Village Preservation’s Historic Image Archive captures and preserves scenes of Greenwich Village, the East Village, NoHo, and landmarks across New York City over many decades. One of our newest collections shows the East Village in the early 1980s, during a critical period when the neighborhood was a hub for artists, musicians, and writers, as well as drifters, and punks, […]
Village Preservation’s Historic Image Archive captures and preserves scenes of Greenwich Village, the East Village, NoHo, and beyond over many decades. One of our collections shows the East Village in the early 1980s, during a critical period when the neighborhood was a hub for artists, musicians, and writers, as well as drifters, and punks, and […]
An exciting feature of Village Preservation’s extensive Historic Image Archive is the ability to filter images by category, or “tag.” We have painstakingly tagged every single one of our more than 5,000 historic photographs (an ever-growing number), so that users can easily view images organized by their interests. Today, we will be using the “winter” tag […]
Contained within 24 colorful and informative pages, Village Preservation’s 2024–2025 Annual Report paints a vivid picture of an organization deeply committed to protecting the architectural and cultural legacy of Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo, while pushing forward with innovative community educational programs. Advocacy remained central to Village Preservation’s mission over the last year, […]
Sills get all the credit. Sitting pretty at the bases of windows, they support what’s above them and provide a ledge for flower pots or a perch for birds. But there’s another architectural element integral to any window, a perhaps lesser-known vocabulary word but one of equal importance: the lintel. Lintels are the load-bearing horizontal […]
An exciting feature of Village Preservation’s sizable Historic Image Archive is the ability to filter images by category, or “tag.” We have added tags to the more than 5,000 historic photographs in our archive, so that users can easily view images organized by their interests. To celebrate pride, we will explore images using the “LGBTQ+” tag, which […]
The Holland Plaza Building is a unique, large manufacturing building that occupies an entire, irregularly shaped block, bound by Canal, Watts, and Varick Streets. The building, also called One Hudson Square, helps tell the story of its neighborhood fittingly called Hudson Square. Hudson Square is situated between Tribeca, the West Village and SoHo. For much […]
Our Historic Images from Landmarks Applications collection is one of the most extensive in our historic image archive. It is regularly updated with additional historic images that are included in local Certificate of Appropriateness applications to the Landmarks Preservation Commission. These provide invaluable documentation of our neighborhoods, and the newest batch includes several images of […]
This is the second in a multi-part series Photography has long been a powerful medium for documenting history, shaping narratives, and preserving memory. Women photographers have played a crucial role in capturing the spirit of our neighborhoods. Through the lens of their cameras, these women documented the evolution of our urban spaces, cultural movements, and […]
Village Preservation previously conducted extensive research on the history of one particularly peculiar East Village Building, 143-145 Avenue D. This research culminated in a five-part blog series which was eventually used as part of the buildings entry on our East Village Building Block Resource. We were recently reminded of this building’s fascinating history following the […]
The photographs of the West Village waterfront in our Historic Image Archive remind us just how dramatic a transformation that area has undergone over the past several decades. Photographer James Cuebas, a Lower East Side native, captured on film the Hudson River piers in Greenwich Village in the late 1970s and 1980s. His photographs in […]
If we had to pick just one type of building to represent our neighborhoods, the top contender would almost undoubtedly be the row house. A ubiquitous feature of 19th-century urban streetscapes, many of these homes are happily still present throughout New York City (particularly in Manhattan and Brooklyn), and are plentiful in number in our […]
Once burning much of New York City’s refuse, the Gansevoort Destructor Plant was a looming fixture of the skyline along the Hudson River. John T. Krawchuk photographed the plant, which has since been demolished, in the 1990s as part of his masters thesis, On The Edge: the West Village Waterfront. The plant appears in the […]
Since September 11, 2003, twin pillars of light have pierced the Lower Manhattan sky from dusk to dawn each year, briefly reverting our skyline to an impression of its previous self. First implemented as a months-long temporary art installation in early 2002 to commemorate the September 11th attacks, Tribute in Light was reinstalled on the […]
A year or two into my career as a historic preservationist, I was accused (in good humor) of being a warden of “the ephemera of New York.” I tended toward a particular interest in protecting the seemingly minor and often transient aspects of our built environment: attributes such as vault lights, sidewalk grates, and paving, […]
Linda Yowell, architect and preservationist, recently donated a wide assortment of photos to Village Preservation’s Historic Image Archive, covering the 1970s through the late 1990s. Among them are images of small businesses that Yowell, who has also been a Village Preservation trustee since 1998, captured during that period. Some of the stores have long since […]
