Multiple Landmarks Preserved with Multiple Histories
After years of effort by Village Preservation, the historic No. 50 West 13th Street is now on the path to NYC landmark designation. The Greek Revival row house between Fifth and Sixth Avenues has several different histories worthy of note: leading 19th-century Black businessman and abolitionist Jacob Day ran his business here and owned the home from 1858 to 1884, when Greenwich Village was the center of African American life in New York; noted suffragist, educator, and civil rights leader Sarah Smith Tompkins Garnet also lived here during that time, from 1866 to 1874; and the groundbreaking 13th Street Repertory Theatre was born here in 1972 and thrived for decades blazing trails in the world of theater, LGBTQ+ representation, and much more.
The building offers a rich, multi-layered background for the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) to contemplate in its proceedings, but that diversity is not unique among the local landmarks our organization has campaigned to earn the recognition, designation, and protection they deserve. Here are a few examples of those varied sites.
70 Fifth Avenue
The city landmarked 70 Fifth Avenue, the 1912 Beaux Arts–style office building on the corner of Fifth Avenue, in 2021, following research and still-ongoing efforts by Village Preservation to preserve the South of Union Square area as a historic district. The building played a key role in local and national Black history, serving as headquarters of the NAACP, the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization, in its early campaigns against lynching, employment discrimination, voting disenfranchisement, and defamatory representations in the media. The building also saw two significant publishing milestones. W.E.B. DuBois’ The Crisis magazine started publication here as the first African American magazine and voice of the civil rights movement for over a century, serving as a launching pad for the Harlem Renaissance and such writers as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Countee Cullen. The first magazine for African-American children, The Brownies Book, was also born here.
Yet these weren’t the only progressive organizations that launched from or were headquartered at 70 Fifth Avenue. Others included the ACLU, the American Federation of Teachers, the League for the Abolition of Capital Punishment, the League for Industrial Democracy, the Women’s Peace Party, the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, the Near East Foundation (which led the effort to prevent and respond to the Armenian Genocide), and the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, among others. In 2022, we honored these groundbreaking groups and their significant achievements with a historic plaque.
Learn more about the noteworthy events at 70 Fifth Avenue and the surrounding neighborhood on our South of Union Square Map + Tours, including the Civil Rights and Social Justice Tour.
128 East 13th Street
In 2006, Village Preservation discovered plans to tear down 128 East 13th Street (between Second and Third Avenues) and replace it with a seven-story condo development. That move would have deprived the community and city of the last surviving building of its type and the histories associated with it in the years that followed.
The structure was built in 1903 as the Van Tassel and Kearney Horse Auction mart, a once-common building type where wealthy New Yorkers and others went to view horses for purchase. As the horse trade died down in subsequent decades, the building found other purposes, including as a World War II assembly-line training center for women. A few decades later, the building went through another conversion, matching the changes taking place in the community around it, to become a source of great art. From 1978 to 2005, the building served as both home and studio for Frank Stella, one of the most influential artists of his time, a groundbreaking explorer of abstract expressionism.
The campaign paid off with landmark designation in 2016. In 2021, Village Preservation honored Stella’s work at the site with a historic plaque.
Webster Hall
Located at 119 East 11th Street (between Third and Fourth Avenues), Webster Hall was built in 1886 by architect Charles Rentz in the Queen Anne style as a reception hall for hire; six years later, he designed an addition to the building in the Renaissance Revival style using the same materials as the original structure. The hall soon became a site for social movements — labor rallies, drag balls, costume bacchanals, and political protests from the late 19th century through World War II.
After the war, Webster Hall grew to be an important venue for emerging Latin artists and folk musicians, and then a recording studio used by Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, and Julie Andrews, as well as for the soundtracks for Hello Dolly and Fiddler on the Roof. It was also the location of seminal hip-hop performances by Bow Wow Wow and Sugar Hill Review in the early 1980s when the space was known as The Ritz, one of many key sites in the East Village’s history as the style’s second birthplace.
Village Preservation’s campaign led to landmark designation for Webster Hall in 2008.
Read more about our organization’s accomplishments for preserving Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo here.
50 West 13th Street and the 13th Street Theatre, 1960-1972
Julie Herrod
July 2024
Working from personal memory, I’d like to add a few notes to Village Preservation’s coverage of 50 West 13th Street and its theatrical history that concern the years before Edith O’Hara founded the 13th Street Repertory Theatre.
I was raised at 50 West 13th Street from 1960-1972 (ages 5-17) when my father, Bro Herrod, was the Owner/Producer/Artistic Director of the 13th Street Theatre. Our basement theatre space was the same space that Edith took over in 1972.
The 13th Street Theatre has a rich history that precedes The Drunkard (the only 13th Street Theatre production noted in some of the coverage)—which I will describe—but first I’d like to expand on the mention of that musical.
My father adapted the script of The Drunkard from the W.H.S. Smith 1890s melodrama classic. He met Barry Manilow in the control room at CBS where they both worked, and invited the young and talented but as-yet-unknown musician to compose the blues-rock score and lyrics for the spoof musical. Also directed by my father and initially a showcase production, The Drunkard offered performance opportunities to up-and-coming actors such as John Savage. I was one of those young actors as well, before taking over the light booth in my teenage years and moving on to television, Broadway, and film roles. Barry served as Musical Director of The Drunkard and played the piano for performances in the early years of the show’s six-year run, moving on to accompany Bette Midler at the famed Continental Baths and producing her first album as he shot to stardom.
But when my family moved into the theatre in 1960 from our 10th Street apartment, our first production was a children’s puppet show, The African Queen. As a family, we (my father, mother, brother, and I) worked the colorful African animal puppets to a pre-recorded soundtrack every weekend. My father also produced and directed a children’s musical adaptation of Annie Get Your Gun, titled Away Out West, in which both my brother and I performed.
Highlights and productions throughout our years at the 13th Street Theatre also include:
• Reflecting on the building’s significance in Black history, I must note that one of our stagehands was 1960s social activist Andrew Goodman. Andy was one of the three CORE workers (along with James Chaney and Michael Schwermer) who were killed by the KKK in Mississippi in 1964. They were part of the Freedom Summer Campaign to register Blacks to vote and to set up Freedom Schools for Black southerners. Andy was a hard worker, a dear friend, and a member of our theatre family. He was 20 years old when he was murdered.
• Playwrights Opportunity Theatre (POT). My father established this 1960s program to welcome new scripts for development and to offer mounted productions a performance space.
• My father welcomed the celebrated Afro-American Folklore Troupe to perform many engaging tales and compelling poems by such writers as Gwendolyn Brooks, Leroi Jones, and Langston Hughes during their residency at the 13th Street Theatre in 1968.
• My father produced and/or directed innovative originals and adaptations, including the 1910 German farce The Underpants (Die Hosen) written by German Expressionist Carl Sternheim. The production starred my mother, Off- and Off-Off-Broadway actress Marion Herrod.
The studio space on the first floor (just above the theatre’s living room-style lobby, complete with beer barrel bar made by my father) was the home of acting and dance classes, rehearsals, and workshops.
My family’s living quarters were on the second and third floors. My brother and I had bedrooms on the third floor, where additional small rooms were rented out or loaned to actors and students. Actors, playwrights, singers, musicians, dancers, and others were always coming and going, both upstairs and throughout the theatre, creating a tangible artistic energy and profound sense of family.
I am so thankful for my childhood and teenage years at 50 West 13th Street and the 13th Street Theatre. And I am fascinated and delighted by the building’s vital Black history—but I must say I am not surprised. We always suspected that the dark, dank room with the hand-over-fist ladder beneath the trap door in the dressing room (in the “back house,“ where I lived as a teenager) was involved in the Underground Railroad.
But we didn’t know for sure, so now I am thrilled to know more, and I’m so grateful for the hard work of Village Preservation that has brought all this exciting Black history forward. They have my full support in seeking landmark status for this unique and important historical building.