BY ALBERT AMATEAU | Elizabeth Shuldiner, a Village resident and homeowner for more than 60 years and founder of the W. 12th St. Block Association, died at home on Thurs., Oct. 16. She was 94.
In frail health for the past four years after the death of her husband, David Shuldiner, she was still able to manage the stairs in her W. 12th St. house until a few weeks before her death from respiratory failure, according to her son Gardner Rankin.
Elizabeth Shuldiner was involved in some of the important issues of the past five decades. She was active in the fight against Robert Moses’s plan for a road through the middle of Washington Square Park and the fight in the 1980s to block the Westway landfill project, successful battles both.
In the 1960s Elizabeth became a leader of the Women’s Association of Grace Church when her sons, Gardner and Todd Rankin, were attending the church school.
Cree Harland, a fellow activist and mother of a former student at Grace Church School, recalled that Elizabeth became the treasurer of the church Women’s Association because she was dissatisfied with the group’s banking arrangements.
“We didn’t have any money,” Harland said. “But if she thought a bank wasn’t doing the best it could for us, she would change banks.”
“Elizabeth was one of the first people to plant flowers in sidewalk tree pits,” said Carol Greitzer, a former city councilmember and W. 12th St. resident and block association member. “She started the block association 30 or 40 years ago and her husband, David, became active. Between the two of them, there was a great institutional memory,” Greitzer said. “Her death is a big loss for us,” she added.
Margarite Martin, a resident of W. 12th St. for 20 years, said, “She was an awesome person. I first met her while she was planting flowers in a tree pit. Now every block association does it.”
Originally active on the block between Fifth and Sixth Aves., the association later expanded to Seventh Ave. It became dormant a few years ago, “but the thing about block associations is that when there’s no problem people lose interest, and when things get bad they become active again,” Greitzer said. “It’s easier when there’s already a history and a structure on the block.”
Elizabeth Shuldiner spread the block association gospel to other streets in the Village.
“She helped me and Joan McAlister and Barbara Monroe start the Charles St. Association,” recalled Tommi Marx, a fellow fighter for neighborhood causes. “It went from Greenwich St. to Hudson St. We would have block parties — not with vendors. It was potluck with things we baked ourselves and sold,” she said.
“We were always fighting, protesting something, from 1965 through the 1970s,” Marx said. “The Village was like a small town. I know what that’s like, I’m from Kansas. I became ill and she was always there for me. She was just a great dame: elegant, blonde, beautiful.”
Born Elizabeth Deland in Utica, N.Y., she came to the Village in the mid-1940s after finishing junior college.
“I don’t know all the places she worked, but she spoke about having worked at The New Yorker and at Altman’s,” said her son Gardner.
“She lived on Waverly Place and met my father, Arthur Rankin, who lived downstairs,” Gardner said.
Arthur Rankin was an art director at NBC and later an animator who created Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. The couple married in 1947 and moved to W. 12th St. in 1950. After some years in Connecticut in the mid-1950s, the family returned to W. 12th St. in 1960. Elizabeth and Arthur divorced a few years later, and Elizabeth married Shuldiner in 1964.
For her two sons, Elizabeth was an inspiration. For her friend Tommi Marx, “She was sweet and elegant but you didn’t want to mess with her,” she said. “If you were against her, she would oppose you with all her ‘I’ ’s dotted and ‘T’ ’s crossed.”
