The Future Gloria Steinem Wanted for Her Upper East Side Apartment

The Future Gloria Steinem Wanted for Her Apartment Joining her duplex with her foundation downstairs will take some sorting out. By , an Emmy Award–winning Curbed writer who has reported on New York City for four years Steinem at home in February 2026. Photo: George Etheredge Steinem at home in February 2026. Photo: George Etheredge Steinem at home in February 2026. Photo: George Etheredge Gloria Steinem died at her home on East 73rd Street, a five-story brownstone she first arrived in as a renter with a roommate in 1967. The space — decorated with pattern-on-pattern multiculti richness that nodded to her start as a correspondent in India — quickly took on other roles: Ms. magazine was launched from the living room, which her foundation eventually turned into its headquarters, preserving an archive that filled the built-in bookshelves and covered the walls with posters, art, and ephemera, some signed by her friends. “It’s a place where people have come to feel safe, and I hope it could be preserved with that in mind,” Steinem said a few years ago. The foundation was soliciting donations so it could remain there; she told visitors she hoped the nonprofit would eventually take over her living space upstairs: a duplex on the second and third floors. That is still the plan, Amy Richards, a member of the foundation’s board, said today, “but there’s a lot that has to be sorted out.” Steinem owned the first three floors of a five-story co-op. Doing the math, that leaves two other units with residents who will have a say since allowing the foundation to take over the entire space would require changing the co-op’s bylaws, Richards said. “And we’re not considering making a shift now,” she noted. “People will reside here and continue residing here.” Steinem hosting a Talking Circle in 2025 from the red armchair in her living room. The subject was the lack of funding for women’s health. Photo: Nina Westervelt/The New York Times/Redux Steinem set up the co-op structure with a group of friends whom she organized in the 1970s to buy the building from their landlord — paying $120,000, or $24,000 per floor. She snapped up the two lower floors. In 2017, she added the third floor, paying $1.1 million to the estate of Mary Ann Madden, an original co-op member and the longtime editor of this magazine’s weekly Competition word game. Madden tussled with the co-op, at one point unsuccessfully trying to buy the fourth-floor apartment to make a duplex of her own. That fourth floor traded hands in 2015, selling for $1.2 million to Kelly C. Schaeffer, a managing director at a financial firm. And the fifth floor is owned by Eileen Patricia Matthews, a lawyer who has volunteered on the Lincoln Center Women’s Leadership Council and seems to have been there since the co-op was organized. Neither Schaeffer nor Matthews immediately responded to a phone call requesting their thoughts on the building’s future. The 1910 building is part of a stately row off Park Avenue along East 73rd Street. Photo: Google Maps A spokesperson at the foundation reiterated that Steinem had hoped her home could serve as a space for feminists to gather and strategize and shared a quote from her forthcoming book, An Unexpected Life: “I have now lived for more than 50 years in this brownstone, in rooms that have witnessed lives before mine, and will know others after I am gone.” The Future Gloria Steinem Wanted for Her Apartment Your product is saved! You’ll receive emails when your saved products go on sale. Manage preferences.