Mid-Year Appeal: Help Us Do More When It’s Needed Most!
New York is at a pivot point. We’ll soon have a new Mayor, City Council, and leaders of city agencies. We’re emerging from a pandemic, and charting our future. Big real estate and government leaders are conspiring to strip away rules and regulations that protect our neighborhoods from unmitigated greed and avarice.
Now more than ever, we need a strong voice for preservation, and for perpetuating the qualities that make our neighborhoods great — a human scale, beauty, and sense of history, and a tradition of openness, cultural innovation, and social progress.
We’re doing that in so many ways — leading the effort to:
- Stop a disastrous upzoning of SoHo and NoHo, intended as a blueprint for similar changes to historic neighborhoods across New York City
- Extend landmarking to unprotected areas of Greenwich Village and the East Village, including South of Union Square
- Get the City to appropriately protect designated landmarked areas of our neighborhood, fighting inappropriate developments on Lower Fifth Avenue, the West Village, the Meatpacking District, NoHo, and the East Village
- Oppose air rights transfers and other measures to allow oversized commercial developments in our neighborhoods
- Recognize and protect our neighborhoods’ rich civil rights history, including African American, women’s, and LGBTQ+ history
- Show the positive relationship between preservation and affordability
- Educate children about the value of historic preservation, including with our new African American history curriculum
- Provide an ever-expanding array of programs and online resources to educate about the special histories and architecture of Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo, and the value of historic preservation
We’ve secured landmark designation for over 1,250 buildings and zoning protections for almost 100 blocks, and each year we provide educational programming to more than 12,000 people and online resources to over 350,000 users each year.
All of this is possible only because of the generosity of individuals like you, who provide more than 75% of our support. As we reach the midpoint of what promises to be a crucial year for preservation efforts, I hope you’ll consider making a contribution to support our work today.
Sincerely,
Andrew Berman
Executive Director