RoseAnn Doherty-Vinicor, known to nearly all her friends as Gypsy, died on Thursday, May 22, after an illness. She was 75.
She and her husband, Mitch Vinicor, bought their house nearly 43 years ago in Bearsville, raising their son, Jesse, and daughter, Molly, there. Gypsy was a dyed-in-the-wool Bostonian — all you had to do was hear her speak. She grew up on Bunker Hill Street in the pre-gentrified Charlestown neighborhood.
She was an early adopter to hippiedom. She and her sister hitchhiked to the Woodstock Festival and made frequent trips to Saint Marks Place in New York City. After high school, she worked mainly as a waitress, even though she had graduated high school with a diploma in cosmetology. Between jobs, Gypsy and friends hitched cross country and drove a wreck of a car to New Orleans, where she, her sister and a friend got temp jobs for Mardi Gras.
When she was 23, she, her sister and two friends boarded a plane to Brussels and, through a contact, reached a Boston photojournalist who lived there and worked with Mitch. He asked Mitch to put up two of them for only a night… And along came Gypsy! “Michelle?” she inquired when she arrived at his apartment, believing he was a French-speaking Belgian. “No,” he said, “Mitch, and I’m from the Bronx.” That was the start of a 53-year relationship.
After living and working in Western Massachusetts, the couple moved to New York, landing first in Manhattan, where she opened Desire, a successful vintage clothing store in pre-gentrified SoHo. (Robin Williams bought Hawaiian shirts from her.) They lived in a loft in TriBeCa when it was still teeming with warehouses and salvage hardware stores.
They fell in love with the Hudson Valley early on, paying $50 a month toward a barely inhabitable “weekend” house on a beautiful stream in West Shokan. After they wed, in 1981, they spent a year in a freezing stone house in Lyonsville until they found their home in Bearsville. (From lions to bears, she would say.) In spring 1987, she and Mitch started walking three miles every chance they got, their backpacks filled with bricks, to prepare for the Pennine Way — a trail through the moors of Yorkshire, steep hills, lovely dales and tiny villages in the north of England.
Jesse was born the following June. A few years later, she was invited to become an Ada Comstock scholar at Smith College; she earned a B.A. with honors in the mid-1990s. By then, Molly had arrived.
A loving, warm, kind, giving, funny and genuine person, she was quite the entrepreneur. She found her niche for a while traveling to universities and the Columbus Avenue weekend market setting up a booth and selling 100% cotton leggings and “big shirts.” Later, she operated Rockcut Ledge Cottages in Mount Tremper, working on it day and night.
Finally, retirement…sort of. She never stopped moving. She loved life, and she loved her family and friends. On December 18, 2024, Gypsy’s birthday, her daughter gave her a wonderful gift: a tiny grandson! She couldn’t have asked for anything more. She loved being a mother and grandmother.
Gypsy was an eternal optimist, infinitely curious and deeply generous. She learned that she and an elderly neighbor who lived alone, unable to drive, shared a mutual love for seafood. So Gypsy committed to cooking and personally delivering a fish dinner once a week
In addition to her husband and children, Gypsy is survived by her granddaughter, Esther (5 1/2 years old); grandson, Owen, 23 weeks; her sister, Ellen, brother-in-law, Ron, of Cape Cod; sister-in-law, Susan, brother-in-law, Angelo, Manhattan; sister-in-law, Nancy, Los Angeles; and numerous cousins, nephews and nieces.
Donations may be made in her memory to Doctors Without Borders and/or Memorial Sloan Kettering.
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