Did you know that Village Preservation members receive advance notice of many of our public programs? Our tours and other programs sometimes offer limited seating or spaces. By becoming a member, you can take advantage of that advanced notice and register before the general public. Find out how to become a member here.

For videos, details, and other media from our past programs, click here. 

New! July 2024 Programs

Broken City: Land Speculation, Inequality, and Urban Crisis

Join us as Patrick Condon discusses his new book in conversation with Village Preservation Executive Director Andrew Berman

How can urban housing, and the land underneath, now account for half of all global wealth? According to Patrick Condon in Broken City, the simple answer is that land has become an asset rather than a utility. If the rich only indulged themselves with gold, jewels, and art, we wouldn’t have a global housing crisis. But once global capital markets realized land was a good speculative investment, runaway housing costs ensued. In Vancouver, for example, land prices increased by 600% between 2008 and 2016. How much wealth have investors extracted from urban land? In this engaging, readable, and insightful treatise, Condon explains how we have let land, our most durable resource, shift away from the common good and proposes bold strategies for how cities in North America can shift it back.

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Strong Passions : A Scandalous Divorce in Old New York

Co-sponsored by the Salmagundi Club, Coffee House Club, and the Merchant’s House Museum

On a sparkling spring day in 1853, Mary Emmeline Stevens married Peter Remsen Strong at her family’s elegant Bleecker Street townhouse. They were said to be ideally matched — charming, well-educated, deeply in love, and from two of New York’s best families.

A dozen years later, the couple’s supposedly storybook marriage catastrophically collapsed when Mary confessed to Peter that she was having an affair with his brother. Peter sued Mary for divorce for adultery, but not before she accused him of forcing her into an abortion and having his own affair with the abortionist. The abortionist lived on Waverly Place, where Peter was her landlord.

Barbara Weisberg recounts how the divorce trial Strong v. Strong riveted the nation with a shocking glimpse into the private lives of New York’s elite, and raised issues related to women’s rights still in the headlines today. The true tale of a family and country in turmoil at the end of the Civil War, the Strongs’ story — largely set against the backdrop of Greenwich Village — illuminates a world and neighborhood in the process of transformation.

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Greenwich Village Experience Walking Tour

Join Bruce Poli of the Greenwich Village Experience for a two-hour tour of the neighborhood. Explore Greenwich Village as a bastion of civil rights activism. Unlock its mysteries as the American center for artists, writers, and actors, both current and former residents. And experience it as the epicenter of LGBTQIA+ liberation, culture, and history. This immersive tour will take you to neighborhood highlights both famous and little-known, and offer insights into why Greenwich Village is known throughout the world for its transformative social, cultural, and political movements and figures.

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Gateway to the World: The Hudson River and the Golden Age of Ocean Liners 

Today it’s reborn as a beautiful site for recreation after decades of decay, but over a hundred years ago the Hudson River waterfront was the place where New York cemented its place as one of the world’s greatest cities. Cargo, commuters, and international passengers jostled with dock workers, freighters, ferries, railroads, and giant ocean liners. Those ocean liners brought millions of migrants to the country, with thousands settling in Greenwich Village and the East Village. The immigrants traveled not just across the North Atlantic but across multiple borders coordinated by train and steamship over an integrated transportation network built by the shipping companies of the time, which were then some of the largest corporations in the world.

Join Village Preservation Director of Programming William Roka as he explores how the Irish, German, Italian, Jewish, Ukrainian, and Spanish immigrants made it to our neighbors, turning them into microcosms of a country undergoing a dramatic change in the late 19th and early 20th century. 

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Garden Party at the New York Marble Cemetery

Rescheduled from June 20 

Join the Village Preservation’s Brokers Partnership for a garden party in one of the East Village’s hidden treasures: the New York Marble Cemetery. Treat your senses to the beauty, colors, and scents of the garden’s tranquil natural setting. Resplendent with glorious blooms throughout the spring and summer seasons, this venue provides the perfect setting to enjoy wine, cheese, and live music by Bobby Lynn.

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Imagining Greenwich Village in LEGO: The Making of a First-of-its-Kind Building Set

Join us for a conversation with Christopher J. Devine, the creative genius behind Village Preservation’s first-of-its-kind new Greenwich Village Building Set made with genuine LEGO bricks. How does one design a building set to capture America’s most legendary neighborhood? How do you recreate in miniature buildings and signage recognized throughout the world? How do you choose what to include and how to represent it, and turn that vision into a real life model ready for production and sale?

Christopher is the man to show us the answer to all those questions.  The creative director of Peacham, a creative agency dedicated to making history fun and cool he founded in 2023, Christopher was previously the Marketing Director at The Brooklyn Studio, an architecture firm committed to restoring and enhancing New York City’s historic fabric. He also spent seven years working for Danish audio brand Bang & Olufsen, where he managed brand marketing and public relations for the North American markets. Now he’s designing products and communications strategies that transform otherwise esoteric topics into exciting, relatable concerns. 

Christopher will walk us through how the project came about, and the year-long process of designing the very much in-demand set. He’ll give behind-the-scenes glimpses into how the bricks were sourced, design details on signage for Village Cigars and the Stonewall Inn were meticulously created, and how the histories behind the buildings included in the set were brought to life in the images and text that accompany it. Village Preservation Executive Director Andrew Berman will join Christopher to reveal how a project like this is realized, the hurdles it has to overcome, and the fun behind making it all work.

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“We Started a Nightclub”: The Birth of the Pyramid Cocktail Lounge as Told by Those Who Lived It

Book talk with Susan Martin and Kestutis Nakas in conversation with Yael Friedman.

​​​​​Unlike the mega-clubs of the era, like Area or Palladium, the Pyramid Cocktail Lounge was a dive. Located at 101 Avenue A, the Pyramid offered a mixture of cultures: from groundbreaking, irreverent theater and experimental music to “anti-drag” that challenged the norms of gender binaries and stereotypes. It began in 1981 when the East Village was considered a dangerous no-man’s-land. Rents were cheap, AIDS was still unknown, and a new generation of creators broke the mold and went on to make art in an atmosphere of unbridled celebration.

​​​​​​“We Started a Nightclub”: The Birth of the Pyramid Cocktail Lounge as Told by Those Who Lived It is a narrative and oral history comprising more than 75 interviews with performers and bar boys, doormen and DJs, it covers the early years of the Pyramid from the time of its founding in 1981 through its rise, near demise, and rebirth. Excerpts of more than 50 Pyramid press releases in the club’s signature satirical tone document the hundreds of acts who performed there.

​​​​​​Though the venue was no longer the hotspot of its early years, its closure prompted an outpouring of reminiscence and mourning for a bygone era, amid a broad renewed interest in the art and culture of 1980s New York. “We Started a Nightclub” is an insider’s look at the cultural history of the East Village in the early 1980s. The project, which began in 2006, represents the only in-depth exploration of the Pyramid’s origins.

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Spaces Still Available for June Programs

Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies

Join us as Stan Mack discusses his new hilarious new book Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies: The Collected Conceits, Delusions, and Hijinks of New Yorkers from 1974 to 1995. 

From 1974 to 1995, New Yorkers starred in their own comic strip in the weekly pages of the city’s trailblazing alternative newsweekly, The Village Voice. Stan Mack’s “Real Life Funnies” chronicled the every day, the extraordinary, and the downright outlandish lives of New Yorkers, capturing their sardonic humor, sexual shenanigans, and exotic obsessions. Every story was told entirely in the subjects’ own words. And New Yorkers ate it up.

For the first time, a significant collection of those comic strips has been included in one volume, Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies. With a foreword by Jake Tapper and afterword by Jeannette Walls, this collection will be treasured not only by the strip’s devoted followers and comics fans, but everyone fascinated by this revolutionary period in the life of the World’s Greatest City.

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Oscar Wilde in New York 1882: The Art of Celebrity

Co-sponsored by the Salmagundi Club

Oscar Wilde first set foot in New York on January 3, 1882. He had come to begin a lecture tour that was not only to change the public’s perception of him, but create it as well. Oscar Wilde became the master of his own celebrity and his time in New York at this particular moment set it all in motion. In this illustrated talk, Carl Raymond, host of The Gilded Gentleman history podcast, will delve in to just how Wilde reacted to New York nearing the height of the Gilded Age, but also how New York reacted to him. Much of his time in the city was spent on the fringes of the Village around Union Square and Fifth Avenue and Broadway leading up to Madison Square. Carl will discuss the people and places Oscar encountered during his time at the beginning of his tour including one unique and legendary meeting that perhaps changed it all. 

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Walt Whitman and Pfaff’s

We’ll be joined by NYU professor and Whitman scholar Karen Karbiener as she delves into the impact that Pfaff’s, the first underground Bohemian club in America, had on the life and writings of Walt Whitman. 

More information available soon!