Founded Georgetown Senior Center

Virginia Luce Allen, 92, who started the Georgetown Senior Center to alleviate what she called the "plague of loneliness" for the neighborhood's older residents, died Oct. 28 at the Washington Home hospice after a stroke in August.

Ms. Allen, a fourth-generation Georgetowner, retired in 1978 as a General Services Administration interior designer.

Mostly she was known in the community for creating a space for the social, recreational and educational needs of senior citizens. She became involved in the early 1980s when a senior center housed at Dumbarton United Methodist Church was forced to close because of city budget cuts.

Upset by the news, Ms. Allen decided to create a new center. Her Georgetown Senior Center began in late 1981 and quickly found a permanent home at St. John's Episcopal Church in Georgetown.

She became executive director of the nonprofit organization overseeing the senior center, which has several dozen members at any given time and a core group of volunteers. The center provides lunches, an exercise program, lectures and entertainment.

To maintain the center, Ms. Allen raised money from residents and businesses around the city. The challenge, she told The Washington Post, was getting people to donate money for a senior center in a neighborhood widely viewed as a wealthy enclave.

"So many people say, 'You don't have lonely, poor people in Georgetown.' But yes, we do," she said. "Many come from the days when Georgetown was full of blue-collar families. They weren't the career women like today."

Virginia Luce Allen was born in Washington, where her doctor father specialized in treating tuberculosis patients. She attended the Immaculata junior college in Washington. According to a friend Dorothy Maloney, Ms. Allen once had a fiance who died in combat in Italy during World War II. She had no immediate survivors.

To friends, Ms. Allen was distinguished by a jubilant personality and a keen resourcefulness. Author and community activist Allison Silberberg included Ms. Allen in her recently published book "Visionaries in Our Midst," in which she described her friend as "a Georgetown version of one part Auntie Mame mixed with a good helping of Miss Marple."

Ms. Allen said she took pleasure in helping many of the women who attend the senior center and who live on Social Security checks and their husbands' pensions. For those women, she told Silberberg, the center was a place to lessen the "plague of loneliness," adding that the "thing that inspires me is to see how they change once they become members."