It’s sometimes almost incredible to think about the sheer volume of artistic talent that has been located in our neighborhoods of Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo. It’s perhaps even more overwhelming when multiple artists were present within one building over the span of just a few short years. Such was the case at […]
Since 2006, May has marked Jewish American Heritage Month, 31 days to explore and celebrate the impact of Jewish values, contributions, and culture on the nation’s history and character. Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo are communities rich with sites that showcase and commemorate 350 years of Jewish history in our city. That hyperlocal […]
Greenwich Village is a community rich with Jewish history, especially within the area that in 1969 was designated as one of the city’s first and largest historic districts. That legacy manifests in so many ways, including several incredibly prominent elected leaders of the 20th century who called Greenwich Village home. We’ll take a look at […]
The story of Curious George is so much more than that of one of the most popular children’s books since the 1940s. It’s also the story of a couple who endured and escaped the Nazi occupation of Paris, and found their way to Greenwich Village. Hans Augusto Reyersbach and Margarete Reyersbach were both Jews of […]
“South of Union Square, the Birthplace of American Modernism” is a series that explores how the area south of Union Square shaped some of the most influential American artists of the 20th century. In the 20th century, the area south of Union Square attracted painters, writers, publishers, and radical social organizations, many of whom were […]
Have you walked by the narrow triangle park where East 2nd Street, East Houston Street, and Avenue C all meet? This small, fenced-in sliver of green may seem unremarkable, but it’s named for someone who played a rather large and inspiring role in the lives of so many in our city. Gustave Hartman, a Jewish […]
For its entire existence over twenty years, the International Worker’s Order’s (IWO) New York City headquarters was located at 80 Fifth Avenue. 80 Fifth Avenue, at 14th Street, is located in the historically rich but endangered area south of Union Square for which Village Preservation is seeking landmark protections. Our ongoing research about the area has […]
Novelist Bernard Malamud is considered by many critics to be one of the finest American novelists of the 20th century. Born on April 26, 1914, in Brooklyn to a poor Russian Jewish immigrant family who ran a small grocery store, he attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, City College of New York, and Columbia for […]
In the mid-19th century, Levi Strauss was responsible for bringing one of the world’s most durable clothing items to market: denim blue jeans. Levi Strauss would become a household name as his distinctly American invention — an enduring symbol of cowboy and frontier life in the 1800s, of Beat ‘cool’ in the 1950s, hippies in […]
The area south of Union Square is the center of an amazing and dynamic collection of histories.
A remarkable number of people and places in Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo played important roles in the move towards women’s suffrage. These neighborhoods were long centers of political ferment and progressive social change, and women and men here played a prominent part in removing barriers to women voting in New York State […]
For twenty four years, the entire existence of the organization, the International Workers Order (IWO) was headquartered at 80 Fifth Avenue (southeast corner of 14th Street), an elaborately-detailed Renaissance Revival style office building designed in 1908 by Buchman and Fox. This progressive mutual-benefit fraternal organization was a pioneering force in the U.S. labor movement, which […]
In 1926, Edith Gregor Halpert was twenty six years old. She had, up until the year before, served as one of two female business executives in New York City. But in 1925, she had left the elite position behind, her sights shifting to a new goal. A lover of modern art who did not think […]
Part of our blog series Why Isn’t This Landmarked?, where we look at buildings in our area we’re fighting to protect that are worthy of landmark designation, but somehow aren’t landmarked. On December 1, 1917, the Evening Post wrote: “The tide of Jewish immigration to this country had begun in 1883, following the first of […]
Congregation Shearith Israel, now located at 2 West 70th Street, takes pride in being the very first Jewish congregation in North America, where something like half the world’s Jewish population now lives.
Nineteenth-century Jewish immigrant life in New York is well-documented, when massive waves of Jews, first from Germany and then from Eastern Europe, began to flood into the city. This made New York the largest Jewish city by population in the world, which it remains to this day. Like all immigrant stories, the Jewish community had […]
This is one in a series of posts marking the 50th anniversary of the designation of the Greenwich Village Historic District. Check out our year-long activities and celebrations at gvshp.org/GVHD50. With neighborhoods like the Lower East Side and Upper West Side in close proximity, Greenwich Village, and more specifically the Greenwich Village Historic District, is not one of the […]
I was holiday shopping at my local bookstore and was delighted to encounter Emily Jenkins’ “All of a Kind Family Hanukkah.” In the book, a Jewish immigrant family prepares for Chanukah in their Lower East Side Tenement in 1912. The family’s four daughters share a room, make latkes, throw tantrums, and in the end light […]
On an average day in New York City, you might catch sight of the Statue of Liberty on the subway, meandering down the High Line, or maybe if you are somewhere along the Lower Manhattan or Brooklyn waterfront.
Today we are going to take a look at Temple Emanu-El located at 65th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. It is New York’s largest synagogue, and by reputation is the largest Reform synagogue in the world. But this very uptown institution actually has some very downtown roots, which may surprise you.
On 2nd Avenue, just south of 9th Street at No. 140-142, sits one of the East Village’s oddest structures. Clad in metal and adorned with Cyrillic lettering, the building sports a slightly downtrodden and forbidding look, seeming dropped into the neighborhood from some dystopian sci-fi thriller. In reality, for the last half century the building […]
On March 29, 1516, the Venice Ghetto was established by decree of the Venice Ruling Council. The very first ghetto, it was a tiny 2 1/2 block area on a small, dirty island housing over 4,000 people. The name comes from the Italian getto meaning “casting,” or Venetian geto meaning “foundry.” The Venice Ghetto, long after the […]
On October 1, 2010, the New York State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) agreed to GVSHP’s request to find 326 and 328 East 4th Street eligible for listing on the State and National Registers of Historic Places. According to the significance statement issued by the NYSHPO, “the two adjacent three story, brick houses at 326 and 328 East […]
Five hundred years ago today, on March 29, 1516, the Venice Ghetto was established by decree of the Venice Ruling Council. The very first ghetto, it was a tiny 2 1/2 block area on a small, dirty island housing over 4,000 people. The name comes from the Italian getto meaning “casting,” or Venetian geto meaning “foundry.” With […]
Today is Yom Kippur, so let’s take a look at some East Village buildings that are, or used to be, synagogues. Jewish immigrants to the East Village and Lower East Side were a significant segment of the population of these neighborhoods, particularly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Sixth Street Community Center, 638 East […]
The Lower East Side means many things to many people. Working as an architectural historian in New York City, it means a great deal to me. I always consider it a joy to travel the world and learn the history of places near and far, but New York has always been special to me because […]
A friend of mine – and unabashed New York City chauvinist – has been known to observe a street in Manhattan and pronounce something like, “There’s more style on this one block than in all of Ohio.” (Sorry, Ohio.) Well, if that’s true, then Lower East Side History Month, beginning May 1, has more creativity, […]
Welcome back to another post in our Throwback Thursday series where we feature everyday scenes of yesteryear. I recently came across some neat market photos taken by Andrew Herman as part of the Federal Art Project. The ones featured today were all taken in the 1930s on First Avenue between today’s St. Mark’s Place (referred […]
A couple of weeks ago I was walking along 3rd Street in the East Village and stopped in front of a sculpture park that I had seen many times before. Just past Avenue B, the park holds a number of metal sculptures which, without doing any research, seemed to be the work of current artists […]
On August 8, 2008, GVSHP and the East Village Community Coalition formally requested that the City landmark the historic Congregation Mezritch Synagogue building at 415 East 6th Street in the East Village (you can read the request, and more about the building’s history, here). At the time, plans had been filed to demolish the […]
Tough decision, I know. Luckily, in the East Village/Lower East Side, you don’t have to travel far to stock up on both of these Jewish treats. If you’ve ever stood on line for a pastrami on rye at Katz’s or grabbed a bagel with lox and a schmear at Russ & Daughters, you know what […]
Recently, our fellow-blogger friend, Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, noted that the facade of the East Village building that is home to Moishe’s Jewish bakery had gotten a facelift. He asked, “Can renovations ever just mean renovations, without implying some major shift, a landlord’s plan to seek a higher paying tenant?” This question got us thinking- […]
Marking the 100th anniversary of his birth on August 11, 1911, Tablet printed a thoughtful piece on pioneering preservation architect Giorgio Cavaglieri, written by Allan M. Jalon. Jalon’s article takes a look back at man behind the adaptive re-use of two of the Village’s most iconic buildings, the Jefferson Market Library (formerly the Jefferson Market […]
