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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Janet Coleman is a writer, actor, radio producer, and historian of the theater. She worked at the New York Review from 1963 to 1966. She authored both “The Compass: The Improvisational Theater That Revolutionized American Comedy” and (with Al Young) “Mingus/Mingus: Two Memoirs.’ She is a founding producer of the seminal off-off Broadway’s Loft Theatre Workshop.
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Richard Barone is an acclaimed recording artist, performer, producer, author, and professor, whose lifetime of work has been profoundly influenced by, intertwined with, and a celebration of the musical history of Greenwich Village. Born and raised in Tampa, Florida, Barone moved to New York in the late 1970s, where he helped launch the indie rock […]
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Karen Cooper was the Director of Film Forum from 1972 to 2023, building the institution into a force for independent and repertory cinema. Her oral history deals with her five decades at its helm, her being drawn to the Village as a young person growing up in Queens, and changes she’s seen in the neighborhood since the mid-20th century.
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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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Shirley Wright co-founded the West Village Nursery School, a model, progressive, nursery school that has been a cornerstone institution in Greenwich Village for over sixty years, teaching children through play. She has lived in Greenwich Village for more than three quarters of a century.
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Christina Maile is a Greenwich Village-based artist who has lived at Westbeth Artists Housing since its opening in 1970. She was intimately involved with organizing and support for fellow women artists there and beyond, and has drawn from her Malaysian and Trinidadian heritage to inform her artwork.
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Calvin Trillin is a an award-winning journalist, humorist, food writer, poet, memoirist and novelist and member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Known for his cultural commentary and reporting on the civil rights movement, he has lived in Greenwich Village for decades.
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John Guare (b. February 5, 1938) is a playwright and screenwriter known for Six Degrees of Separation and The House of Blue Leaves, among many other works. Born in Manhattan and a graduate of Yale’s School of Drama, Guare has lived in Greenwich Village since the 1960s, making plays as part of Caffe Cino, Cafe […]
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For more than a quarter century, Robert Mason (b. 1946) operated RPM studios from his live/work loft on 12th Street south of Union Square, one of the first boutique recording studios in the city during a golden age of music and recording here. Some of the greatest rock, hip hop, disco, jazz, and R&B artists of the […]
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