The Iconic Women of One Greenwich Village Block
Our neighborhood is packed with rich histories of trailblazing women who worked, lived, and organized within its streets.
Within just one small block in Greenwich Village, consisting of West Washington Place and Sheridan Square between 6th and 7th Avenues, there are multiple sites that have deep connections to Women’s History. On Village Preservation’s Greenwich Village Women’s History Walking Tour, we explored the incredible history of this slice of our neighborhood.
Let’s take a peek at this history, and highlight four incredible women who frequented Sheridan Square and Washington Place during their lifetimes.
Cafe Society – 1 Sheridan Square (Billie Holiday)
Café Society, the first racially integrated nightclub in New York City, was a groundbreaking institution located at 1 Sheridan Square from 1938 to 1949. The radically progressive club was made possible due to the vision of its founder and owner, Barney Josephson, a former shoe salesman. Josephson’s inspiration for Cafe Society came from the political European cabarets he’d visited. He wanted to reflect the Bohemian traditions, unconventional social habits, and free spirit of the Greenwich Village neighborhood.
Josephson also pictured his cabaret as a place for political exchange and Communist meetings. He maintained a politically leftist house policy in his club and was committed to challenging both racism and sexism.
Throughout its existence, Café Society welcomed some of the biggest talents in jazz history to its stage, including Josh White, Ida James, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Count Basie, Nat King Cole, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, Big Joe Turner, Nellie Lutcher, and Mary Lou Williams. Additionally, many of the most influential African American intellectuals of the time, including Walter White, Ralph Bunche, Richard Wright, E. Franklin Frazier, Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, and Paul Robeson frequented the club.
It was at Café Society that “Strange Fruit” was first performed by legendary jazz singer Billie Holiday. “Strange Fruit” was the first song of its kind—an explicit song of protest against racism, lynching, and a government that refused to pass anti-lynching laws. It became incredibly popular, even allowing Café Society to begin to advertise itself and the song — an indication of the power and influence of “Strange Fruit.”
While Café Society was only open for a little over a decade, its radical politics had an enormous impact, and its legacy lived on long after its doors closed in 1949.
121 Washington Place (Frances Perkins)
Frances Perkins, the first female U.S. Cabinet member and Secretary of Labor, lived at 121 Washington Place in the 1910s.
Perkins was born in Boston, MA in 1880, and attended Mount Holyoke College, majoring in chemistry and physics. She then moved to Chicago, where she worked as a teacher and began volunteering in settlement houses, before briefly moving to Philadelphia and then finally arriving in New York City to complete a fellowship on survey-making methods and pursue a master’s degree at Columbia.
After first living in Hartley House, a settlement house in Hell’s Kitchen within her fellowship study area, Perkins moved to Greenwich House, calling it “the very heart of both the theoretical and practical efforts to socialize the life of the modern city.” In New York, Perkins began advocating for women’s labor rights and lobbied for a state bill to limit women’s work hours to a fifty-four-hour week.
By January 1911, she had caught the attention of President Theodore Roosevelt. Responding to her invitation to attend a League meeting in New York, he provided a letter she could circulate outlining his support for laws of the kind she was advocating.
On March 25, 1911, Perkins happened to be around the corner from the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. As she saw the tragedy unfold, her resolve to improve working conditions for women strengthened immensely.
Determined to promote political change, she began cultivating relationships with the powerful Tammany Hall political machine. She gained more attention for her accomplishments and work ethic, and by 1912 was recommended by Theodore Roosevelt to become the Executive Secretary for the Committee on Safety in the City of New York. Here, Perkins continued to push for legislation that would make factories safer for workers, limit the number of hours women could work, and secure a minimum wage.
When Theodore Roosevelt’s distant cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt ascended to the presidency in 1933, he brought Perkins with him, announcing her appointment as the Secretary of the Department of Labor on February 28, 1933, and making her the first woman in the presidential cabinet.
115 Washington Place (Crystal Eastman)
Co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Women’s International League for Peace and Justice, Crystal Eastman fought for the legal rights of women, laborers, conscientious objectors, and more. She lived at 115 Washington Place in 1916.
Eastman was born in 1881 to parents who were both church ministers in Elmira, New York. Throughout her life, Eastman was a persistent advocate for women’s rights. Her 1910 report ‘Work Accidents and the Law” resulted in the first workers’ compensation law, which she drafted herself.
She was active in the National American Woman Suffrage Association’s Congressional Committee and helped found the Congressional Union. Eastman also co-founded the National Woman’s Party with Alice Paul and Lucy Burns and spoke at the 1916 convention establishing the party.
A pacifist, during the First World War she participated in founding the National Women’s Peace Party with Jane Addams and the American Union Against Militarism with Lillian Wald. She was also a member of the Heterodoxy Club, an influential women’s debate group in Greenwich Village.
In 1917, Eastman helped found the National Civil Liberties Bureau, which would become the ACLU, to protect dissenting speech during World War I. That same year she created The Liberator, a radical journal of politics, art, and literature, with her younger brother Max, a founder of the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage. The Liberator, which was blacklisted during the Red Scare, was based at 138 West 13th Street.
Eastman died on July 8, 1928, and has since been called one of the most neglected leaders in United States history.
371 6th Avenue (Dorothy Day)
The Church of St. Joseph, on the corner of Washington Place and 6th Avenue, was founded in 1829 to serve the growing community of Greenwich Village.
Dorothy Day, former St. Joseph’s parishioner, made history as a radical social activist. She co-founded The Catholic Worker, a newspaper that promoted Catholic teaching and spawned the Catholic Worker Movement.
Day was born in Brooklyn Heights in 1897, to a relatively non-religious family. After many years of travel throughout the United States, she settled on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1916 at 18. She quickly found work writing for several Socialist magazines including The Liberator, The Masses, and The Call.
In November of 1917, she was arrested in Washington, DC where she was picketing the White House on behalf of women’s suffrage. She was also jailed at the Greenwich Village Women’s House of Detention at one point.
In her early days in the Village, Day began making daily stops at St. Joseph’s Church at 371 Sixth Avenue for early morning Mass. She was more than likely to have been at the 5 am service to relax and recover after a night out, but as it turns out, the seeds of Day’s eventual conversion to Catholicism were planted at this time. Giving birth to a daughter in 1926 was a true turning point in Day’s life. She took up the Catholic faith and shortly thereafter converted fully to Catholicism.
Day soon began the Catholic Worker, with French immigrant & former Christian Brother Peter Maurin. It was a radical magazine that was intended to make Catholic writing and thought on social justice accessible to a broader audience; in time, it would grow to become much more than a publication—it would serve as the center of gravity for an entire left-wing Catholic movement.
To learn more about the trailblazing women of our neighborhoods, check out our Women’s Suffrage History Map