently as last year.

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Her death was announced Thursday in a statement posted to her official Instagram account, which said she “passed away peacefully at her home in New York City, surrounded by some of the many who loved her.” No cause of death was given, according to NPR.

She lived at 118 East 73rd Street, a five-unit brownstone co-op between Park and Lexington avenues. Steinem first arrived as a renter in 1966, bought her first apartment in the building in the 1990s for $160,000, and picked up a second unit in 2017. Then last November, she paid $1.1 million for a third apartment there, a floor-through with 16-foot ceilings and two working fireplaces, as we reported in December. A representative from her office said at the time that Steinem had long envisioned a place where traveling feminists could stay, meet, and host events, and that she hoped the new unit would eventually house activists.

Thursday’s statement suggests that plan will outlive her. It describes her “commitment to her home becoming a center for social justice movements,” and says the Talking Circles she hosted in her living room, welcoming hundreds of guests over the years, will continue “long after she is no longer with us.” The statement also quotes from her forthcoming book, An Unexpected Life: “I have now lived for more than fifty years in this brownstone, in rooms that have witnessed lives before mine, and will know others after I am gone.”

The building has a place in feminist history beyond Steinem’s residency. Ms. magazine, which she co-founded and which NPR describes as widely regarded as the first national magazine run by and written for women, got its start in one of her apartments there before launching nationally in 1972.

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Steinem was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1934 and graduated from Smith College in 1956. She made her name as a freelance journalist in 1960s New York, most famously with a 1963 exposé for Show magazine in which she went undercover as a Playboy Bunny to document the working conditions inside Hugh Hefner’s clubs. She was a founding editor at New York magazine, helped form the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971, and in 2013 received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama, who credited her with changing how women thought about themselves.

Steinem’s statement closes with a request that anyone wishing to honor her light a candle, a nod to her love of the tradition of signal fires lit on hilltops to guide others over the mountain. In lieu of flowers, she asked that gifts be directed to Gloria’s Foundation.

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