It was the bullet felt around the world. On April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was shot by stage actor, Confederate sympathizer, and white supremacist John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theater in Washington, DC. Lincoln succumbed to his wounds in the early hours of the following day, April 15, at the Peterson Boarding House just […]
This is the latest installment in our Gilded Village blog series. The Gilded Age was a time of contradictions and change: extreme wealth and desperate poverty; political stability and corruption; venal greed and generous philanthropy; social retrenchment and reform; an ever-more powerful establishment and a rising immigrant class. Nowhere were the paradoxes and churn of […]
We love historic photos of our neighborhoods, many of which appear in our vast historic image archive. A subset of that archive includes artists’ renderings and interpretations. One Village artist whose work we’ve often admired, Bertram Goodman, created a number of works showing Greenwich Village in the mid-20th century with a particularly special quality. Bertram […]
Civil War Major General Daniel E. Sickles had one of history’s most contentious, strange, and multifarious biographies.
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. The area south of Union Square is rich in architectural and social history which needs and deserves historic district (landmark) protections, which we have […]
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 1909, Frances Perkins was living in Greenwich Village and pursuing a master’s degree in political science at Columbia University. She was, in her […]
On June 11th, 2019, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) designated seven buildings in the area south of Union Square as individual landmarks. While these seven buildings are just a fraction of a fraction of the buildings we called for to be landmarked in connection with the City’s shady Tech Hub “deal”, and […]
We all know that New York University has an enormous presence in Greenwich Village and the East Village — one that has grown tremendously in recent decades, and is continuing to grow with the construction of their “NYU 2031” expanded campus on the Washington Square Village and Silver Towers superblocks south of Washington Square. The […]
This was originally posted by Amanda Davis, GVSHP’s former Director of Preservation & Research. It has been updated with new information. New law tenement at 151 Bleecker Street in the South Village. Photo by GVSHP. The 20th century had hardly begun when the New York State legislature signed into law a new act to address […]
You may have Vice-Presidents on the brain in anticipation of the upcoming Vice Presidential debate. To help, we thought we would take this opportunity to look at two past United States Vice Presidents with close ties to the Village — Aaron Burr and Theodore Roosevelt.
This is the first part of a three part series on the Weehawken Street Historic District. This small historic district is comprised of only fourteen buildings but represents a wonderful cross section of the development of Greenwich Village’s Hudson River waterfront. The designation of this District was due in large part to the efforts of […]
On September 6, 1901, President William McKinley was shot while visiting the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York; he died eight days later on September 14. Both the man responsible for the assassination, and the man who assumed the presidency as a result, had some interesting connections to our neighborhoods. McKinley was only the third […]
Can you name the only United States president to be born in New York City? Here’s a hint: he served as the city’s Police Commissioner when the 9th Police Precinct Station House on Charles Street in the Far West Village was constructed in 1896-97.
One of the many wonderful things about the East Village is the fascinating layers of history that convey the evolution of the neighborhood. The buildings at 19-23 St. Mark’s Place are an excellent example of how the East Village has changed over time from a wealthy merchants neighborhood, to a landing spot for immigrants, to […]
