New June 2024 Programs: Our Village Awards and Members Meeting, Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, and More
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!: June 2024 Programs

Creating the Hudson River Park
Tuesday, June 4, 2024
6 PM
Zoom webinar
Free
Pre-registration required

Join us for a live virtual talk with Tom Fox as he discusses his new book Creating the Hudson River Park: Environmental and Community Activism, Politics, and Greed.
After the defeat of the $2.4 billion Westway plan to fill 234 acres of the Hudson in 1985, the stage was set for the revitalization of Manhattan’s West Side waterfront. Between 1986 and 1998 the process focused on the basics like designing an appropriate roadway, removing noncompliant municipal and commercial activities from the waterfront, implementing temporary improvements, developing the Park’s first revenue-producing commercial area at Chelsea Piers, completing the public planning and environmental review processes, and negotiating the 1998 Hudson River Park Act that officially created the park. From 1999 to 2009 planning and construction were funded with public money and focused on creating active and passive recreation opportunities on the Tribeca, Greenwich Village, Chelsea, and Hell’s Kitchen waterfronts.
However, initial recommendations to secure long-term financial support for the park from the increase in adjacent real estate values that resulted from the park’s creation were ignored. City and state politicians had other priorities and public funding for the park dwindled. The recent phase of the project, from 2010 to 2021, focused on “development” both in and adjacent to the park. Fox’s first-person perspective helps to document the history of the Hudson River Park, recognizes those who made it happen and those who made it difficult, and provides lessons that may help private citizens and public servants expand and protect the public parks and natural systems that are so critical to urban well-being.

34th Annual Village Awards and 44th Annual Members Meeting
Wednesday, June 12, 2024
6 PM
In-person
Free
Pre-registration required
Location: The Great Hall at The Cooper Union Foundation Building, 7 East 7th Street

Each year, Village Preservation honors invaluable local leaders, institutions, businesses, places, and organizations at its Annual Meeting and Village Awards. This fun and free public event highlights and celebrates those that make our neighborhoods some of the most interesting and exceptional in the city. The night also includes a review of Village Preservation’s activities and accomplishments over the last year.
2024 Village Award Winners:
Bus Stop Cafe, 597 Hudson Street
Barbara Kahn
Sixth Street Community Center, 638 East 6th Street
Penny Arcade
Trash & Vaudeville, 96 East 7th Street
Regina Kellerman Award: Washington Square Park Conservancy
2024 Trustee Nominations:
RETURNING TRUSTEES (THREE-YEAR TERM): Tom Birchard, Jessica Davis, Art Levin, Trevor Stewart, Linda Yowell
NEW TRUSTEES (THREE-YEAR TERM): Jessica Dean Schiffer, Christina Kepple

A Pioneering Dual-Career Marriage: Lucy Sprague Mitchell and Wesley Clair Mitchell
Tuesday, June 18, 2024
6 PM
In-person
Free
Pre-registration required
Save the date, June 18! Stay tuned for registration information.
Location: TBD

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 discusses 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.
Living in Greenwich Village gave Lucy the physical space she needed to integrate her professional and family life and access to social and intellectual circles that were vital to her success. The Mitchells were part of a network of like-minded path-breaking educators — Caroline Pratt, Harriet Johnson, and Elizabeth Irwin — who resided in Greenwich Village and experimented with alternative lifestyles. Lucy and Wesley were also friends of Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch, founder of the Greenwich Settlement House, and her husband, Vladimir, an economist. These friendships bolstered the Mitchells’ efforts to create a new-style marriage and develop new standards for raising their four children, two of whom were adopted.

Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies
Monday, June 24, 2024
6 PM
Zoom Webinar
Free
Pre-registration required

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.

Oscar Wilde in New York 1882: The Art of Celebrity
Wednesday, June 26, 2024
6:30 PM
In-person
Free
Pre-registration required
Location: The Skylight Gallery at Salmagundi Club, 47 Fifth Avenue

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.

Walt Whitman and Pfaff’s
Thursday, June 27, 2024
6 PM
In-person
Free
Pre-registration required
Save the date, June 27! Stay tuned for registration information.
Location: TBD

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!
Spaces Still Available in May

Historian, Artist, Activist: Jonathan Ned Katz in Conversation
Wednesday, May 29, 2024
6 pm
Zoom Webinar
Free
Pre-registration required

Join us for an evening with historian, artist, and activist Jonathan Ned Katz, the subject of Village Preservation’s most recent oral history. A renowned public historian and author, whose pioneering work helped to found the fields of U.S. LGBTQ and heterosexual history, Katz grew up in Greenwich Village in a house on Jane Street and attended the Little Red School House.
Katz in 1971 joined the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), and in June 1972 used his name on a documentary play, Coming Out! produced by GAA at its rented firehouse on Wooster Street. The mainstream publicity received by the play led a publisher to offer Katz a contract for the collection of documents and interpretation published in 1976 as Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the USA. At that time within academia, young scholars were warned that producing work on this history would ruin their careers. Katz’s play and book led to his joining a network of gay men, lesbians, and bisexual and heterosexual women that met regularly in study groups over the following decades –– often in the Greenwich Village house on Jane Street where Katz had lived as a child –– enabling he and others to found the academic field of LGBTQ history and studies.
In this conversation with Village Preservation Executive Director Andrew Berman, Katz will also focus on his little-known career as an artist; on the Greenwich Village family that encouraged his precocious child art and talented teen art; and his work as a textile designer at the Jack Prince Studio.
Katz will discuss with Berman his memoir in progress, Coming of Age in Greenwich Village: A Painter, His Paintings, His Life, and show examples of his art, celebrating the male nude, and featured in a one-man show at the Leslie Lohman Museum in 2013.