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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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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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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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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Michael E. Levine (1943-2025) was an urban planner and NYC Department of City Planning Community Board 2 liaison beginning in the 1960s. He was intimately involved in the landmark designation of the Greenwich Village Historic District, pioneering zoning and landmark designations for SoHo, the Stonewall Riots, and Congregation Beth Simchat Torah, the world’s largest LGBTQ+ […]
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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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Dr. Victor Keyloun (b. February 20, 1935) worked at St. Vincent’s Hospital from 1963 to 1983. He was a neighborhood doctor, notably serving extended Italian families as well as the Village’s large gay population, at a time when many doctors would not. His last years in practice overlapped with the first years of the tragic […]
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Merce Cunningham (1919-2009) was an American dancer, choreographer and leader of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, located since 1971 at Westbeth in the West Village.
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Since 1983, Cominskie has lived in Westbeth, a nonprofit housing and commercial complex dedicated to providing affordable living and working space for artists and arts organizations, located in the old formerly disused Bell Telephone Labs at Bethune and West Streets. In this oral history, he discusses the significance of an affordable housing community for artists, […]
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