Village Preservation has spent much of the last two years documenting the extraordinary array of artists who lived and worked South of Union Square, an unrivaled mecca for artists in the 20th century that played a crucial role in shifting the center of the art world from Paris to NYC. The impressive roster of creatives found here includes Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Isamu Noguchi, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jane Freilicher, Jackson Pollock, Joan Mitchel, Thomas Nast, Marcel Duchamp, Robert Indiana, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, Winslow Homer, Joan Mitchel, Lee Krasner, Helen Levitt, Chaim Gross, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Keith Haring, Jules Olitsky, Helen Frankenthaler, and Selma Hortense Burke, among many others. 

We’ve compiled all this information in a street-by-street, building-by-building submission to the Landmarks Preservation Commission, which also includes a timeline of one hundred mid-20th century artists in the neighborhood, and an illustrative map showing where they lived and created. 

This incredible constellation of artistic luminaries speaks to just one more reason why the area South of Union Square is so historically significant, and why this endangered area lacking in landmark protections deserves the historic district designation we have proposed and fought for. As we have documented, South of Union Square was not only a critical center for artistic innovation, but great writers and publishers, Black, LGBTQ+, labor, and women’s rights movements, music, film history, and so much more. But the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, which in recent years has reached historically low levels of new landmark designations, thus far has refused to consider historic district or landmark designation for the area (though we have secured landmark designation of about a dozen individual buildings within the area) — in spite of New York State finding the area qualified for the State and National Registers of Historic Places, and the Preservation League of NYS naming it one of their “Seven to Save.” 

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