We’re proud to share our latest oral history, with Margaret Halsey “Pi” Gardiner, a Greenwich Village native who grew up in MacDougal Sullivan Gardens and has been the Executive Director of the beloved Merchant’s House Museum since 1990.

Pi’s oral history offers sprawling insights into what life was like in MacDougal Sullivan Gardens and Greenwich Village in the 1950s and ’60s. We hear about her life traveling across the country and the opportunities and obstacles for young women in the 1960s and ’70s; her family’s deep roots in New York, which helped inspire her love of history and historic preservation; and of course her more than three decades of work to improve, celebrate, and preserve the Merchant’s House Museum, one of the oldest landmarks and the finest example of a preserved 19th-century row house inside and out in New York City. In her oral history, Pi gives special attention to the years-long battle to protect the museum from potentially devastating construction next door — an effort with which Village Preservation has been deeply involved. 

Village Preservation maintains nearly 70 oral histories with figures who witnessed, participated in, or made significant history in our neighborhoods, including Jane Jacobs, Penny Arcade, Wolf Kahn, Jonas Mekas, Marlis Momber, Edwin Fancher, Margot Gayle, David Amram, Matt Umanov, Merce Cunningham, Joan Davidson, Richard Meier, Ralph Lee, Mimi Sheraton, John Guare, Calvin Trillin, and Chino Garcia.