Village Preservation’s decades-long project to document and preserve Federal Era rowhouses in Lower Manhattan has resulted in the landmark designation of more than one hundred twenty-five federal rowhouses — as individual landmarks and within historic districts.

The work under discussion began as a survey, research, and advocacy effort by two staff members at the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission in the mid-1980s. The Village Preservation (then the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation) project was an initiative that began in the mid-1990s to continue the earlier LPC effort, with the goal of protecting as many of the disappearing Federal Era row houses of Lower Manhattan as possible.

This video and transcript documents a conversation held on January 10, 2024 between Susan De Vries and Jay Shockley, moderated by Vicki Weiner to discuss the history of the Federal Era Row House Preservation Project. Jay Shockley, who worked at the  Landmarks Preservation Commission from 1979 until his retirement as a Senior Historian in 2015, helped begin the effort by staff at the Landmarks Preservation Commission to survey and focus on Federal rowhouses. Susan De Vries was a Research Associate/Intern here at Village Preservation from 1994-1996 (later holding the positions of Assistant to the Director and Associate Director from 1996-1999) who worked on this project, and then continued that work as part of her own studies and research after leaving the organization. Vicki Weiner was the Executive Director of Village Preservation from 1993-1998 and helped lead and oversee the project for the organization. All three are now members of the Village Preservation Archive Committee; Jay is a co-founder of the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project; Susan is a historian, researcher, writer and photographer; and Vicki is the Academic Director of the Historic Preservation Master’s degree program at Pratt Institute.

In the decades since this project was initially undertaken in the 1980s and 90s, Village Preservation has successfully advocated for 136 of these buildings becoming designated as NYC landmarks and/or listed on the State and National Registers of Historic Places. This includes 13 individual NYC Landmarks, nine NYC historic districts or historic district extensions which contain scores of these buildings, and the South Village State and National Register Historic District, which contains 96 Federal-era houses among its approximately 750 buildings.

This project resulted in this report, Twenty Years of Protecting Federal-Era Rowhouses, documenting the federal rowhouses that gained protections or recognition as a result of our effort, and this photo collection now available on our Historic Image Archive

Watch the video HERE and read a transcript of the conversation HERE.