Did you know that Village Preservation members receive advance notice of many of our public programs? Our tours and other programs sometimes offer limited capacity, and often fill up quickly. By becoming a member, you can take advantage of that advanced notice and register before the general public. Find out how to become a member here.

Tour of Stonewall Visitor Center

Join us for a tour of the Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center. This guided tour will explore how the Visitor Center came to be, the independent nonprofit behind it, and the story it tells.

The mission of the Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center is to memorialize the legacy of the Stonewall Rebellion while serving as a beacon for generations to come and visit the very site where history was made and the fight for full LGBTQ+ equality began.

Serving as an educational resource, the Visitor Center offers an immersive experience featuring a rich tapestry of LGBTQIA+ history and culture through a variety of engaging exhibitions and programs. It functions as a multifaceted learning experience that speaks to today’s generations, encouraging them to carry forward the Stonewall legacy and the ongoing fight for full equality. The Center serves as a home base for the dedicated Stonewall National Monument NPS park rangers, who are committed to welcoming all visitors to this site of national significance.

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Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Revolutionary Life

Join us for this chance to hear from a preeminent historian of women’s suffrage and the author of the definitive biography of American suffragist and women’s rights pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Stanton was a singular leader, thinker, and organizer whose fight for women’s emancipation stretched from the 1840s to her death in 1902, a full fifth of America’s history. Yet her legacy has been marked by controversy. From her speeches at Cooper Union to inspiring generations of women’s suffrage advocates and activists who lived and worked in our neighborhoods, historian Ellen Carol DuBois paints a fresh portrait of this complex crusader whose tireless work made contemporary feminism possible.

Born in 1815 into a family deeply marked by the tumult of the American Revolution and surging evangelicalism, Stanton was captivated by Enlightenment ideas about individual freedom and transformed by early experiences in what she called “the school of antislavery.” Though most remembered for her fight for the vote, she was also an early crusader for women’s reproductive autonomy and reforming the institution of marriage, and against Christianity’s subordination of women. Her rifts with Black reformers and embrace of nativist ideas tarnished her reputation, but her words still have the ability to move and agitate people today.

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From Village to Village: The Immigrants’ Journey to Greenwich Village and the East Village, 1880-1924

The rich history of life in the 19th- and early 20th-century immigrant communities of Germans, Italians, Irish, Jews, and many more who settled in our neighborhoods is well known. But the story of how they got here in the first place, not so much. Join us and take a trip alongside these intrepid people who started their journeys in far-off villages of Europe and Russia, and experience the numerous obstacles they had to overcome to fet to Greenwich Village and the East Village. Before ever reaching the ship that would carry them across the Atlantic, immigrants would have already taken numerous trains and ferries, and crossed multiple borders to just reach their port of embarkation; and the journey wasn’t quite finished when they disembarked from the ship in New York.

Then, when they finally arrived, what happened? We will also explore how those who decided to stay in the Village began their transitions from newcomer to New Yorker by examining the long-forgotten institutions and organizations that aided these migrants in and around our neighborhoods.

Our neighborhoods offer a unique microcosm of the numerous overlapping, side-by-side, interconnected, and hamletlike immigrant communities that existed across New York and the United States at the dawn of the 20th century. While a multitude of languages, customs, religions, and ways of life jostled with one another, one of the things that all these immigrants had in common was the journey that they had undertaken to reach their new home.

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Thirty Years, 5,700 Pictures: A Guided Tour of Village Preservation’s Historic Image Archive with Andrew Berman 

Village Preservation’s Historic Image Archive began 30 years ago in 1996, with a donation from the New York Bound Bookshop of a few dozen iconic historic photos of great local and NYC landmarks from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Three decades and 75 collections later, Village Preservation’s archive has grown to nearly 5,700 images, spanning the 18th to the early 21st century, with an incredible array of photos of Greenwich Village, the East Village, NoHo, Lower Manhattan, and beloved landmarks across all five boroughs. 

Those collections consist of historic photos, postcards, and etchings of people and sites that have been critical to our city’s history and development; historic landmarks being documented for both early and more contemporary preservation efforts; deeply personal views of our city and our neighborhoods’ evolution over time taken by individuals; and what we believe to be the largest collection of crowdsourced images of the impact and aftermath of the September 11th attacks in Lower Manhattan. Within these archives you’ll find touching personal perspectives and family records, images of long lost landmarks, mysteries steeped in New York City history that took years to solve, and the work of renowned photographers and average citizens. 

Village Preservation Executive Director Andrew Berman will take you on a guided tour, showing you just some of the incredible highlights, and sharing with you some of the hidden stories behind the images in these collections. He’ll also let you know how you can add to the collection, and guide you to using the archive as a resource for your own research or just some fun online exploration. 

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Don’t miss out on our final July Program!

The History of Jazz in Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo, Part 2

Join us for part two of our conversation about the history of jazz in our neighborhoods, using our new, first-of-its-kind map resource, the Village Preservation Jazz Map of Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo.

For this conversation, we will use the map to help us illustrate the evolution of jazz from the late 1950s through the 1980s. Come hear how the music changed and see how the local jazz scene changed along with it, from dive-bar post bop, to artist-loft avant-garde. This event will deepen your appreciation for the extraordinary legacy of jazz in our community.