April is National Poetry Month! Launched by the Academy of American Poets in 1996, the month of April marks a marvelous opportunity to celebrate the expressiveness, delight, and pure charm of poetry. National Poetry Month reminds us of the integral role of poets and poetry in our culture. It is only fitting to recognize several […]
April is National Poetry Month! Launched by the Academy of American Poets in 1996, the month of April marks a marvelous opportunity to celebrate the expressiveness, delight, and pure charm of poetry. National Poetry Month reminds us of the integral role of poets and poetry in our culture. It is only fitting to recognize several […]
In the early 20th century, Greenwich Village was teeming with vitality and possibility. Great intellectuals met on street corners, in cafes, as part of clubs, using the neighborhood as a playground for their minds to connect and create. One center of such interactions was the Heterodoxy Club, the women’s debating group that created common ground […]
Helen Keller’s connections to New York City and Greenwich Village are numerous but perhaps less well known, as they are largely rooted in her work not as an advocate for the disabled, but in her sometimes controversial work as a suffragette, birth control advocate, antimilitarist, socialist, and an early founder of the American Civil Liberties Union […]
It was on October 16th, 1916 that Margaret Sanger opened her first family planning and birth control clinic in Brownsville, Brooklyn. Although Sanger’s groundbreaking clinic wasn’t in Greenwich Village, its politics were very much of the neighborhood, and in fact were fostered by Sanger’s deep involvement with many radical and progressive movements centered in Greenwich Village at […]
Some things never change about New York City life; New Yorkers’ social lives have seemingly always hinged on the restaurants and bars in their neighborhoods. Aside from the very lucky few, most of our apartments are too small to serve as gathering spaces. In fact, many New York apartments don’t have living rooms or common […]
(This post is part of a series called Village People: A Who’s Who of Greenwich Village, which will explore some of this intern’s favorite Village people and stories.) Crystal Eastman was born to two Congregationalist ministers in Massachusetts, before the family moved to the ‘burned-over district’ of New York (from where the Shaker and Mormon […]
(This post is part of a series called Village People: A Who’s Who of Greenwich Village, which will explore some of this intern’s favorite Village people and stories.) Djuna Barnes was born in 1892, to a polygamist family at Storm King Mountain, New York. Her father made little effort to support his children, and Djuna’s grandmother […]
(This post is part of a series called Village People: A Who’s Who of Greenwich Village, which will explore some of this intern’s favorite Village people and stories.) Henrietta Rodman was born in Queens, in 1877. In 1904, she graduated from Teachers College, Columbia University. She began her career teaching English and working as a […]
(This post is the first of a series on the history of the LGBTQ community in Greenwich Village.) It is easy to assume, in the aftermath of the Stonewall riots, that Greenwich Village’s LGBTQ history happened entirely on Christopher Street. Of course, there’s a lot more to LGBTQ history in the Village than Stonewall, just […]
