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Author: Ariel Kates

Oral History: Ayo Harrington’s East Village

Village Preservation shares our oral history collection with the public, highlighting some of the people and stories that make Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo such unique and vibrant neighborhoods. Each includes the experiences and insights of leaders or long-time participants in the arts, culture, preservation, business, or civic life. Ayo Harrington has been […]

Oral History Highlight: Colette Smith Douglas

Village Preservation shares our oral history collection with the public, highlighting some of the people and stories that make Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo such unique and vibrant neighborhoods. Each includes the experiences and insights of leaders or long-time participants in the arts, culture, preservation, business, or civic life. Colette Smith Douglas, born […]

Image Archive Collection: The High Line in 1979 — Noah Greenberg’s “Manhattan Promenade” Proposal

We recently added a new collection to our historic image archive, Noah Greenberg’s “Manhattan Promenade” Proposal. This collection dates from 1979, and includes shots of what we now know as the High Line, at a unique moment in its history. Scroll down to see a sample of the collection, or click here to see all […]

John Guare Oral History: a Writer of the Theater, and of Greenwich Village

Village Preservation shares our oral history collection with the public, highlighting some of the people and stories that make Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo such unique and vibrant neighborhoods. Each includes the experiences and insights of leaders or long-time participants in the arts, culture, preservation, business, or civic life. John Guare was born […]

German Heritage #SouthOfUnionSquare

The area of Greenwich Village and the East Village south of Union Square, for which Village Preservation has been advocating landmark protections, is the center of an amazing and dynamic collection of histories. Village Preservation’s South of Union Square Map+Tours is an online interactive tool that allows users to journey back in time to explore and […]

Beverly Moss Spatt Oral History: the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s First Woman Chair

Village Preservation shares our oral history collection with the public, highlighting some of the people and stories that make Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo such unique and vibrant neighborhoods. Each includes the experiences and insights of leaders or long-time participants in the arts, culture, preservation, business, or civic life. Beverly Moss Spatt has […]

LGBTQ+ Pride Programs Roundup

The roots of LGBTQ+ life in our neighborhoods are deeper than we even know. In the documentary PS. Burn This Letter Please, which premiered at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival and was presented at one of Village Preservation’s Pride programs, gay historian George Chauncey spoke about using police records and newspaper articles because personal papers […]

2021 Village Awardee: Bon Yagi

It’s that time of year again…time for Village Preservation’s Annual Meeting and Village Awards! The Village Awards recognize and honor some of the businesses, organizations, and institutions that make our neighborhoods such special places, while our Annual Meeting also includes a review of Village Preservation’s activities and accomplishments over the past year. This year’s event […]

Samuel F.B. Morse: A Brilliant Artist and Inventor With A Complicated, Troubling Legacy

Samuel Finley Breese Morse was an artist, inventor, and would-be-politician. While there was much to admire about his legacy and accomplishments, there was also much to condemn and deplore. Reading his biography, one might think (or even wish) that there were actually several different Morses. One was an inventor who helped bring telegraph technology and […]

Delving into the Past & Future of the Greenwich Village Historic District

The Greenwich Village Historic District, which was designated (landmarked) on April 29, 1969, holds some of the loveliest bits of Greenwich Village within its bounds — from Washington Square to Abingdon Square, from the New School to the New York Studio School. Historic houses of worship and historic houses, key sites of immigrant, LGBTQ, African-American […]

“Amended,” a Podcast Going Deeper on Women’s History

There are many important takeaways from Village Preservation’s 19th Amendment Centennial StoryMap; there are a remarkable number of people and places in Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo who played key roles in the women’s suffrage movement. That these neighborhoods were long centers of political ferment and progressive social change, and people here played […]

Ada Louise Huxtable and More Than A Century of Preservation, Architecture, and Liveable Cities

Ada Louise Huxtable (March 14, 1921 – January 7, 2013) loved architecture, New York and its neighborhoods, preservation, and the gifts to society that built environments shape. It is this love, and her incredible skill as a writer, that earned Huxtable her job at the New York Times as the first-ever architecture critic, her reputation, […]

A Village Song: “Bazooka Joe Don’t Live There Anymore”

The singer-songwriter Gone Marshall recently celebrated a bit of vintage Greenwich Village which might be familiar to you, over on the corner of MacDougal and Houston Street. If you’re thinking fondly of some of the old-school neighborhood heroes, you might find meaning in the new song, “Bazooka Joe Don’t Live There Anymore.” Marshall, known for a […]

Michael E. Levine Oral History: How the Greenwich Village Historic District, SoHo, and Stonewall Happened

Village Preservation shares our oral history collection with the public, highlighting some of the people and stories that make Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo such unique and vibrant neighborhoods. Each includes the experiences and insights of leaders or long-time participants in the arts, culture, preservation, business, or civic life. Michael E. Levine is […]

2020 Village Preservation Public Programs Roundup

Despite all the challenges of the year, Village Preservation proudly hosted 76 programs (most of which were virtual), reaching over 9,000 people in 2020. How does one choose favorites? It’s nearly impossible, especially given that each program represents, at minimum, someone’s research, passion, skill, life’s work, book, or all of the above. So, in wrap-up […]

Small Business Roundtable: Support, Protect, and Shop!

Small businesses have been on everyone’s mind, and it’s no secret that Village Preservation is working hard to support our local small businesses — from our Small Business/Big History campaign, to our work supporting the ‘Save Our Storefronts’ Legislation for Small Business Relief, to our ongoing Businesses of the Month program, and much more.  Recently, […]

La MaMa’s Archive of Experimental Theater

For more than half a century, La MaMa E.T.C. has brought amazing off-off-Broadway theater to the East Village. 74 East Fourth Street, designated a New York City landmark on November 17, 2009, was built in 1873 for the Aschenbrödel Verein (“Cinderella Society”), a musicians’ club formed in Kleindeutschland in 1860. In 1969, it became Ellen […]

Margaret Woodrow Wilson: First Lady, Suffragist, and Village Socialite

A remarkable number of people and places in Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo played important roles in the move towards women’s suffrage. These neighborhoods were long centers of political ferment and progressive social change, and women and men here played a prominent part in removing barriers to women voting in New York State […]

Archive Exploration Made Easy On Our New Website

Archiving is one of the many ways that Village Preservation ensures the preservation of our neighborhoods. By keeping records and files of images, stories, and the processes of preservation since neighborhood residents first came together to advocate for their neighborhoods, we keep Village histories alive. We have always made these archives accessible for anyone who […]

New Historic Images Added to Archive From Landmarks Applications –Ninth Avenue El demo, and Pre-PS 41

We’ve just added over a dozen wonderful new images to our historic image archive culled from recent landmarks applications in our neighborhoods. Some highlights include the old Ninth Avenue Elevated being torn down in 1940, and an 1898 image showing wooden houses at the corner of Sixth Avenue and 11th Street (with its own Elevated […]

Sign Up Now For Fall Continuing Education Classes

Village Preservation’s highly acclaimed continuing education classes are available online this Fall!   Sign up now to reserve a spot: whether you’re a real estate professional seeking required NYS continuing education credit, or you’re just a history lover who wants to learn more about preservation, planning, and development in our city, with a special focus on […]

New Podcast for LGBT History Month

October is LGBT History Month, and we’ve got a great new episode of our Off the Grid podcast on our Soundcloud page to help celebrate. Explore some of the many great historic sites of our neighborhood connected to LGBT history from the East Village to the West Village, the South Village to NoHo, including civil […]

    The Legacy of Italian-American Entertainment Venues in the South Village

    In 2007, Village Preservation published “The Italians of the South Village” by Mary Elizabeth Brown, Ph.D. The report is exhaustive and highlights buildings, people, and dynamic histories of a long-storied community in an historic neighborhood. The report opens with a map of Italian-American Sites in the South Village, which lists 45 sites in this relatively […]

    The Pathfinder Mural: Public Political Art in the Far West Village

    “The pathfinder mural is a historic political and artistic landmark now nearing completion on a six-story wall of Pathfinder publishing house in New York’s Greenwich Village. The centerpiece of the mural is a giant printing press churning out sheets of paper and books adorned with the portraits of outstanding working class and revolutionary leaders whose […]

    Cemeteries of Greenwich Village, Part II

    Archeologist Elizabeth D. Meade, PhD has created an amazing map of the hundreds of cemeteries and burial grounds, past and present, in NYC. Over 35 such sites can be found in Greenwich Village, the East Village, and Noho, although according to the map, none are still active. Dr. Meade created this map because “Cemeteries are […]

    Rose Schneiderman: Making History at the Intersection of Labor and Women’s Suffrage

    A remarkable number of people and places in Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo played important roles in the move towards women’s suffrage. These neighborhoods were long centers of political ferment and progressive social change, and women and men here played a prominent part in removing barriers to women voting in New York State […]

    Sarah Smith Garnet: Suffragist, Principal, Villager

    In the late 1880s, Brooklyn-born Sarah Smith Garnet helped found the Equal Suffrage League, a Brooklyn-based club for Black women, which worked with the Niagara Movement, a predecessor to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP.). She also served as superintendent of the Suffrage Department of the National Association of Colored Women. […]

    Elvis is in the building: July 2, 1956

    Greenwich Village and the East Village have launched many a musical career over the decades. But perhaps one of the least known examples of the neighborhoods as musical launching pad involves one of the most famous names in music. Elvis Presley, “the King of Rock and Roll,” or simply “The King,” has been known and […]

    Support Our Mid-Year Appeal

    Ten years ago today, we secured landmark designation of 235 buildings on 12 blocks in Greenwich Village, the largest expansion of the Greenwich Village Historic District in its history. It included streets and structures many would consider the heart of our neighborhood, yet lacked protections and were endangered by developers and institutions like NYU. This […]

    The Animal Rights Movement’s Origins (and still-visible legacy) in Greenwich Village

    On the 19th of April in 1860, the New York state legislature passed a bill punishing an act, or omission of an act, that caused pain to animals “unjustifiably.” It was a historic step forward in the nineteenth-century movement toward animal protection. Just a few days before the New York legislature passed the animal-welfare act […]

    2020 Village Awardee: Ray’s Candy Store, 113 Avenue A

    Each year, Village Preservation honors the invaluable people, businesses, and organizations that make a special contribution to our neighborhoods at our Annual Meeting and Village Awards. On June 17th, 2020 we will be celebrating nine outstanding awardees at our— RSVP here to participate virtually. Have you ever meandered into the bright little shop at 113 Avenue […]

    Why Isn’t This Landmarked: 4 & 6 East 12th Street

    Part of our blog series Why Isn’t This Landmarked?, where we look at buildings in our area we’re fighting to protect that are worthy of landmark designation, but somehow aren’t landmarked. Nos. 4 and 6 East 12th Street are a pair of largely intact 4-story and basement ca. 1846 Greek Revival houses located just east […]

    The Greenwich Village Historic District’s Historic Birthday! 

    Who doesn’t like an opportunity to celebrate? The Greenwich Village Historic District, which was designated (landmarked) on April 29, 1969, holds some of the loveliest bits of Greenwich Village within its bounds — from Washington Square to Abingdon Square, from the New School to the New York Studio School. Historic houses of worship and historic […]

    The Birth of The Committee to Save the West Village, Led By Jane Jacobs

    The battle between Village preservation icon Jane Jacobs and Robert “put a highway through every park” Moses is quite storied and well-documented.  But for us, understanding it and preserving its memory — including how decisions were made, tactics used, plans that were formulated and scrapped — has special meaning, and important lessons that should not […]

    Looking Back On Our Civil Rights and Social Justice Map

    Village Preservation’s Civil Rights and Social Justice Map was launched on January 3, 2017. This online resource, which marks sites in our neighborhoods significant to the history of various civil rights and social justice movements, includes over 200 locations. We’re proud that the map has been viewed by over 100,000 people in its three short […]

    Penny Arcade’s Village Preservation Oral History – Chronicles of the Queen of Downtown

    GVSHP shares our oral history collection with the public, highlighting some of the people and stories that make Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo such unique and vibrant neighborhoods. Each includes the experiences and insights of leaders or long-time participants in the arts, culture, preservation, business, or civic life. “Hi, my name is Susana […]

    Why Isn’t This Landmarked?: the Joseph J. Little Building on 28 East 14th Street

    Part of our blog series Why Isn’t This Landmarked?, where we look at buildings in our area we’re fighting to protect that are worthy of landmark designation, but somehow aren’t landmarked. Where do the piano industry and radical workers’ rights movements intersect? The gorgeous historic cast-iron building at 28 East 14th Street is one such […]

    A Rebuilt Corner, a Carpenter House, and an Art Deco Beauty: New Additions to Our Greenwich Village Historic District Map

    This is one in a series of posts marking the 50th anniversary of the designation of the Greenwich Village Historic District. Click here to check out our year-long activities and celebrations. On April 29th, 2019, we launched our new interactive map, Greenwich Village Historic District, 1969-2019: Photos and Tours, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of […]

    Romany Marie’s, Feeding and Defining Village Bohemianism

    That village, the labyrinth of streets and lanes… into which those restless individuals seeking political or social or cultural change began settling after 1910 consisted mostly of buildings grown dingy since prosperous New Yorkers had begun moving northward…Marie was one of those newcomers. — Robert Schulman from Romany Marie, Queen of Greenwich Village Born and […]

    How Greenwich Village and the East Village Launched the 19th Century Hebrew Free School Movement

    Nineteenth-century Jewish immigrant life in New York is well-documented, when massive waves of Jews, first from Germany and then from Eastern Europe, began to flood into the city.  This made New York the largest Jewish city by population in the world, which it remains to this day.  Like all immigrant stories, the Jewish community had […]

    The Attica Prison Riots and the Village

    The Attica Prison Riots, which took place September 9th through 13th, 1971, rocked the entire country. The bloodiest prison disturbance in recent American history, the riot was unplanned but ignited at a time of deep unrest among the prison population. The prisoners spent the four days of the riot/uprising in negotiations for better conditions, dignity, […]

    Kahlil Gibran: An Immigrant Artist on 10th Street

    Both the reach and the origins of those who have called the Greenwich Village Historic District home have always been international in scope; Kahlil Gibran is a prime example of that broad reach. Born on January 6, 1883, in Lebanon, which at the time was part of Ottoman Syria, educated in Beirut, Boston, and Paris, […]

    Amelia Earhart: Aviatrix, Feminist Fashionista, Villager

    This is one in a series of posts marking the 50th anniversary of the designation of the Greenwich Village Historic District. Click here to check out our year-long activities and celebrations. Aviatrix Amelia Earhart is a household name for shattering a record-breaking 18,415-foot glass ceiling in her airplane.  Almost as famous is her mysterious disappearance […]

    Jewish History of the Greenwich Village Historic District

    This is one in a series of posts marking the 50th anniversary of the designation of the Greenwich Village Historic District.  Check out our year-long activities and celebrations at gvshp.org/GVHD50.  With neighborhoods like the Lower East Side and Upper West Side in close proximity, Greenwich Village, and more specifically the Greenwich Village Historic District, is not one of the […]

    A little FUN Gallery with Patti Astor

    “A long time ago in the 1960s, a young white girl from Ohio committed herself to being a revolutionary,” begins a short feature documentary about Patti Astor and her FUN Gallery (see within). FUN Gallery opened originally in the tiny basement storefront at 229 East 11th Street in 1981, later moving to 254 East 10th […]

      East Village Building Blocks Tour: the LGBTQ East Village

      While the neighboring West Village may have the more well-known sites, the East Village contains a rich assortment of places connected to LGBTQ history, including the homes of noted artists, writers, musicians, and activists. It also holds a vast array of performance venues and gathering spaces that attracted and helped launch the careers of many […]

        The Source Unltd, 2019 Village Awardee

        Read blog posts about each of our 2019 Village Awardees. Santo and Margaret Mollica told our friends at Manhattan Sideways the unusual origin story of their small business, The Source, which reflects much about why it is anything but your average local business. It involved a psychedelic church, the fire department, and a case of mistaken identity. Santo […]

        East Village Building Blocks Tour: Synagogues

        If you’re walking around the East Village, you’re likely standing on (or near) holy ground. To illustrate this, we’ve created a tour of current and former synagogues in the neighborhood. This incredibly rich, multi-layered community was home to some remarkably beautiful houses of worship with stained glass, turrets, and more still visible. While many of […]

        Hettie Jones, 2019 Village Awardee

        Hettie Jones is a talented writer, a loving mother and grandmother, a forceful activist, a nurturing teacher, and a friendly neighbor and preservationist. She is the stuff neighborhood dreams are made of. Showing no signs of slowing down at 85, she is easily one of the earth mothers of our community – and we’re thrilled […]

        GVHD50 and Stonewall50 – LGBTQ Sites of the Greenwich Village Historic District

        This is one in a series of posts marking the 50th anniversary of the designation of the Greenwich Village Historic District. Click here to check out our year-long activities and celebrations. Rounding up each person, place, and moment in the Greenwich Village Historic District’s LGBTQ history would take longer than it does to line up […]

        Merce Cunningham’s Centennial: Leaping into 100

        Villager, dancer, and choreographer Merce Cunningham is an artist whose work continues to live vibrantly in 2019, which marks Cunningham’s centennial. The Merce Cunningham Centennial is celebrating a century of artistic expression through events, presentations, and discussions about Merce, dance, and his influence on culture. This Village Preservation Oral History participant will continue to be […]

        Great Writers and the Greenwich Village Historic District

        This is one in a series of posts marking the 50th anniversary of the designation of the Greenwich Village Historic District.  Check out our year-long activities and celebrations at gvshp.org/GVHD50.  The Greenwich Village Historic District has been home, over the years, to countless writers, authors, poets and other literati. Known as an area for artists, the writers […]

          Chaim Gross on LaGuardia Place, and “The Family” on Bleecker

          When the days are finally seeming longer than they used to be, the beautiful details of the Village begin to reveal themselves in new ways. Today, I’m thinking about public art, and a special spot in the Greenwich Village Historic District. Bleecker Street Park is a place to chat on the phone, eat a cupcake […]

          Emma Goldman, Birth Control Crusader, Arrested

          Emma Goldman, anarchist and feminist, advocate of free speech, free love, birth control, and the eight-hour workday, was arrested in New York City on February 11, 1916. Charged with violating the Comstock Act, an 1873 law banning the transportation of “obscene” matter, the courts interpreted distribution as transportation. Goldman later spent time in jail for […]

          An Intersectional Black History Month Roundup

          Black History is Village history, and while many are celebrating Black Futures Month, as a historic preservation organization, we’re glad to amplify a history that often goes unnoticed in the Village. These histories live in the context of the other movements that have their roots in our neighborhoods. So many of these stories are intersectional, […]

          La Vie en Rose: Meet Villager Rose Hartman

          Villager and photographer Rose Hartman has, since the 1970s, been known for her candid portraits of the world’s celebrities and non-celebrities as they pass through New York City. Ms. Hartman, who’s lived on Charles Street in the West Village, is a former high school teacher who took the leap into photography in her thirties. Hartman’s photography […]

          If Beale Street Could Talk’s West Village Scenes

          If Beale Street Could Talk is the newest release from award-winning filmmaker Barry Jenkins. The film is Jenkins’s adaptation of a novella by James Baldwin of the same name. The story, based in 1970s New York City, is about mother-and-wife-to-be Tish, who vividly recalls the passion, respect and trust that have connected her and her […]

          Viewers Choice: Top 5 Village Preservation Program Videos of 2018

          Each year, Village Preservation hosts more than sixty public programs. They cover our neighborhoods from the western edge of Greenwich Village to the easternmost reaches of the East Village.  Topics cover a diverse range of areas including rock and roll, restoring artists’ studios, terracotta mosaics in the subways, street photography, women’s poetry, and so much […]

          “London Calling:” The Clash and the Village

          If you were to ask me to name a truly perfect album, it would take a very quick punk-rock-beat to say “London Calling!” Released on December 14, 1979, this iconic album has been called the first post-punk album; “merry and tough, passionate and large-spirited” by one reviewer; and one of the five greatest albums by […]

          World War I Centennial and the Village

          November 11, 2018 marks the 100th anniversary of the Armistice which ended World War I, a war that engulfed most of Europe since 1914. United States troops tipped the balance toward Allied victory, placing the United States on the world stage in a new way. The war came at a great cost, though. WWI claimed […]

          “An Intimate and Unconventional Space:” Caffe Cino

          Caffe Cino at 31 Cornelia Street was a community, a haven, the birthplace of countless theatrical careers and movements, and the origin of off-off-Broadway theater. In November 2017, Caffe Cino was added to the National Register of Historic Places, which is a great symbolic honor for the Caffe, which opened in 1958 and closed its […]

            Woody Guthrie’s New York Comes Alive

            Folk music icon Woody Guthrie was a little man with beady eyes – as described by his second wife Marjorie, though she had imagined him to be taller, strapping, and more like a proper cowboy than he was. Perhaps it was because of his Dust Bowl Ballads, his first album, chronicling his travels from Dust […]

              One Track Mind: Drawing the New York Subway

              The New York City subway system is messy, crowded, unreliable, full of musicians, and generally teeming with folks who will bowl you over if you’re not careful. It’s also full of art. Graffiti and advertisements, yes, but that’s not the kind of art we’re talking about. The stations themselves were built with art. The tiles may be […]

              No One Had Ever Heard a Howl Like That Before

              The Beat poets, inextricably linked with the Village and East Village, materialized in the post-WWII American of white picket fences to celebrate all things messy, countercultural, drug-addled, disenfranchised, and unstoppably vital. East Villager Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” was an anthem of this movement, with its power, breathlessness, and breadth of content. And on October 7, 1955, Ginsberg […]

              Villager David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake At Night at the Whitney Museum

              GVSHP took a trip to the Whitney Museum’s exhibition called “David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night,” and learned about this incredible Villager, artist, poet, and activist.  His work from the 1990s, before his death of complications from AIDS, agitated for change and strove for visibility, supporting and nurturing a community of artists through hard […]

                Top Five Greenwich Village Moments in Fourteenth Amendment History

                The Fourteenth Amendment, adopted on July 28, 1868, played an important role in setting legal precedents for equality after the Civil War. The most radically worded of the Reconstruction Amendments, it was intended by its post–Civil War Radical Republican sponsors to stop the efforts by the former Confederate states to nullify emancipation. Its language promotes “liberty” […]

                A Decision By the State Was An Important Milestone in Preserving Gansevoort Market

                There were many moments to celebrate along the arc of fighting for the protection of the Gansevoort Historic District, also known as the Meatpacking District. One such milestone took place on July 17, 2002, when the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation determined, in response to an application by GVSHP, that […]