Happy Birthday to Four NYC Landmark Districts
Two years ago today, the Greenwich Village Historic District Extension II, or what GVSHP terms the South Village Phase I District, was designated by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. It seems that come this time in June, many new landmark districts are born.
Twenty-eight years ago, on June 19 1984, the St. Mark’s Historic District Extension was designated. This tiny extension to an already small district only contains two buildings, 102 and 104 East 10th Street. Number 102 is the oldest house on the block, and both buildings were part of the large estate held by Peter Gerard Stuyvesant and Elizabeth Stuyvesant Fish, the great, great grandchildren of Peter Stuyvesant.
NoHo’s landmark districts are also celebrating their anniversaries within the next week. The NoHo Historic District was created on June 29, 1999 and the NoHo East District was born just nine years ago on June 24, 2003. The NoHo District, comprised of approximately 125 buildings, “represents the period of New York City’s commercial history from the early 1850s to the 1910s, when this section prospered as one of its major retail and wholesale dry goods centers,” according to the designation report. The NoHo East District was designated just four years later, is centered around Bleecker Street between the Bowery and Lafayette Streets.
But let’s get back to today’s anniversary of the Greenwich Village Historic District Extension II. GVSHP submitted a published report on the history and architecture of the neighborhood to the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission at the end of 2006, as part of a request for designation of the area as a New York City Historic (landmark) District. The report (which you can access on the GVSHP website) proposed a much larger area than the current district contains. The section still waiting on a decision from the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) is mainly dominated by tenement architecture. The area was a home to Italian immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century and was the center of the countercultural movements of the 1950s and 60s. You can help in the creation of another new district by writing to the LPC and showing your support of landmark status for this neighborhood.
Want to learn about these and other landmark districts in our neighborhoods? You can access designation reports on the GVSHP website.