The 2025 Village Awards Celebrating the Best of the Village
By Phyllis Eckhaus
LA LANTERNA DI VITTORIO, 2025 VILLAGE AWARD WINNER: Vittorio Antonini Sr. (center) and Vittorio Antonini Jr. of La Lanterna di Vittorio with Andrew Berman, Village Preservation Executive Director. Special thanks to the Antoninis for their early support of The Village View by carrying our paper since the beginning! All photos courtesy of Village Preservation.
As hundreds gathered at the Great Hall of Cooper Union on June 11 to celebrate the best of the Village—Village Preservation’s annual awards ceremony—the atmosphere had a special electricity, a wave of feeling erupting from Villagers eager to stand up for institutions and values increasingly under siege.
Village Preservation Executive Director Andrew Berman described the Village’s longstanding bohemian ethos as offering refuge and resistance. He said, “With all the challenges we face in our city, country and world, I’m…more convinced than ever of the vital importance of the work we do. Honoring stories of our past; building a community based on humanity, creativity and inclusion; and cultivating a sense of place based not on the lowest common denominator, but the best expression of who we can be, is exactly what we need right now.”
Though the six honorees were known in advance, there was still suspense, drama, and comedy. The emcee, performance artist Penny Arcade, handling an unfamiliar script full of complex metaphors and big words, wittily entertained the audience by wrestling the text into submission—at one point, pausing at length to crack wise while looking up the meaning of “atavistic” on her cell phone.
Danspace Project
DANSPACE PROJECT, 2025 Village Award winner. From left: Judy Hussie-Taylor, Executive Director; Seta Morton, Development Manager; and Jodi Bender, Deputy Director.
The Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery was honored for more than 50 years as “an artistic refuge for performers and audiences alike.” Committed to experimental dance performance, Danspace has not only commissioned over 5,600 new works, it has expanded the audience for its offerings by keeping ticket prices low, holding open rehearsals, and constantly seeking to engage the public with artists and their artistic process.
Danspace Executive Director Judy Hussie-Taylor said, “It makes me cry” to receive an award from “our below 14th Street downtown community” in the same spot where her son graduated from middle school and high school. “For those of us who…embrace the eclectic ever-changing, sometimes confusing, sometimes loud pulse of the Village, we know that together we demonstrate values of a vibrant democracy, inclusivity, diversity, equity, creative innovation each and every day.”
The audience cheered as Seta Morton, Danspace program director and associate curator pledged, “In the face of increased fascism and censorship, we will keep uplifting intergenerational voices of world-building artists as they imagine new possibilities for the future.”
Forbidden Planet
The “legendary disseminator of geek culture,” Forbidden Planet, received the next award. The comics-and-more store, over 40 years old and located on Broadway by 12th Street, has inspired fervent, world-wide, multigenerational loyalty from a customer base that responded generously to a public appeal when the shop struggled during the COVID pandemic. One such supporter wrote praising “the incredibly kind and thoughtful staff” and thanking them “for opening a thousand portals leading from the mundane to the extraordinary and for providing a haven and a family for the quirky, quiet misfits inside us all.”
Jeff Ayers, the store’s long-time general manager, described it as “a place of discovery, imagination, and community” that has featured “creators long before they got their big breaks, their movie deals, their book deals, sometimes even before they left their garage.” To be honored by Village Preservation, “an organization that works to preserve the soul of this neighborhood…means the world to us,” he said. “Thank you for recognizing what we do, and for fighting the good fight to keep New York weird.”
La Lanterna di Vittorio
Restaurant and neighborhood haven La Lanterna di Vittorio, located in a landmarked 1828 Federal style row house on MacDougal by 3rd Street, was honoree number three. Founded in 1977 by Vittorio and Marisa Antonini, a Ligurian immigrant couple, La Lanterna was celebrated for offering “a classic New York experience” to neighbors and tourists alike, and for “its deep investment in our neighborhood and in protecting its history and people. You see it in the stewardship of its historic building…and the support of neighbors in times of emergency, like the provision of free food after Superstorm Sandy…and the free food and drink that plenty of picketers have enjoyed during protests.”
Proprietor Vittorio Antonini, son of the restaurant’s late founder, remained true to La Lanterna’s reputation for supporting righteous causes. He praised other award recipients, especially “our brothers and sisters at the Stonewall Visitor Center… it’s especially fitting that they be honored here tonight.” He gave thanks to his employees, his immigrant parents and the values of “service to community” that he learned at Our Lady of Pompeii parish and Xavier High School, as well Village Preservation and “everyone…making the Village such a vibrant, welcoming, ego-grinding place. We’re proud to be a part of this extraordinary neighborhood.”
His son, also named Vittorio, gave a shoutout to the Sisters of the Cabrini Mission Foundation who were in the audience: “Their orphanage [in Guatemala] is really a testament to what we need to be doing right now.”
LUNGS—Loisada United Neighborhood Gardens
LUNGS was honored for coordinating more than 50 community gardens in the East Village and the Lower East Side, offering everything from “celebration [and] cultivation” to “blissful respite from humanity’s noxious machines.” LUNGS, founded in 2011, not only organizes spring and fall garden festivals, it runs educational programs for youth and seniors, and makes fresh local produce affordable to the neighborhood via community-supported agriculture (CSA) programs.
Charles Krezell, LUNGS president, said, “To plant something in New York City is sort of a revolutionary act because it means you believe that something’s going to grow.” He reminded the audience that community gardens are largely unprotected city-owned spaces, threatened by developers. “We’ve been fighting with the city for a long time to preserve the gardens. We tried to start a community garden district, which is something we would…love to have enacted by the city council as preservation for the neighborhood.” He thanked Village Preservation for recognizing that community gardens are all about “mak[ing] the city a better place.”
Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center
ANN MARIE GOTHARD, CO-FOUNDER, STONEWALL NATIONAL MONUMENT VISITOR CENTER, 2025 Village Award winner.
Award number five went to a Village newcomer, the independent nonprofit Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center, opened a year ago. At 51 Christopher Street, it occupies the portion of the Stonewall Inn—where the modern LGBTQ movement began. The center has already welcomed 65,000 visitors from all 50 states and at least 76 countries. Free and open six days a week, it has not only “transformed and reinvigorated an important historic space” but grounded its “mission around educating the public and celebrating the history and progress connected to that space at a time when…aspects of our history are recklessly being erased or silenced.” As the emcee Arcade observed, the visitor center “is not subject to executive orders.”
Arcade—who was witness to all three nights of the 1969 Stonewall uprising—added her personal gloss to the history, recalling that the crowd of rebels included “ecologists and feminists and Black Panthers and all kinds of other people, because we formed coalitions. We were ‘one for all, and all for one.’ And that’s the only thing that works.” She also noted that the visitor center space, “lovingly restored,” features a 1967 jukebox because that side of the Stonewall Inn “was where we danced.”
The visitor center is the brainchild of Diana Rodriguez and Ann Marie Gothard, who founded the nonprofit Pride Live to advance the LGBTQ legacy and make the visitor center happen. Gothard, president of Pride Live noted that Rodriguez (her wife and Pride Live CEO), was ill and could not be present. “We are so thankful to the community for welcoming the new kids on the block,” she said. Noting that the visitor center is “the first LGBTQ+ visitor center within the national parks” she observed that “Diana and I loved national parks and we’ve been to many, many of them. But we didn’t see people like us.” She noted that she and Rodriguez reached out to Village Preservation from the get-go, because “we didn’t want to just be another location. We wanted to have our roots ingrained in the community.”
Charles Fitzgerald and Kathy Cerick
The Regina Kellerman Award, named for Village Preservation’s first executive director—went to the husband-and-wife team of Charles Fitzgerald and Kathy Cerick, who have transformed St. Mark’s Place from a dangerous bleak wasteland of crime and empty storefronts to a bustling stretch of quirky businesses and trees. Fitzgerald first moved to St. Marks in 1959, and when his roommate fled after waking up to find a rat eating crumbs off his beard, Fitzgerald not only took over the space but also, eventually, an empty storefront. That storefront became Bowl and Board, where Fitzgerald sold woodwork when he wasn’t teaching English. Over the years, he and Cerick fostered other businesses along St. Mark’s and started planting trees. Today they are the landlords of several Saint Mark’s Place properties, refusing chain stores and actively seeking the success of their unique tenants, such as the Village Works bookstore downstairs at #12—and the couple plough their profits into a 15,000-acre nature preserve they’ve been assembling in Maine.
Fitzgerald described the award as the culmination of a life’s work. Acknowledging he and Cerick had worked hard, he credited the renewed vibrancy of St. Mark’s to “the real heroes”—the trees that brought birds and life back to a once-desolate strip, at one point even hosting a flock of escaped green cockatoos. “The whole neighborhood is now alive,” Fitzgerald declared with pride.
