For more than a quarter century, Rob Mason (the subject of a recent Village Preservation Oral History) operated RPM Studios from his live/work loft at 12 East 12th Street, south of Union Square. RPM was one of the first boutique recording studios in the city during a golden age of music and recording here from 1976-2004. […]
We’re continuing to spend a lot of time thinking about things we used to do before the coronavirus outbreak, that we’re looking forward to hopefully doing again once things return to ‘normal.’ We’ve also been spending a lot of time going through our historic image archive at www.archive.gvshp.org, remembering some of those once-common activities, and just exploring the […]
This is one in a series of posts marking the 50th anniversary of the designation of the Greenwich Village Historic District. Click here to check out our year-long activities and celebrations. In the 19th century, the neighborhood around the north side of Washington Square Park was a prestigious residential neighborhood. Developers looked to expand this […]
The Village in the 1960s was a hotbed of creativity. In one of the most defining moments of that decade, in January 1961, a twenty-year-old Bob Dylan moved here to play the clubs and become a recording artist. Photographer Fred W. McDarrah was the photographer behind the Village Voice at the time. McDarrah had a […]
On February 24th, 1975, Led Zeppelin’s double studio album Physical Graffiti was unleashed upon the world. The band’s second most commercially successful album, it went sixteen times platinum in the United States, and spawned such classics as Trampled Under Foot, Boogie With Stu, and the east-meets-west magnum opus, Kashmir. The monster album also emerged roughly […]
…what a long, strange trip it’s been. On August 26th, 1970, an electric lady was introduced to the rock and roll scene on 8th Street in Greenwich Village. Ushered in by none other than Jimi Hendrix, Electric Lady Studios at 52 West 8th Street was built to provide Hendrix with affordable studio space that would […]
We here at GVSHP spend a great deal of time pouring over archival records and buildings department files to document the history of our neighborhoods — when buildings went up, when they came down, how they once looked, how they changed, etc. (click HERE to learn more). However, a less dusty (and frankly more fun) […]
