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.

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Black History in Greenwich Village: Session 3 – Civil Rights, Women’s Suffrage, and the Great Migration 1870 – 1950

Monday, March 4, 2024
6 pm 
Zoom webinar

Free
Pre-registration required

Session 3 of our Black History in Greenwich Village series will focus on how the demographic changes of the Great Migration fueled Greenwich Village’s role as a hotbed for the Civil Rights movement in the early-to-mid 20th century. We’ll continue the discussion of how art and activism intertwined in our neighborhood, especially around Black Americans and civil rights. We’ll learn about the work of influential artists and authors who lived in Greenwich Village during the 20th century.

Questions will be considered such as: “Can you imagine a silent protest?” and “Why do you think 6 million people choose to leave their homes, communities, neighborhoods and extended families in the South?”

We’ll be challenged to remember who actually could vote in 1917. The program will take a look at important historic sites and events in our communities, such as the establishment of the headquarters of the NAACP at 70 Fifth Avenue.

NOTE: This program will not be recorded and made available for later viewing.

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Staging America: The Artistic Legacy of the Provincetown Players

Join us for a comprehensive history of the Provincetown Players and their influence on modern American theater.

The Provincetown Players created a revolution in American theater, making room for truly modern approaches to playwriting, stage production, and performance unlike anything that characterized the commercial theater of the early 20th century. This study draws on many new sources that have only become available in the last three decades; this new material modifies, refutes, and enhances many aspects of previous studies.

At its center of the study is an extensive account of the career of George Cram Cook, the Players’ leader and artistic conscience, as well as one of the most significant facilitators of modernist writing in early 20th-century American literature and theater. It traces Cook’s mission of “cultural patriotism,” which drove him toward creating a uniquely American identity in theater.

Special attention is paid to the many legends connected to the group (such as the “discovery” of Eugene O’Neill), and adds to the biographical record of the Players’ 47 playwrights, including Susan Glaspell, Neith Boyce, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Floyd Dell, Rita Wellman, Mike Gold, Djuna Barnes, and John Reed. The fascinating artistic, literary, and historical personalities who crossed the Players’ paths — including Emma Goldman, Charles Demuth, Berenice Abbott, Sophie Treadwell, Theodore Dreiser, Claudette Colbert, and Charlie Chaplin — are also explored. This book highlights the revolutionary nature of those living in bohemian Greenwich Village who were at the heart of the Players and the America they were responding to in their plays.

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The Peculiar Story of Doesticks and the Fortunetellers

Co-sponsored by the Salmagundi Club Library Committee, Merchant’s House Museum, and Victorian Society of New York. 

Meet Q.K. Philander Doesticks, P.B.. (real name: Mortimer Thomson), a reporter for The New-York Tribune, who in 1857 investigated the fortune tellers of the Lower East Side, and eventually wrote a book about them titled The Witches of New York. When his articles were published in book form in 1858, they catalyzed a series of arrests that both scandalized and delighted the public. But Mortimer was guarding some secrets of his own, and in many ways his own life paralleled the lives of the women he both visited and vilified. This talk, in celebration of the release of Marie Carter’s book Mortimer & the Witches: A Nineteenth-Century History of Fortune Telling from Fordham University Press, leads us into the world of Doesticks who hobnobbed with literary luminaries of his time including Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, the wildly popular columnist Fanny Fern, and biographer James Parton. It will also examine some of the stories of those supposedly “evil” fortune tellers who showed up in the press in surprising ways.

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Black History in Greenwich Village: Session 4 – Evolution of Arts, Culture, Activism and The Fight for Civil Rights 1950 – 2020

Monday, March 11, 2024
6 pm 
Zoom webinar

Free
Pre-registration required

In this final session of Village Preservation’s series, Black History in Greenwich Village, we will travel from the mid-20th century to the present. The program will begin with a summary of the people, places, protests, and laws that have shaped and influenced Black history in Greenwich Village between 1954 and 1965 — a key period in the American civil rights movement between the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling and the passage of the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts. From street activism to revolutionary performance spaces, the lives and work of Black Americans in Greenwich Village will be celebrated and shared, giving even greater context to the impact of Black Americans on our communities and society. Examples include Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King’s right hand and the organizer of the watershed 1963 March on Washington, who began his life as an activist after being exposed to the radically integrated and politically charged environment at legendary Village club Cafe Society.

We’ll look at how events and locations in Greenwich Village helped to keep a spotlight on civil rights and the great societal strides made in America thanks to Black Americans who lived, worked, and created art here.

NOTE: This program will not be recorded and made available for later viewing.

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Patchin Place: History and Literary Connections

From 1924 to 1931, the British novelist John Cowper Powys lived with his partner Phyllis Playter on Patchin Place in Greenwich Village. He made a living by giving paid public lectures on literature to large audiences in all but two states of the U.S. from 1904, when he was 32 years old; the schedule was exhausting. Once established in a tiny apartment in No. 4 Patchin Place, he embarked on writing his first major novel, Wolf Solent. How has this little street he lived on survived almost unchanged, from the 1840s to the present day in a city like New York, and how did living there impact Powys?

Among the low-rent boarding houses were home to very many writers, including long-term residents such as poet E. E. Cummings (from 1924 to 1962) and novelist Djuna Barnes (1940 to 1982), and short-term occupants including the political activist and writer John Reed (not long before his death in 1920). Several other major writers had connections with residents of Patchin Place, including Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), Theodore Dreiser, and Ezra Pound. They have bequeathed to us vivid descriptions of what life was like for the little street’s residents, particularly during the 1920s and 1930s when Greenwich Village was at the heart of the modernist movement in literature.

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Sass in the City: New York Women of Wit in the Twentieth Century

Seen as too smart, too sassy, too sexy, and too strident, female humorists have been resisted and overlooked. This talk will look at the pioneering women of wit who emerged in New York City during the interwar period and the ways in which they used irony, satire, and wit as an indirect form of social protest. Many of these writers stood on the periphery of largely male New York intellectual circles, which gave them a perspective allowing them to critique the worlds to which they partially belonged. These include Edna St. Vincent Millay among the Greenwich Village set, who wrote satiric sketches under the pseudonym Nancy Boyd; Tess Slesinger of the Menorah Journal group; Dorothy Parker of the Algonquin wits; Jessie Redmon Fauset among the Harlem Renaissance writers; Dawn Powell of the Lafayette Circle in Greenwich Village; and Mary McCarthy of the Partisan Review crowd.

These women writers developed a more urban and urbane form of humor that reflects the increasingly cosmopolitan and sophisticated time and place in which they lived. The advent of modernism, the women’s suffrage movement, the emergence of the New Woman and the New Negro Woman, and the growth of urban centers like New York City in the 1920s and ’30s gave rise to a new voice of women’s humor that challenged traditional gender roles. These foremothers of women’s humor set the stage for more overtly feminist humorists of today, who have turned the labels of bright, bold, and bitchy from a stigma into a rallying cry for future generations.

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Jane Jacobs: Champion of Cities, Champion of People

The presentation is open to all ages with an emphasis on accessibility for young people (ages 12-18) and their educators.

Jane Jacobs was born more than a hundred years ago, yet the ideas she popularized — about cities, about people, about creating a more equitable world — remain hugely relevant today. Debut author Rebecca Pitts paints a vivid picture of a headstrong and principled young girl who committed her life to building cities made for, and by, the people who live in them. Refusing the conventional wisdom of the time, Jacobs championed diversity, community, grassroots organizing, and “the life of the street” — and she never backed down, even when it meant going up against the most powerful man in New York, Robert Moses. This is a story about standing up for what you know is right, including a playbook full of real-world takeaways for young activists.

Join us for a presentation and Q&A as Rebecca discusses her book for young readers, published by Seven Stories Press. Jane Jacobs: Champion of Cities, Champion of People was shortlisted for the Goddard Riverside CBC Youth Book Prize for Social Justice and earned a starred review from the American Library Association’s review magazine Booklist.

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Our speaker A.G. Norton has toured her slideshow about Berenice Abbott internationally. Based on extensive research carried out on Abbott’s life on Commerce Street and the surrounding artistic community, this slideshow and lecture is infused by storytelling from her grandfather’s time with the photographer.

Norton relates the chance discovery of an old box of family photos, the winding path of learning and catharsis it led her down, and the seminal role played by teacher and friend Berenice Abbott.