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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November Programs — Spaces Still Available

Sixth Annual Village Preservation Comedy Night

Tuesday, November 28, 7 pm
In person 

$50 per ticket
Two-item minimum
Please arrive at 6:45 pm

Join us for a special night of comedy benefiting Village Preservation & The Rebecca Daniels Scholarship. Comedians who will grace the Village Preservation stage have appeared on Comedy Central, Inside Amy Schumer, The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon and The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.

Join Village Preservation, Villagers, and comedy lovers from across the city for a fun night that supports education and preservation awareness in the real estate community. 

Emcee: James Mattern
Performers include: Ophira Eisenberg, Phil Hanley, Tanael Joachim, Sam Morrison, Cailin Peluffo, Michael Somerville, and more to be announced!

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Glitter and Concrete: A Cultural History of Drag in New York City

Journalist, historian, and photographer Elyssa Maxx Goodman, author of the newly released Glitter and Concrete: A Cultural History of Drag in New York City, joins us to discuss drag: its meanings then and now, its history in the city, its role in the development of the Village, its sociocultural impact, its future, and more. She’ll present a lecture and readings from her new book followed by a Q&A and book signing.

Goodman explores the dynamic role of drag, from the Jazz Age to Drag Race, in queer liberation and urban life. From the lush feather boas that adorned early female impersonators to the sequined lip syncs of barroom queens to the drag kings that have us laughing in stitches, drag has played a vital role in the creative life of New York City. But the evolution of drag in the city—as an art form, a community and a mode of liberation—has never before been fully chronicled. Now, Goodman unearths the dramatic, provocative untold story of drag in New York City for the first time in all its glistening glory.

This comprehensive compendium of drag history was labeled one of Vogue’s best LGBTQ+ books of 2023 and reviewed by The New York Times, Washington Post, Elle, and many more. 

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NEW! December 2023 Programs

Out My Window Stories

Join us at the home of Nina and Robert Kaufelt as acclaimed photographer Gail Albert Halaban will share a new storytelling and photography project. Albert Halaban asks neighbors what they imagine about their neighbors’ lives, and has gathered these stories and created short audio pieces. She will share one of these short stories and attendees can participate in a story circle (using a new tech platform designed just for the project) and share their imaginations of what is happening in the window space. Join us for wine, cheese, photographs, and stories.

Gail Albert Halaban is an internationally exhibited artist with an BA from Brown University, and an MFA from Yale University. She is best known for her series “Out My Window,” in which she photographs from one window to a neighboring window with the consent and collaboration of all the residents. She is working on a new book about New York City with an accompanying public art project where she collects and shares the stories New Yorkers imagine of their neighbors.

Nina Planck Kaufelt is one of our hosts. Planck Kaufelt is a story-keeper, founder of London Farmers’ Markets, author of the Real Food cookbooks, and former Executive Director of the NYC Greenmarkets.

Rob Kaufelt, our other host, is the former owner of Murray’s Cheese. Kaufelt runs Small Farm Productions, which has just released How the Other Half Lives (October 2023), an album by AC Rose.

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A Jazz Age Holiday Celebration: Village Preservation Members Only ($500+)

Exclusively for Village Preservation Members at the $500 Level or Above. 

Come celebrate this festive season with Village Preservation in the Parish Hall at historic St. Mark’s in-the-Bowery Church. Enjoy the sounds from the golden age of American jazz and vintage-inspired originals from The Buck and Quarter Quartet. Feel free to dress up in your Jazz Age winter finery.

Members of Village Preservation at the “Sponsor” level and invited guests join us to enjoy a drink and some light fare, and recount another memorable year. Please indicate if you plan to bring a +1 and provide their information at the time of registration.

Please note: Registration is NOT confirmed until you receive a personalized email from our Programming Team. We will check your membership status prior to sending your personalized registration confirmation.

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Eyes on the Street: Jewish Photographers Picture Postwar New York

After World War II ended, a new type of street photography emerged. Young Jewish photographers, most of whom served in the armed forces, returned to see their city through different eyes. Their cameras captured the city’s expressive cultures as well as its quotidian practices with a heightened sense of vulnerability and solidarity. This illustrated talk contrasts the Italian Feast of San Gennaro on Mulberry Street with the experience of Jewish refugees waiting outside the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society on Lafayette Street, both located in neighborhoods that were distinct at that time from Greenwich Village. 

Deborah Dash Moore is Frederick G.L. Huetwell Professor of History and Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. An historian of American Jews, she specializes in 20th-century urban history. Her recent book, Walkers in the City: Jewish Street Photographers of Mid-Century New York (2023), extends her interest in urban Jewish history to photography. Currently she serves as editor in chief of The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, a 10-volume anthology of original sources translated into English from the biblical period to 2005, selected by leading scholars.

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Unknown to many fans and readers, the influential and controversial horror author H. P. Lovecraft — the creative mind behind such stories as “The Call of Cthulhu,” “Pickman’s Model,” and “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” — lived and wrote in New York City between 1924 and 1926. During this time, Greenwich Village became his favorite neighborhood. Often in the dark hours of the night, Lovecraft lost himself in its maze of streets and alleys. He visited Greenwich Village not to fraternize with its poets and painters, but to savor the neighborhood’s architecture and buildings. However, his encounters with its immigrant and minority communities revealed his deep racism and xenophobia. These beliefs were distilled in his stories “The Horror at Red Hook” and “He,” both written in New York. David J. Goodwin will discuss his new book Midnight Rambles: H. P. Lovecraft in Gotham, a biography on the horror master’s love-hate relationship with the city, and he will invite the audience to discover how Greenwich Village informed Lovecraft’s imagination and fiction.  

David J. Goodwin is the Assistant Director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University and a past Frederick Lewis Allen Room scholar at the New York Public Library. His first book, Left Bank of the Hudson: Jersey City and the Artists of 111 1st Street, received the J. Owen Grundy History Award in 2018. He has written for Gotham: A Blog for Scholars of New York City History, The Metropole, The Providence Journal, Sapientia, and Urban Archive. 

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December Is South Village Month!
South Village Italian Americans’ Support for the Arts

From the late 19th through the 20th century, the South Village was a tale of two communities: Italian immigrants and American-born artists, authors, and performers. This illustrated Zoom lecture explores the Italians’ reactions to their neighbors. Sometimes the Italians provided inspiration for artists; sometimes they became part of the mainstream community themselves. More often the communities operated in parallel: Eugene O’Neill at the Provincetown Playhouse, a Passion Play at a church auditorium. There is also some intriguing evidence that even though the Italians and the creative types came to the Village to pursue different dreams, they both found what they wanted in the Village’s unique mix of buildings.

Village Preservation kicked off its campaign to honor, document, and seek landmark designation for the South Village and its remarkable immigrant and bohemian histories in December 2006 and completed the effort in December 2016 with designation of the third and final phase of our proposed South Village Historic District, the largest expansion of landmark protections in the neighborhood since 1969, and among the city’s first and only historic districts to honor immigrant and artistic history. We now celebrate each December as “South Village Month.” 

Mary Brown first spoke to a Village Preservation audience in spring 2005.  She works as an archivist at the Center for Migration Studies, a mission of the Scalabrini Fathers, who are also active in the Village at Our Lady of Pompei parish; and she teaches writing and U.S. history as an adjunct at Marymount Manhattan College. She received her doctorate from Columbia University in 1986. Her dissertation was on Italian Catholic immigrants in the Archdiocese of New York. Her next publication will be in a new field, co-authored with Dr. Christine Angel of St. John’s University in Queens: “Building Representative Archives: Training Archivists to Act as the (Representative/ Inclusive) Bridge between the Archive and the Public.” She also authored the Village Preservation–commissioned report and study, The Italians of the South Village.