We’re thrilled to share our latest oral history with award-winning author and eighty-year resident of Greenwich Village Tony Hiss. In the latest addition to our oral history collection, Hiss, author of 15 books, including Rescuing the Planet: Protecting Half the Land to Heal the Earth and a former staff writer at The New Yorker magazine for 30 years, discusses memories of corresponding with his incarcerated father, Alger Hiss, a government official accused of spying for the Soviet Union during the McCarthy-era Red Scare; reflections on watching the Village change from the window of his apartment, in which he’s lived since 1947; and thoughts on how to tell the story of a neighborhood while looking both to the future and to the past.

Village Preservation maintains more than 75 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, Deborah Glick, Richard Meier, Ralph Lee, Mimi Sheraton, John Guare, Calvin Trillin, and Chino Garcia.