The wedding of John Wojtowicz and Ernest Aron (later Elizabeth Eden). On August 22, 1972, what may be the most legendary bank robbery in New York City history took place. And it had some interesting Village connections. On that sweltering August day, John Wojtowicz, Salvatore Naturile, and Robert Westenberg entered a bank on the […]
Your input is needed! Today we feature our latest Business of the Month — help us to select the next. Tell us which independent store you love in Greenwich Village, the East Village or NoHo: click here to nominate your favorite. Want to help support small businesses? Share this post with friends. Where can you get […]
Happy Pride Week! Each June during the week leading up to the Gay Pride March, NYC celebrates Pride Week. Throughout the week, different groups and organizations will host events, throw parties, and do general outreach and advocacy to promote the history and visibility of the LGBTQ community. Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation has always worked […]
Off the Grid is highlighting the 2016 Village Awards winners in the lead up to the June 14th Annual Meeting & Award Ceremony. Click here for more information about the event and to RSVP. Read about other awardees here. Julius’ Bar at 159 West 10th Street/188 Waverley Place is a Village institution. Established nearly a century ago, Julius’ (and […]
Note: This is an updated version of a post originally written by Drew Durniak Map of the Greenwich Village Historic District. Click to enlarge. On April 29th, 1969, mayor John Lindsay was still smarting from the botched cleanup of the February 1969 snowstorm, The 5th Dimension was at the top of the pop charts with […]
During the holiday season we reflect back on the past year. Here at GVSHP we’ve certainly had some big accomplishments. We have also had a lot of wonderful support from our members and neighbors, but we need your help to continue the fight. Please consider GVSHP in your year-end giving! Alice Carey and Geoffrey Knox, […]
Stonewall was designated an individual landmark on June 23, 2015. Since then, people have asked us why, if the building was already located in a designated historic district, was the “double landmarking” necessary?
Following on some groundbreaking events last week – the LPC designation of the Stonewall Inn as the city’s first LGBT individual landmark and then the Supreme Court ruling on marriage equality – we thought we’d feature some historic images taken by photographer Diana Davies. Yesterday, we also celebrated the 46th anniversary of the June 28, […]
Off the Grid is highlighting the winners of the 2015 Village Awards in the lead up to the June 17th Annual Meeting & Award Ceremony. Previous entries include Barbara Shaum and Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks. Today we will look at the many notable accomplishments of Villager and Fortune Society founder David Rothenberg.
This year’s Gay Pride Month certainly got off to an auspicious start with the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission finally agreeing to consider the Stonewall Inn for individual landmark designation — a proposal GVSHP has been spearheading for the last year and a half — which would make it New York City’s first LGBT […]
On April 29, 1996, playwright Jonathan Larson’s Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize winning musical “Rent” made its Broadway debut at The Nederlander Theatre. As many Broadway show-goers and longtime East Village residents already know, “Rent” takes place in the heart of the East Village during the AIDS epidemic in the mid-to-late 1980s. This legendary rock […]
For weeks now we’ve all been celebrating the 50th anniversary of the signing of New York City’s landmarks law, which actually took place on April 19, 1965. As we approach this momentous occasion, we thought we’d take a look at some items on our current preservation agenda, and the many challenges we face today.
(This post is the first of a series called Village People: A Who’s Who of Greenwich Village, which will explore some of this intern’s favorite Village people and stories.) 453 6th Avenue is an apparently unremarkable building, now home to a noodle shop. Before being renumbered in the 1920s, this was 145 Sixth Avenue. Murray […]
(This post is part of a series called Village People: A Who’s Who of Greenwich Village, which will explore some of this intern’s favorite Village people and stories.) Djuna Barnes was born in 1892, to a polygamist family at Storm King Mountain, New York. Her father made little effort to support his children, and Djuna’s grandmother […]
Christopher Street is the place most of us look to when it comes to LGBTQ history in New York. It is the site of the Stonewall Uprising, with the second Stonewall Inn, the Gay Liberation Monument, and the Gay Street photo-op all within a few steps of each other. However, there are also a number […]
(This post is part of a series called Village People: A Who’s Who of Greenwich Village, which will explore some of this intern’s favorite Village people and stories.) 20 East 11th Street now bears a plaque, which tells us that Eleanor Roosevelt lived here while she was First Lady. It says nothing, however, about the […]
(This post is part of a series called Village People: A Who’s Who of Greenwich Village, which will explore some of this intern’s favorite Village people and stories.) Paul Clayton was a mentor and friend to Dave Van Ronk, a friend to Liam Clancy, and later a mentor to Bob Dylan. (It is said that […]
In the 1890s, the Bowery, like Bleecker Street, was a center of ‘gay’ nightlife in New York City. On Bleecker Street, the Black Rabbit and the Slide did business, offering live sex shows and male prostitutes. On the Bowery, Manilla Hall and Little Bucks, like the Slide, served as ‘fairy resorts,’ where male prostitutes waited […]
An early twentieth-century song entitled ‘The Greenwich Village Epic’ declares: ‘Fairyland’s not far from Washington Square.’ By this time, park police had arrested men for having sex with male partners multiple times in Washington Square Park, as they had in Central Park, Battery Park, Tomkins Square Park, and seemingly just about every other park in […]
Tonight at the Hudson Park Library at 6:30pm, lesbian activist, independent journalist and East Village author Kelly Cogswell will discuss her new book at our free public program, “Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger”, detailing the origins of the Lesbian Avengers, a direct action group born in 1992 from the Queer arts and […]
(This post is the first of a series on the history of the LGBTQ community in Greenwich Village.) It is easy to assume, in the aftermath of the Stonewall riots, that Greenwich Village’s LGBTQ history happened entirely on Christopher Street. Of course, there’s a lot more to LGBTQ history in the Village than Stonewall, just […]
On March 13th, 1964, Kitty Genovese was brutally raped and murdered in Kew Gardens, Queens. The crime, and Kitty Genovese’s name, became symbols of much more than this one savage act. Largely through reporting in the weeks that followed, the murder became a parable of sorts about the unravelling of society, increasing crime, racial fears, […]
Over the past several weeks, we’ve been highlighting the recent designation of the South Village Historic District, which GVSHP fought ten years to achieve, as well as the treasure trove of information found in the newly-available designation report for the district, which in several cases cites research and materials provided by GVSHP. The South Village’s […]
The United States Senate’s historic passage yesterday of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), banning workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, has deep roots in a house in the South Village at 186 Spring Street — a hotbed of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) civil rights activity in the post-Stonewall […]
On August 28th, 1963, one of the most iconic and transformative events of the civil rights movement took place, the ‘March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.’ One of the largest demonstrations ever staged in our nation’s capitol, it featured Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have A Dream” speech, and is credited with helping […]
On the last Sunday of June, since 1970, the New York City LGBT community has celebrated the last day of Pride Week with a march (NOT a parade) that ends its route where the gay-rights movement began, Greenwich Village. By now everyone knows the story of the 1969 Stonewall Riots that happened on Christopher Street […]
Yesterday the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG), and The Church of the Village unveiled a bronze historic marker now permanently affixed to the facade of this landmark church memorializing the first meeting of what came to be PFLAG, led by Jeanne Manford, at the church […]
The Landmarks Preservation Commission has recently begun creating on-line slide shows to showcase various history months as represented by some of the city’s roughly 31,000 landmarked properties. In March, they highlighted Women’s History Month, and in February, Black History Month. Now for the first time, the LPC has also created a “Gay Pride Month” slide […]
GVSHP is proud to be working with PFLAG (Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) and the Church of the Village at 13th Street and 7th Avenue to memorialize and celebrate Jeanne Manford. Jeanne died earlier this year at 92, but forty years ago this March she held the first meeting of what would […]
This coming March will mark the twenty-sixth anniversary of the founding of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) — the direct action and advocacy group organized to affect change in order to fight the AIDS Crisis. ACT UP was formed in New York City after a series of meetings at the LGBT Community Center […]
We hope you can join us for The Village and All That Jazz, an evening of music and history at Zinc Bar Monday, March 4th presented by GVSHP’s Brokers Partnership – RSVP here. Pianist Joe Alterman will perform and award-winning music critic Gary Giddins will explore the jazz scene of the Village during the 1960s, […]
GVSHP recently received an inquiry from a researcher looking for information about the historic 1966 “Sip In” that took place at the bar Julius’. This seminal protest, which challenged the regulation that bars were not allowed to serve homosexuals, took place three years before the historic Stonewall Rebellion. While there are many resources for those […]
As we have covered in past Off the Grid posts, the South Village building at 186 Spring Street holds strong historical significance for its role in the Lesbian and Gay Civil rights movement and the early fight against the AIDS epidemic. We presented this information to the Landmarks Preservation Commission (read our letter HERE) in the […]
In light of demolition plans that GVSHP uncovered for the Federal row house at 186 Spring Street, we recently discovered an incredible bit of history about the building. If surviving nearly 190 years in the ever-changing landscape of New York City isn’t remarkable enough, 186 Spring also stands as a significant link to the early […]
As EV Grieve recently reported, the final credits may be on the way for a movie theater turned grocery store on Avenue A. As the end may be coming for the former Hollywood Theater, we thought we’d take a brief look at another East Village showplace that only recently went the way of the silent […]
Just last week the famed Copacabana nightclub reopened yet again. At its newest incarnation at Times Square, guests were treated to an opening night performance by salsa great Willie Colón. One of the most recognizable names in nightclub history, the Copa opened its doors in 1940 at its original location at 10 East 60th Street. […]
While Greenwich Village will always be equated with the Gay Rights Movement, particularly for its role in the series of protests at the Stonewall Inn in 1969, the East Village is also known for pushing the envelope for gay culture. And no establishment played a bigger role in that process than the Pyramid Club, located […]
Today marks the anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, a series of riotous protests at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village that many scholars consider the launching pad for the modern Gay Rights Movement. In 1999, GVSHP and the Organization of Lesbian and Gay Architects and Designers, gained federal recognition for the site when it became […]
View A Guide to Lesbian & Gay New York Historical Landmarks in a larger map The Village erupted in riotous celebrations this past weekend at the news of passage of marriage equality legislation, which carried over into the annual Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride March that ends in Greenwich Village. Of course the Village […]
