Colleen Jackson has dedicated 30 years of her career to human services, and she wouldn’t have it any other way. For almost 20 of those years, she has worked with the West End Intergenerational Residence, where she is now the executive director.

The nonprofit, located on West End Avenue near West 83rd Street, provides housing, education and support for homeless families and senior citizens. Its 12-story building houses both populations together, an arrangement, Jackson said, that benefits both.

“For many of the elderly, the connection with younger people means a lot,” she said. “Some have lost or didn’t have families, and the young families become surrogates to them.”

One woman who has lived at the residence almost since it opened in 1989 made friends with one of the mothers there. When the younger woman left to become a stylist, she promised

Colleen Jackson, West End Intergenera-tional Residence. Photo by Karl Crutchfield

to visit and has since returned to the residence every Mother’s Day to bring the elderly lady flowers and to style her hair.

“I thought about whether or not this type of program could exist anywhere but the West Side,” Jackson said. “I don’t think it could.”

“People here are interested in looking at providing services and helping others,” she added. “It’s just conducive to what we do here.”

Jackson’s organization serves residents in a variety of ways. It provides G.E.D. training, has an onsite medical clinic and geriatrician, and hosts recreational events for both populations. A women’s empowerment program is designed to boost young mothers’ self esteem, which, Jackson said, helps them to keep permanent housing and jobs.

Jackson remembered hearing about one of these women who lived in the residence more than a decade ago and who ended up becoming a social worker. She had contacted her former caseworker and said, “Now that I have a great job and permanent housing, I want to help people.” The woman told the employee that she now sent families to various shelters and would tell them about West End. They would ask her how she knew so much, and she told them she had lived there.

“The most you can do with anyone is plant a seed and hope it grows,” Jackson said. “When we get stories like that, it makes us realize we are doing a good job.”

Former residents of West End are not the only ones who recognize Jackson’s contributions.

“Colleen Jackson has provided invaluable community service to the Upper West Side,” said Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer. “With Colleen’s great leadership, the residence has helped over 2,000 young families secure housing stability.”

Jackson, a former caseworker in a child welfare agency, moved to the city from Upstate New York in 1982. She now lives in Nassau County with her husband and dog (“Who doesn’t think he is a dog”).

Next on her list of charitable projects: The True Colors Residence, which she is building with Cyndi Lauper for homeless and troubled LGBT young adults. But this won’t be the last thing she does.

“I can’t imagine working anywhere else,” she said. “This is where I am going to be until I retire.”

Welcome to the Johnsons

123 Rivington St. (betwn. Essex & Norfolk Sts.)

212-420-9911



Several million brain cells ago, before I flopped into this town of dashed dreams and dirty sidewalks, I knew where I’d get drunk.



“Josh, I found a bar made for you,” my friend Aaron said, telephoning me in Ohio, where I shared a bunk bed with my brother.



Wow, I replied, a saloon where indie-rocking, nonpracticing Jews with crippling emotional instabilities can whiskey their way to surlier personalities.



“Well, not exactly,” Aaron said, “but they have buck-fifty happy-hour Pabst and tabletop Pac-Man. It’s called Welcome to the Johnsons.”



Good enough, I said, back in summer 2000, when my chest was hairless and my idealism endless. Several months later, I relocated into a threadbare Astoria apartment. I was lonely. My cure was Welcome to the Johnsons.



It sat on a murky, sinister Lower East Side block—weren’t they all back then?—beside a Chinese Laundromat and across from defunct kosher wine factory Schapiro’s. I minced inside the Johnsons’ concrete-floor digs and sighed: home. It mimicked my high school pal Chris’ rec room, with plastic-topped couches, wobbly tables, faded family pics and a fuzzy TV broadcasting B-grade schlock.



A tattooed crowd of tee–clad twentysomethings blabbed about bands playing at Mercury Lounge, while head-bangers roared from the jukebox. The bathrooms were covered with illegible graffiti—and, likely, several communicable diseases I hadn’t had enough sex to acquire.



“What do you want, sweetheart?” a tank-wearing bartender cooed.



Sweetheart? Me? I scanned the room: endless Pabst. I bought one can, then two, then three, the price only reaching $2 after happy hour’s 9 p.m. death. For a tightwad earning $10 an hour as a call-dropping receptionist, I was ecstatic.



“You’re thirsty tonight,” the bartender said, as I drank my sixth beer.



“Something like that,” I replied, grinning loonily. That night I trekked home happily plowed.



I revisited the Johnsons the ensuing week, sucking down two-dollar cocktails (until 9 p.m.) and small lakes of Pabst. I returned endlessly, like a homing pigeon, the Johnsons my constant even after I moved to Brooklyn and became a besotted alt-weekly columnist.



In today’s hastily spiffying Lower East Side, hotels reach clouds. Cocktails top $10. Destination restaurants sprout like mushrooms and sell truffles to Euro-trash, who, if I were a psycho protagonist in a Bret Easton Ellis novel, I’d throttle with my carpal tunnel–plagued paws. But like an unpluckable back hair, Welcome to the Johnsons has staying power.



Sure, skateboarders have relented to fixie-riding bike messengers. Tie-wearing wage slaves now bend elbows at the scuffed bar. And the ashtrays have vanished. But Welcome to the Johnsons remains broke-down beautiful, combating the city’s spic-and-span future.



I came back last week and cemented my tushie at the bar. I ordered a whiskey ginger, poured to paint-peeling strength—none of this mixologist nonsense. A girl in bright-red tights shot bad pool, while youngsters with bed head and oversize sunglasses guzzled Pabst. One flipped open his phone.



“Where are we? We’re at the Johnsons, man,” he shouted into his phone, over the jukebox’s rock din. “Where else would we be?”



I sipped my cocktail in silent agreement.