Our jam-packed June program calendar just got a little busier, as we’ve added a new children and family program, and opened registration for our previously announced June 27 Walt Whitman program and June 18 book talk with Patricia Auspos:

Washington Square Park Children and Families Tour

Travel back in time as you join Village Preservation in Washington Square Park for a guided walking tour filled with activities for the whole family. Learn about the original inhabitants of the land and how Washington Square Park was developed. Put on your detective hat and search out clues to help tell the history of the area, concluding with an architectural scavenger hunt at the Washington Square Arch.

These tours will be led by Village Preservation Educator Terri Daly. Terri has taught lessons and led tours as part of Village Preservation’s Children’s Education program since 2021. Prior to this, Terri was the Director of the Mount Vernon Hotel Museum & Garden on East 61st Street, where for 17 years she led and taught the museum’s K-12 education programs on the history of New York City in the 19th century.

---

A Pioneering Dual-Career Marriage: Lucy Sprague Mitchell and Wesley Clair Mitchell

Join us as Patricia Auspos speaks about her new book Breaking Conventions: Five Couples in Search of Marriage-Career Balance at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century and discuss the fascinating lives of the Greenwich Village–based couple Lucy Sprague Mitchell and Wesley Clair Mitchell.

Residents of Greenwich Village from 1913 to 1946, Lucy and Wesley were pioneering educators who founded and led schools that became beacons of progressive education and iconic institutions in the neighborhood. Lucy founded the Bureau of Educational Experiments (later the Bank Street College of Education); Wesley, a renowned economist, was involved with the New School for Social Research. Their union was an early and unusually successful example of a dual-career marriage, at a time when well-to-do white women weren’t supposed to have careers, and career women weren’t supposed to marry.

---

Walt Whitman and Pfaff’s Cellar

Unbeknownst to most New Yorkers, a literary landmark lies beneath Greenwich Village’s stretch of Broadway: Pfaff’s Cellar Saloon, located below the twin tenements at 645-647 Broadway between 1859 and 1864, was America’s first bohemian hotspot and home to one of the country’s first gay men’s clubs, the “Fred Gray Association.” Walt Whitman was a loyal Pfaffian who met many young men in this space, and was here inspired to write several of his most inspirational poems. Come celebrate the legacy of Pfaff’s with a reading and discussion of Whitman’s poetic cluster, “Live Oak, with Moss,” and find out how you can help honor the legacy of this unlandmarked, unprotected historical treasure.

Karen Karbiener is an internationally recognized Whitman scholar and teaches at New York University. She has published widely and curated several exhibitions on the poet, including an illustrated edition of Live Oak, with Moss (Abrams, 2021) and Poet of the Body: New York‘s Walt Whitman (Grolier Club, NY, 2019; book based on exhibition, 2022). A native New Yorker and local public scholar, she is the president of the Walt Whitman Initiative, a nonprofit organization serving as an organizing center for cultural activism and poetry-related events.

---

We’ve also got plenty of other programs remaining in May and June with spaces still available, including our conversation with historian Jonathan Ned Katz and our lecture on Greenwich Village’s equine past Tuesday and Wednesday night, and programs on creating Hudson River Park, Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies, and Oscar Wilde in New York in June.