Annual Report Details Village Preservation’s Growth, Challenges, and Progress
Village Preservation has released its 2023–24 annual report, a colorful and comprehensive 24-page document that shows how the past year has been one of immense growth, challenges, and progress for our organization.
“While we face multiplying challenges to our preservation efforts on a growing number of fronts,” wrote Trevor Stewart, president of Village Preservation, “we have been heartened to find more people than ever willing to stand with us and support our efforts. By nearly every measure — from number of members and dollars raised, to participation in our advocacy campaigns and programs, to interactions with our constantly evolving online resources — the Village Preservation extended family grew substantially over the last 12 months, fueling our expanding educational work and preservation battles.”
A major portion of the publication is devoted to a year of preservation and advocacy work to protect the unique historic and architectural character of Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo. That includes our efforts to preserve 50 West 13th Street, a house that our research has shown played a vital role in movements for 19th-century abolition, civil rights, and women’s suffrage; following a recent public hearing about the site by the Landmarks Preservation Commission, our four-year campaign is succeeding, with the finish line of landmark designation finally coming into view. The report also chronicles our work to save the Tony Dapolito Recreation Center from demolition; get a new proposal for development at 388 Hudson Street, currently planned as the tallest tower ever built in Greenwich Village; establish better oversight of construction at landmarks and of zoning protections; achieve designation of our proposed South of Union Square Historic District; and earn landmark designations for Theatre 80, the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary, and Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, among others.
We also committed to achieving better outcomes for our communities from citywide plans and statewide legislation. For example, we organized opposition to troubling provisions in Mayor Adams’ “City of Yes” plan, which would change rules to make it easier for developers to build bigger, taller luxury condos in our neighborhoods, all based on the odd yet increasingly widely held premise that building more unaffordable housing will make our city more affordable. Village Preservation also fought a state bill that would have overridden landmark protections for historic religious properties, and won some key concessions in the state plan to raise the limit on the allowable size and density of residential developments in New York City.
Success in these campaigns has been supported by neighbors and NYC residents, as “in the past year, our advocacy campaigns generated over 200,000 messages to decision-makers in government about the important issues before them.”
On the programming front, we continued to offer an array of lectures, panel discussions, walking tours, book talks, symposia, and other in-person and virtual programs throughout the year to celebrate the vibrant local history and provide insights into the field of historic preservation. Some 80 public programs were scheduled this past year, nearly all free and open to the public, covering Black and LGTBQ+ history, anniversaries for James Baldwin and Fifth Avenue, and the Village Voice and vanished music venues, to name a scant few. Those 12 months also saw our two latest plaque installations, for iconic pop artist Roy Lichtenstein and renowned photographer Saul Leiter.
Other popular happenings in 2023–24 included our 34th Village Awards ceremony, honoring six people, places, and institutions essential for their contributions to our communities; the 2024 House Tour of six impressive Greenwich Village homes, which raised more than $200,000 for our educational, programming, and advocacy efforts; our Children’s Education program, which reached 2,501 students in 103 classes at 23 New York City schools and camps, the majority of whom received the program for free or at a reduced rate; and our Continuing Education program for adults, which saw a 65% increase in registration (note: its new fall series of classes is starting soon).
In the online world, our website grew significantly. In addition to our almost daily blog posts, we posted five new image archive collections with hundreds of photos; two new collections to our Neighborhood and Preservation History Archive, including Part I of our Village Independent Democrats collection; a map and tour for the 25th anniversary of the NoHo Historic District’s designation; the digitization of our wide-ranging and successful VILLAGE VOICES outdoor interactive art and history exhibit from 2021 and 2022; and a new oral history by renowned scholar and historian Jonathan Ned Katz. One result of this growth: We saw a 32% increase in our website page views to nearly 1.6 million, a 43% increase in website users to just shy of 500,000, and had almost 190,000 first-time users.
There’s more to explore in the 2023–24 annual report, including the first-ever Greenwich Village model building set made with genuine LEGO bricks we released to help raise funds for our campaigns and our thanks to the hundreds of major supporters, benefit supporters, trustees, and volunteers who help keep Village Preservation going. Download the latest report here and explore all past reports here.