Village Preservation’s Oral History Project includes interviews with some of the great artists, activists, business owners, community leaders, and preservation pioneers of Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo. It captures and preserves their first-person perspective on the important histories they witnessed or of which they were a part.
Click here for an alphabetical list of our entire Oral History Collection.
The views expressed by the contributor(s) are solely those of the contributor(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or endorsement of our organization.
As Lower Manhattan’s elected representative for 35 years, Deborah Glick was a leading advocate for civil rights, reproductive freedom, animals and environmental preservation, the arts, and tenants’ rights. Glick was the first openly LGBTQ member of the State legislature when elected in 1990 and a leader in the fight for marriage equality. She fought to […]
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Kevin McGruder is an active member of Other Countries, a Black gay men’s writing collective that was founded in 1986. This oral history includes extensive discussion of Other Countries’ founding and history, particularly its deep roots in the West Village and shifts in the group’s focus during the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis. The oral […]
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Margaret “Pi” Halsey Gardiner has been the Director of the Merchant’s House Museum since the early 1990s. Her oral history deals with decades of stewardship of that beloved NYC landmark and institutions, as well as growing up in MacDougal-Sullivan Gardens in the 1950s and her family’s deep roots in New York history.
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Jonathan Ned Katz is a pioneering public historian author, and artist credited with helping to establish the field of LGBTQ studies. His oral history deals with his research, writing, upbringing as a “red diaper baby” in Greenwich Village in the 1940s and ‘50s, and his coming out in the post-Stonewall era.
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Lucy Komisar is a former Village Voice reporter who covered the historic “Sip In” at Julius’ Bar and the former Vice President of the National Organization for Women involved in ending the men-only policy at McSorely’s Old Ale House.
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Barbara Kahn is an East Village playwright who’s produced dozens of works rooted in history, especially New York history, with a frequent focus on women, LGBTQ+ people, other marginalized groups, and personal trauma. Her award-winning plays have been produced at the Theater for the New City since 1994, and elsewhere throughout New York, Paris, and London for decades.
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Ayo Harrington has lived in the East Village since the 1960s, and been deeply involved in the community garden, urban homesteading, environmental, resiliency, educational equality, and civil rights movements. She first moved here as a teenager to live with her older sister, who was active in radical Black organizing at the time. Ayo followed suit, […]
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Rich Wandel (b. May 20, 1946) is a former president of the Gay Activist Alliance, and served as the Archivist Historian at the LGBT Community Center from its founding in 1990 to today. From the 1980s through the AIDS Crisis, Rich has been a leader in the ongoing LGBT civil rights movement towards greater tolerance […]
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David Rothenberg (b. August 19, 1933) is one of the Village’s most prolific activists. A former Broadway producer, he also produced the off-Broadway play “Fortune in Men’s Eyes”, which ignited a movement to serve the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated. From this, Rothenberg founded the Fortune Society in 1967, an organization whose mission is to foster […]
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Robert Sanfiz (b. March 20, 1969) has been the Executive Director of La Nacional since 2008. La Nacional is the 150-year-old Spanish Benevolent Society located on West 14th Street, which represents and historically advocates for the “Little Spain” community that stretched from Christopher to 23rd Street along the west side, once the largest Spanish-American community […]
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Arthur (Art) Levin (b. 1936) has served as a Village Preservation Trustee since the 1990s, including as President from 2012 to 2022, overseeing a period of great organizational growth. He was the longtime director of the Center for Medical Consumers, working to expand access information about healthcare for New Yorkers. Art grew up on the Upper […]
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Orselli (b. 1949) immigrated from Italy to Brazil in 1954 and to New York in 1960. He has been a passionate advocate for affordable housing for almost 50 years, especially in the Lower East Side/East Village. His life-long commitment to activism and advocacy has led to work with the Cooper Square Community Land Trust, Cooper […]
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