OBITUARIES
Susan Leelike, 81,
Villager and community activist
BY LISA RAMACI
Her name was Susan Leelike,
and she was a city and neighborhood
treasure.
She was born in 1938, into a very
different New York City, to parents
of Russian Jewish extraction; both of
her parents were Communists, and she
was a true Red Diaper baby who lived
for the vast majority of her 81 years in
either the West or the East Villages,
the last 50 of them on our side of the
island.
She co-founded GOLES (Good
Old Lower East Side) in 1977 with her
friend Floyd Feldman, with the objectives
of providing tenant advocacy and
shining an early spotlight on neighborhood
preservation. Among other
things, they envisioned the transformation
of an underutilized Department
of Sanitation facility, in one of
Mayor LaGuardia’s old former city
markets, as a perfect spot for a theater;
without their creativity and tireless efforts,
Theater for the New City would
not today be calling East 10th Street
and First Avenue home.
She was also a founding member
of the Shelter Task Force, created in
an attempt to block the city from
overloading the East Village
with homel
e s s
shelters, and BASTA, formed to
regulate and better conditions at the
infamous Third Street Men’s Shelter,
a processing shelter for the homeless,
since the city was doing absolutely
nothing about the horrific site
they were supposed to be overseeing.
Through her – and others’ – yearslong
efforts, the shelter was cleaned
up and became a positive resource for
the East Village rather than a nonstop
source of thievery, drug-dealing, garbage,
violence and menace.
In the 1990s Susan and her neighbors
on 10th Street between 1st and
2nd took on the 24/7 drug dealers that
infested so many streets of the East Village
back then and won; this on top of
helping to gut-rehab an abandoned,
fire-ravaged tenement building that
she had called home since 1982. Now
a fully-functioning HDFC, it survived
and thrived in no small part to her unceasing
labors, and the success of her
undertakings helped to turn that block
into the thriving hotspot that it is today.
She was a founding member of the
Democratic Action Club, formed to
take on and eradicate the issue of the
homeless encampment in Tompkins
Square Park, another city-ignored
situation which turned one of the only
green areas in the neighborhood into a
filthy, drug-ridden haven for the homeless,
while putting it off-limits to neighborhood
residents. Anyone who utilizes
the park today – its playgrounds,
asphalt, dog run or lawns – can thank,
among many others, Susan. She
tried to fight for the preservation and
renovation of the now-closed-andawaiting
demolition Essex
Street
Market ,
one of only two
instances I can recall of a
battle in which she was vanquished.
I called her the East Village Jane
Jacobs – her love of New York and its
historical significance, her knowledge
of the neighborhood and its architectural
and personal history, her memories
of the things that used to be here
that have vanished in the mists of time,
were encyclopedic, and the loss of the
memories she carried in her head is
incalculable. She labored in obscurity
and has passed into the shadows with
no fanfare save for that given to her by
those of us who loved her, her sense
of humor, her stubbornness, her sharp
laugh, her crankiness, her belief that
a city’s history and the everyday people
who made it mattered, and above
all her fierceness in fighting for the
things she believed were right.
Susan was my friend for 30 years,
and on October 26. 2019, I was holding
her hand as she lost that second
battle, surrounded by the family
and friends who cherished her, and
whom she loved so much in return.
Her passing has ripped another hole
in the every-evolving quilt that makes
up New York; while to some it may
seem tiny, to those of us who knew,
put up with and adored her, it is a
massive, gaping one that will never
be filled. There aren’t many like her
left today, and we have just lost one of
the good ones.
Schneps Media October 31, 2019 15