Recent years have been difficult for Betty Gordon, a former actress, bar owner and downtown bon vivant who struggles with serious health and financial issues. But in 2024, well into her 90s, she still accomplished remarkable things.

Ms. Gordon wrote and self-published her first book. She saw the first volume of a comic book portrayal of her fascinating life. She rescued a struggling friend and celebrated it all with a festive reunion in her honor at the Greenwich Village bar she once owned.

“It has been a truly wonderful year,” she said this month from her apartment on East 26th Street in Manhattan. “I’m basking in it. I feel very lucky, very chosen.”

Ms. Gordon, who moved to New York in the 1950s, when she was in her mid 20s, was once immersed in the downtown theater scene. She was married to the jazz saxophonist Hal McKusick and later had a yearlong romance with Frank Serpico, the undercover cop whose story was portrayed in the 1973 film starring Al Pacino.

In the 1990s Ms. Gordon took over the Stoned Crow, a dive bar on Washington Place in Greenwich Village, where she dressed in low-cut blouses and ran the pool table with iron-fisted resolve. The bar closed in 2010, and Ms. Gordon fell into ill health. Hospitalized several times in the last two years with congestive heart failure, she sold jewelry to pay for basic needs.

But her friend, the illustrator Ian Spence, was doing even worse.

A former Stoned Crow patron and employee, Mr. Spence, 56, had withered into substance abuse, and Ms. Gordon agonized over his decline. Then she made a proposal secretly designed to pull him back from the edge: She would write a children’s book if Mr. Spence would illustrate it.

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The announcement marks an unexpected milestone in the college’s effort to return to free tuition for all students, a model that had distinguished Cooper Union, a school for art, architecture and engineering, for nearly all of its 165-year history.

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