← Back

Explore Village History with#NewYorkFromHome

With the city slowing down and most New Yorkers at home, our partners at Urban Archive are promoting NYC’s rich cultural gems online. Village Preservation has twenty tours and stories on Urban Archive. We have assembled a select group of four collections for you to explore today, but you can explore all twenty here.

Social Change Champions

Few neighborhoods in New York can claim as rich a tradition of social change advocacy as Greenwich Village. This collection includes homes of the well-known such as James Baldwin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and some lesser-known but important advocates such as Georges Clemenceau and Howard Bennet.

Thomas Paine lived at 309 Bleecker Street (smaller house on left) in the early 19th century. The building was demolished in 1930.

Village Firehouse Architecture

This collection includes one of the oldest firehouses in New York — built in 1852 before there even was an organized Fire Department in New York — and ones designed by famed New York City architects Ernest Flagg and W.B. Chambers.

Fire Patrol House No. 2, built in 1871, was located at 31 Great Jones Street.

The Theaters of Greenwich Village

Greenwich Village has been a breeding ground for artistic expression for nearly two centuries. Nowhere is this more evident than its historic theaters. This tour of nine theaters includes numerous examples of adaptive reuse such as a converted former brewery where “off-Broadway” was born.

1 Sheridan Square, now home to The Axis Theater Company, played a significant chapter in the Village’s extensive theater history as the home of The Ridiculous Theatrical Company in 1967.

Transformative Women

Greenwich Village has been the home of many women whose work has changed the face of New York and America. The twenty transformative women highlighted here range from pioneering early 17th century settlers up to today’s trailblazers like gay rights advocate Edie Windsor.

Numerous transformative women were held here including Mae West, Dorothy Day, and Angela Davis.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *