Native American poet Diane Burns was a luminous, integral fixture of the Downtown arts scene beginning in the 1970s until her death in 2006. Her poetic body of work contains achingly earnest descriptions of her personal experiences as a Native American woman to droll, prophetic indictments of early gentrification in the East Village. Born in […]
Deep below Broadway and Lafayette Street, in the passageway connecting the intersection’s namesake station with the Bleecker Street downtown platform, is an art installation that honors the communities who lived here centuries before the subway was even built. “Signal” by Mel Chin, in collaboration with G. Peter Jemison, was installed when the entire station was […]
Today we’re highlighting the rich Indigenous history of our neighborhood. This is crucial both to understand and respect the full history of the land we live on, and to recognize the story and experience of consistently marginalized groups. Washington Square Park, once a farming land and gathering place for the Lenape, tranformed over two centuries […]
Typically our “What’s in a Name?” series looks into the name of a building or a place and what’s behind the name as we know it. But today we are going to look into the history that has been lost when streets have been named to represent their colonial past. We will look into the […]
Two pretty big things, actually, which is surprising, considering one is the funky heart of our nation’s largest city, while the other is a ‘city’ of 36,000 in pretty sparsely-populated northeastern Oklahoma. And we’re betting that depending upon your areas of interest, while you may know one surprising connection between the two places, you probably don’t […]
The Department of Transportation’s plans to pedestrianize portions of Astor Place have caused quite a stir in the neighborhood, as they have the potential to obliterate the historic street configuration that dates back to the earliest settlements in the city. As mentioned in our letter to DOT, Astor Place follows the path of an old […]