The sewing machines come out every Friday.
They are pulled from a storage closet and placed on folding tables, alongside plastic tubs of fabric, thread, buttons and trimmings. Coffee and cake are served.
In an age of fast fashion and online shopping, the old-school sewing circle endures at the Manny Cantor Center, a settlement house on the Lower East Side, where it has brought women together for over a century.
But what started out of necessity for poor immigrants to make and repair their own clothing has evolved into a social gathering of older New Yorkers who find laughter and friendship in between stitches.
“They do a lot of talking,” said Xiomara Maldonado, the senior director of older adult programs at the center. “They love to talk about anything and everything. It is — besides Zumba — our noisiest group.”
Ludivina Morales, 85, started coming about 15 years ago and now instructs up to 20 women — she calls them “the girls” — on how to make everything from aprons and potholders to holiday ornaments with pompoms. “That’s how we keep busy,” she said.
Behind a Singer machine, Madhu Gupta, 69, watched closely as Ms. Morales pinned together a blouse. “I’m a good student,” Ms. Gupta said.
After Ms. Gupta’s husband of 42 years passed away in 2024, she moved from St. Louis to the Lower East Side last year to live with her son and daughter-in-law. “When I came here, I didn’t have anything to do, and I was very depressed,” she said.
So Ms. Gupta, who had learned to sew from her mother in India, joined the sewing circle. Her first project was a vest, then an apron that she now wears to cook. Soon, she will be making baby clothes for her first grandchild.
The center is run by the Educational Alliance, a nonprofit that was founded in 1889 to provide services to Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side. Sewing was offered from the beginning, and in the 1950s there were specialized classes in dressmaking and “junior sewing” for young people. A flyer for a “family sewing circle” on Sundays invited fathers to work on car covers and utility bags, and sons to make boat sails and pencil cases.
Today, the sewing circle is free to any city resident age 60 and up. The program costs about $8,500 to run annually, and is supported with city funds, grants and donations. Fund-raising items made by the sewing circle — aprons, jar openers, tote bags and dolls — are sold twice a year at the center.
Some of the women do not actually sew. They work on needlepoint, knitting or crocheting. “Whatever they want,” Ms. Morales said. “We’re here to have fun, you know, not to be criticizing or putting anybody down because that’s not right.”
Vaylateena Jones, a retired nurse in her 70s, was crocheting a green jacket. She comes most Fridays to relax and talk with women her own age. “I don’t want to turn anything in,” she said. “I don’t want to have to get anything done within a certain amount of time.”
Rita Liu paused to admire Ms. Jones’s handiwork. “It’s really pretty,” Ms. Liu said.
“You have good taste,” Ms. Jones told her with a laugh.
Ms. Liu had walked by the sewing circle three years ago when her friends called her over. Ms. Liu, 74, said she had no interest in learning to sew since her mother was a seamstress and had made all her clothes. Her friends told her, “just come in and run your mouth,” she said.
“Somehow, I just got roped into this,” Ms. Liu recalled.
“You loved it,” said her friend, Diane Chin, 76, a retired heath clinic administrator who joined the sewing circle in 2012. “It was sewing thread that we roped you in with.”
Since then, Ms. Liu has made a couple aprons, potholders and a doll that turned out so “weird-looking” that her grandchildren laughed when they saw it. Several women helped Ms. Liu sew an oversized blouse from fabric that her mother donated to the sewing circle.
Ms. Morales bakes a cake every week from box mixes that everyone chips in to buy. For two hours, the women sew and talk — in English, Spanish and Chinese — about their parents, grandchildren and getting older. They compare notes. They stay away from politics.
On holidays, the women bring homemade dishes like spring rolls, lo mein noodles and arroz con gandules. They don’t bother taking out the sewing machines.
Ms. Chin said that if someone did not show up one week, the others would check that everything is OK.
“It’s family,” she said. “We’re all connected.”
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