Behind the Historic Image Archive: Women Who’ve Captured History, Part III
Countless women have made important contributions to the arts in Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo. Many have made direct contributions of their art to Village Preservation’s Historic Image Archive, documenting decades of architectural and cultural history. These women were not just artists or photographers, but often advocates or architects, and served in many other important roles in our community and beyond. This is part three of a three-part series — click here to read Part I and here to read Part II.
Susan De Vries
Historian, researcher, and photographer Susan De Vries has been active in the preservation field for over three decades. Early in her career, from 1994 to 1996, she worked for Village Preservation (then known as the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation) as a research associate intern before becoming a staff member and working for the organization until 1999.
Among the many projects she undertook were invaluable photo surveys of early 19th century architecture in Lower Manhattan. These helped form the basis for later landmarking campaigns by the organization and lead to protections for scores of historic buildings. We have three Susan Devries collections in our archive including Architecture, Federal Rowhouses in Lower Manhattan, and Federal Rowhouses in Lower Manhattan and Architecture Part II.
Carole Teller
Carole Teller is an artist, retired public school art teacher, and Village Preservation trustee who has lived in the East Village since the early 1960’s. As a photographer, she has a keen and often prescient eye, capturing in her daily travels people and places that struck her. Many of the buildings she photographed over the past six decades have been demolished, lost to urban renewal or other development.
We have six collections donated by Carole Teller. Click to view Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5 of Carole Teller’s Changing New York, and here to view Carole Teller’s collection of images of the filming of the Godfather Part II.
Jillian Jonas
Jillian was the house photographer at the legendary boy bar on St. Mark’s Place in the mid 1990’s, where she captured thousands of images of drag performers who mixed gender-bending and illusion with downtown in-your-face attitude. Part I and Part II of her collections include images from a variety of shows at boy bar and the Pyramid Club, the annual LGBTQ+ Pride Festival, and other downtown locations and venues in the mid-1990s.
Marjorie Zien
Greenwich Village resident and photographer Marjorie Zien has spent the last several decades chronicling life in her neighborhood and city. In 2021 she donated a collection of photos to Village Preservation taken throughout our neighborhoods in the aftermath of 9/11. In 2023 she donated to us a new collection of photos, which you can view here, that she took between 2020 and 2022, a period of intense pressure and protest in our neighborhoods in response to the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, the 2020 election, and various other social issues.
Lenore Mills
Villager Lenore Mills and many of her neighbors and out-of-town volunteers gathered on the corner of Christopher and West Streets in the days and months after 9/11 to cheer on the rescue and recovery workers traveling to and from Ground Zero via the West Side Highway. A dedicated group gathered here every day until the last beam was removed from Ground Zero in May 2002, and on each anniversary of 9/11.
Click here to access all collections. Click here to read more about Women’s History Month. And if you’re interested in donating your images to our historic image archive, email us at info@villagepreservation.org.