Elderly residents in the Lower East Side are afraid. Two community centers on Avenue D might shut down if the budget cuts proposed by the mayor get approved. For these senior citizens, the community centers provide them with their sole source of company.

Milagros Rivera, 70, has been visiting the Lillian Wald Center, at Avenue D and 3rd Street, for 10 years. She goes there every day from 9:30 a.m. until lunchtime.

"Elderly people who stay at home get bored. We don't have anyone to talk to and we stare at the walls or the television. And that's how you get sick. So we come here, and we help each other," she said.

"We eat, we play bingo, we talk; we're like a family. I live alone and if I stay at home, what am I going to do? Cry? Get depressed?" says Amelia Avilés, 67. "Sometimes I come here because it's air conditioned and my house is not," she added.

"This is the best place in the world," said Luba Worchell, 103. "It would be a sin to do this to people like myself," she affirmed.

This center, along with the Jacob Riibs Center on Avenue D and 10th Street, are two of the 50 centers that the city needs to close down due to lack of funding – the state will stop contributing more than $100,000.

"We're going through this painful process because the state budget cuts leave us with no other option," explained Christopher Miller, of the New York City Department of the Aging. "We promise to do what we can for the elderly and the staff that will be affected, and we're going to provide all the assistance possible during the difficult weeks ahead," he said in a press release.

The centers are at risk because they serve less than 30 daily meals. But Angelita Salgado,

an administrator at the Lillian Wald Center, said that not everyone who goes to the center eats there and that the number of meals served doesn't accurately measure how many people actually use the center.

Nefer Mieles, 84, who uses a walker to get around, says that if they close this center, where she goes to from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., she will have to stay at home. She can't walk to any other place and she doesn't want to go to a center where she doesn't know anyone. Mieles doesn't think that the transportation system that the city has promised to provide to bring senior citizens to other centers will work. For her and for other residents, the closing of these centers is another attempt by the mayor to destroy the community that they have fought for, to displace them and to build luxury housing.