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.
Doris Diether (1929-2021) was a long-serving member of Manhattan’s Community Board 2 and Greenwich Village preservationist. Diether helped found Save the Village, a campaign focused on reforming zoning and rent laws in Greenwich Village. It was while working with Save the Village that Diether was first introduced to New York City’s zoning laws.
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Ingrid Bernhard and her husband, Sven, were Swedish nationals who met in New York and lived in a farmhouse on the Upper East Side sometimes known as “Cobble Court” or “the Goodnight Moon” house, as writer Margaret Wise Brown wrote the book while living there. In 1967, the Bernhards moved the house to 121 Charles […]
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A painter and interior designer, Albert Fabozzi grew up in Coney Island and lived in the West Village as a young adult. When he and his longtime partner moved to the East Village, Fabozzi took an interest in making the neighborhood, and especially Tompkins Square Park, safer and more appealing. He served on Community Board […]
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James Stewart Polshek (February 11, 1930–September 9, 2022) has lived in Greenwich Village since 1955, and his career as an architect has included buildings across the globe. His work in Greenwich Village has focused on complementing the neighborhood’s historic architecture, scale, and character. Notably, he designed the Washington Court apartments, completed in 1985. He was […]
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