The Boomer Files: Meaningful Pursuits

When the Cliffs Communities began developing 3,500 acres of Southeastern forest for vacation and retirement homes in 1991, it was assumed that golf would be the main attraction at each of the seven locations. But it soon became apparent that aging boomers needed help to stay in shape so they could play as much golf as they liked. Starting in 1995, the company began adding gyms—or, in real-estate speak, "wellness facilities"—that include water-therapy pools, exercise rooms, Pilates rooms, spinning rooms, steam rooms, spa rooms, weight rooms and hiking trails. Debe Schwedler, 52, and her husband, Dick, both avid golfers, spend half the year in a 3,000-square-foot house in the Cliffs Valley development in Travelers Rest, S.C. She golfs in the mornings, then takes a class or lifts weights at the wellness center, and once a week gets a massage, alternating between "deep tissue" and Swedish. She shops for organic vegetables from the development's own organic farm. The 10-acre garden, less than a tenth of the area of the golf course's heavily fertilized turf, represents not only an equivocal victory for the environment but also a triumph of marketing what sales chief Scott Beville calls "our commitment to wellness and all the things that fall under that." As boomers age, he says, they realize they're unlikely to find the fountain of youth on a golf course, so "they're looking for something that can really make a meaningful difference in their lives." In fact, Cliffs Communities are attracting aging boomers who don't even play golf, like Larry and Rickie Reinhardt, both 55, who describe themselves as "avid exercisers and outdoors kind of people." The Reinhardts bought a 5,400-square-foot four-bedroom home for just the two of them (their children are grown) at the Walnut Cove development in Asheville, N.C.; Rickie visits the wellness center five or six days a week, while Larry goes for a run.

For that matter, the idea of living in a 365-day-a-year spa has even extended to real-estate developments miles from the nearest golf course, like Canyon Ranch Living—Chicago, a brand extension of the famous Canyon Ranch spa outside Tucson, Ariz. When this 67-story elliptical glass condominium opens on the Miracle Mile in 2010, it will have 257 apartments and a "wellness spa" that will occupy some 75,000 square feet, larger than most supermarkets.

Another Arizona spa, Miraval, is bringing this concept to Manhattan's Upper East Side in the form of a 365-unit high-rise whose amenities will include more than 100 programs of exercise, meditation, education and creative arts, plus an array of grooming and wellness services ranging from reflexology to the newest must-have treatment for aging boomers: nose-hair trimming. Miraval Living's Web site gives so much more prominence to spiritual values than floor plans and appliances that you can almost forget it's advertising what is actually an apartment house. Turning the whole notion of "home" on its head, it presents life at 515 East 72nd Street as a "journey," overseen by a personal adviser who helps tenants develop a "customized program to achieve a life in balance." In jargon that seamlessly blends New Age babble with real-estate boosterism, CEO John Vanderslice enthusiastically, if incomprehensibly, promotes Miraval Living's concept of "not only changing people's lives but changing how they live." It's also changing the notoriously skeptical and hard-headed reputation of New York City apartment buyers, who once would have been appalled at the idea of letting a landlord anywhere near their nose hairs, but are flocking to buy apartments that come with something called an "environmental protective facial."

As they confront their own mortality, aging boomers are also looking back at their antecedents. Tony Vetrano, a 53-year-old lawyer in Philadelphia, recently returned from his second visit to Italy. On his first trip he went to Bisacquino, the Sicilian town from which his parents emigrated after World War II. "When we were growing up, my parents would talk about this small town in Sicily, and because we didn't travel much, it was almost mythical, it seemed so far away and alien," he says. Vetrano travels the world like any successful boomer, but the trip back showed him something different, an alternative universe he might have inhabited if his parents' lives had been a little different. On his first trip, driving through the town of Corleone (yes, that Corleone) on a Sunday afternoon, he stopped at a café and saw a typical Sicilian scene: a crowd of men in their Sunday best pulled up in a circle around a man entertaining them with jokes and stories. Vetrano, fluent in the Sicilian dialect, sidled up to listen, and was struck by the sudden realization that had his father not gone to America, he might have been in that very group, listening to familiar stories, his life bounded by comfortable village routines. "It was a trip back in time to when my parents lived there," he says, "because these small towns in Sicily are very much the way they were then."

Julie Sakellariadis, 51, has never been back to her family's ancestral home, although she'd like to someday—but it's been about 160 years since her great-great-grandfather came over from Carrick-on-Suir in County Tipperary, so most of her encounters with kin would most likely take place in graveyards. It's very different for her when she goes with her husband to his family's hometown of Isari, "smack in the middle of the Peloponnesus." Nick Sakellariadis, a first-generation Greek-American, has numerous relatives and friends to visit in Greece, and even though Isari itself is gradually emptying out as young people move to Athens for jobs, there's still a priest to show them the church where Nick's father was baptized.

American Jews typically have a different kind of experience; most of their ancestors came to America several generations ago from places where almost every trace of Jewish life was wiped out by the Holocaust. "Going to the country where your parents or grandparents were murdered isn't exactly a vacation," observes Michael Schudrich, the American-born chief rabbi of Poland. Nevertheless, many are doing it, and some are even having success in tracing their long-forgotten roots. Eric Greenberg, 50, director of interfaith affairs at the Anti-Defamation League, went back to the town in Poland from which his grandfather had emigrated in 1921—a project that required him first to discover exactly what town it was.