One of the oldest New Yorkers – a rag-trade veteran and card-carrying communist who loved stogies and drank a bottle of whisky a week – died at home yesterday at 107.
William Alpert was born Feb. 2, 1898, in Jaffe, Romania, and emigrated to America with his family at the turn of the century.
Alpert smoked several cigars a day and survived a bout with cancer in the late 1980s, said his nephew, Broadway publicist Michael Alpert.
Alpert grew up on the Lower East Side and had lived since the late 1960s on Second Avenue. In 1910, with a group of fellow immigrants, he founded the Forton Club, a social group, and in 1918, he shared his home with Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky.
Alpert worked as a children’s clothes manufacturer for decades, then took a job with an uptown real-estate developer, riding the subway to work until he was 92.
“He was smoking cigars until he died,” said Michael Alpert. “When he turned 100, he was down to a bottle of Scotch a week.”
Alpert’s wife, who was 13 years his junior, died in 2000. He is survived also by two daughters, a granddaughter and grandnephew Lukas I. Alpert, a Post reporter.