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The services offered at Berkeley’s Over 60 Health Center have been impressive on their own for more than two decades, but ever since the center moved into its new home in May, it has been turning even more heads in South Berkeley. 

The Over 60 Health Center, which serves seniors in both upper and lower income ranges, recently left its home of almost 20 years at 1860 Alcatraz Ave. and moved into a brand new $10 million building at the corner of Alcatraz Avenue and Sacramento Street. There it shares space with two other organizations that also help elders. 

The exterior of the four-story building is decorated with colorful ceramic tiles, some rectangles and some leaf-shaped, at the ground level. Artists Chere Lai Mah and Susan Wick installed the tiles, which were painted by nearly 600 community members at senior centers, homeless shelters, art fairs and local schools. 

“The seniors made the leaf tiles and they painted them,” Mah said. “And I think that’s one of the most beautiful parts of the wall. The wrote their names on the backs of the tiles, so there are actually hundreds of names embedded in the wall.” 

Just outside the main entrance to the Health Center, a bench in memory of Leatha Phillips, one of the Over 60 Health Center’s founding members, is built into the wall. Glass doors lead the way to the organizations inside. 

The first floor of the building is shared by the Over 60 Health Center and Center for Elders Independence (CEI), an HMO. Enter on Sacramento Street and you find yourself in a waiting room decorated with more of the tile design. Further into the new building there are 12 examining rooms, twice that of the old building. 

“The new building gives us room to operate our programs,” said Andra Lichtenstein, planning and development director of LifeLong Medical Care, a partner of the Over 60 Heath Center. “When we were on Alcatraz, we had to move our social services out into a separate building, and that was really hard because the crux of what we do is integrating medical and social services. It’s what’s unique about us.” 

The new building has plenty of space for both types of services and allows for more patients to be accommodated. 

Enter on Alcatraz Avenue and you are in the CEI portion of the building. Here there is a large room where elderly patients participate in group activities or eat meals. Down the hall are a fitness room and gym. 

The second floor has offices and other rooms used by both the Health Center and CEI. It also has a patio, which serves as a gateway to the Mable Howard Apartments, the building’s third alliance. There are 39 residents living in the 40 apartment units, which cover the second, third and fourth floors of the building. While they are not forced to do so, many of the residents use the CEI services downstairs. 

The interior color palate of the whole building is based upon a painting by Richard Diebenkorn, who lived in Berkeley, had a studio on Shattuck Avenue and taught at California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. 

The Over 60 Health Center was founded in 1976 by six members of the Gray Panthers to provide for the lack of health service offered to the elderly in Berkeley. Its first location was in a storefront on San Pablo Avenue. In the early 1980s it moved to the building on Alcatraz Avenue, where it remained until this spring. 

In the beginning, the Health Center offered only a few services for the elderly, but began adding more programs in the 1980s until it finally became a full private medical practice. Today it sees over 3,500 patients a year from Berkeley, Oakland, Albany and Emeryville. 

Two more Over 60 Health Centers opened in the early 1990s in Oakland. In 1996, Over 60 merged with Berkeley Primary Care to form LifeLong Medical Care, a community health center based in Berkeley and Oakland that serves people of all ages. 

The recent team-up with Center for Elders Independence and the Mable Howard Apartments is another step the Health Center has made in aiding its patients and offering them an alternative to nursing homes. 

“Every senior, their biggest fear is that they are going to live in a nursing home,” Lichtenstein said. “This is an alternative to living in a nursing home.” 

In offering seniors this alternative, the building goes out of its way to accommodate its residents. Elevators offer easy access to the upper levels, apartments on the second floor offer full wheel chair accessibility and planters in the patio give residents the chance to maintain their own gardens. 

The apartments accounted for $4 million of the building’s total costs, funded by Resources for Community Development. The CEI and Over 60 Health Center portions of the building cost about $6 million, over half of which was funded by foundations, corporations, the City of Berkeley and Berkeley residents. 

“I believe (the building) is a fabulous model for that kind of environment,” Mah said. “I look forward to using it when I get older. I want to be excited and stimulated when I walk into the building, and that’s what it