Essential Local Oral Histories for Women’s History Month

Women have been constant change makers throughout history and around the world, and that of course includes right here in Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo. Village Preservation has sought to capture their legacies and tell their stories through our long-standing series of oral histories. In honor of Women’s History Month, we take a look at a few of those histories of people who have shaped our communities and our city.

Jane Jacobs

An urban planner, author, and activist, Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) changed the way we view our cities as a whole and the urban environments we experience in communities every day, most notably through her first major book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She was also integral to several key preservation battles in Greenwich Village in the earliest days of this movement, including the fight to prevent Robert Moses from expanding a roadway through Washington Square Park, the fight against the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway through SoHo and other neighborhoods, and the effort to challenge a proposed urban renewal plan for the West Village.

“One morning, early in 1961 … I opened the New York Times to discover that the neighborhood — 14 blocks in the [West Village] neighborhood that I lived in — was being designated for what they called an urban renewal study,” Jacobs related in her 1997 oral history. “I knew at once what that meant — that we were going to be designated to be wiped out. They called it just ‘designated for a study,’ because that’s the way it always began. And the study always showed that yes, this area was susceptible to urban renewal.” Since the cost of the study was always an established percentage of the “renewal” project as a whole, “the cost of the entire thing was just what you would expect for wiping out completely these 14 blocks and putting in, probably, high-rent apartments. This was an awful shock to see this.” 

In response, she reached out to like-minded individuals and institutions to build an organized resistance to the study and project as a whole, including the only “Catholic church in the area that had been informed —  St. Veronica’s — and that was because the cardinal at the time worked closely with Robert Moses. And, in fact, he had replaced the pastor, the usual pastor, with another church official, a monsignor. We were told at one point, this was because the pastor would probably have sympathized with his flock rather than somebody else who didn’t know them and whose mission it was to put the thing through.”

The fight was ultimately successful, of course, preserving her West Village neighborhood, where today a co-named street on Hudson between Perry and West 11th Streets honors Jacobs’ work. Read more of her oral history here, and explore more of the groundbreaking activist’s achievements on our blog. 

Mimi Sheraton

“Food was always a big subject in the family,” said acclaimed restaurant critic and food writer Mimi Sheraton (1926–2023) in her 2019 oral history. That background would serve her quite well later in her life, when in the 1970s she started reviewing restaurants under cover of a good disguise, and writing about cuisine in New York City and beyond for New York and more famously for The New York Times. She went on to work for Time, Condé Nast Traveler, Harper’s Bazaar, and Vogue, among other publications, and became a leader in the burgeoning area of writing about what we eat. 

In the history, she also discussed some special food-centric memories from her earliest years in the community: Ed Winston’s Tropical Bar and Grill at 21 East 8th Street, the Fifth Avenue Hotel at 24 Fifth Avenue, and more. “I was always interested in restaurants, but I couldn’t afford some of those places” on her $40-a-week salary, she noted. “I went to a lot of those restaurants and I ordered the chopped steak, which was the cheapest thing on the menu. I never understood what anybody saw in those restaurants! But that’s because I was eating chopped steak! I had more of a meal at each of those places eventually, but that was a very fancy part of the Village then.”

Over the years, Sheraton witnessed not only numerous restaurants and trends for dining out grow and fade, but also a metamorphosis in how Villagers cook at home. The first Balducci’s store, which opened around the time Sheraton moved to the Village, offered new culinary opportunities: “six kinds of lettuce, or four kinds of mushrooms … and so all of these things became available, and that was great to write about.” The growth of these food markets continued during her earliest days at the Times in the 1970s. Dean & DeLuca “brought in cheeses and all kinds of things that no one had ever heard of. So there was a lot of good copy around, and a lot of interest in buying those things because of the food writing, and publicity, and television, and cooking, and the news of restaurants. There was sort of a fever about it, which still continues.”

Learn more about Mimi Sheraton through our oral history and on our blog.

Barbara Kahn

A 2024 Village Award winner, Barbara Kahn has been a pivotal figure in the New York City theater scene. This East Village playwright has produced dozens of works rooted in history, especially of marginalized or oppressed people, including women, LGBTQ+ people, and people of color, and about personal trauma. In 1990, she co-founded the lesbian theater collective Sisters on Stage. Khan’s award-winning plays have been a staple at the Theater for the New City since 1994 — she has written new work for production there every year since — and have been offered on stages throughout New York, Paris, and London. Other awards she’s earned include the James R. Quirk Award for the Performing Arts, the Acker Award, and the Doric Wilson Independent Playwright Award.

“A lot of my work is based — well, I’m based in New York. So a lot of my plays are about New York,” she related in her 2019 oral history. “And I remember for a grant application, they asked what was the theme that ran throughout my work? I thought, I don’t write themes. I write plays. So I called a playwright friend who had seen almost all my work and I said, ‘How do I answer this?’ She said, ‘Of course, there’s a theme … It’s social justice.’ [I realized] I wasn’t writing themes but I was writing about people. And sometimes they were real-life people who would encounter issues like Eve Adams or some of the other ones who faced discrimination, either religious or political or racial, or it was fictional stories in situations, real-life situations in the past … And I’ve done that throughout my plays.”

Her work — such as Birds on Fire (a historical musical drama about the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire), Pen Pals, and Long Time Passing — has long sought to highlight and explore our interrelatedness. “I write historical plays,” she said, “because if I wrote plays about some of what’s going on now, people might get upset. They’d take sides. They’d call it propaganda. But writing historical plays, people make that connection themselves. … it holds a mirror to the present by portraying the past.”

Read more about Khan’s work and creative process in her oral history, and learn more about her work via various programs we’ve conducted with her here.

These are just three of the more than thirty oral histories we have conducted over the years with women, which also include longtime Film Forum director Karen Cooper, longtime Merchants House Museum director Pi Gardiner, community gardens advocate Ayo Harrington, preservationist Margot Gayle, photographer Marlis Momber, housing activist Fran Goldin, and performance artist Penny Arcade, among many others.