Springtime is a Great Time to Dive into Village History 

By Andrew Berman

Village Preservation recently released a raft of wonderful new resources that highlight and bring to life the Village’s rich history. They join a robust collection we maintain of historic images, interactive maps, oral histories, historic markers, and much more.

One Hundred Years of Jazz In the Village. Our new interactive Jazz Map of Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo shows a century of groundbreaking performance venues, celebrated artists’ residences, and influential recording studios that helped profoundly shape this most American of art forms. With over 100 entries showing locations from the 1920s to today, you’ll be able to explore the rise of swing, Bebop, hard jazz, and every style in between. You can search by decade, type of music, type of location, and more. Billie Holiday’s first performances, Charlie Parker and Charles Mingus’ residences, legendary venues and insider holes-in-the-wall can all be found here, and you can create your own local jazz tour to share with others.

Historic Image Collections: Village Halloween Parade and the East Village in the 1980s. Village Preservation maintains an online archive of over 5,600 historic images in over 70 collections, covering the history of our neighborhoods and other New York City landmarks from the late 18th to the early 21st centuries. Our two latest additions focus on the 1980s and two facets of neighborhood history as they teetered on the edge of momentous change.

Our new Scott Laperruque collection shows his images of the Village Halloween parade from 1983 -1987, just after it moved from the more informal affair that wound its way through West Village streets to the larger stage of Sixth Avenue ─ but before it became the internationally recognized largest Halloween parade in the world. The images, taken by the 10th Street resident, show the joys as well as anxieties of the era, with costumes referencing Ronald Reagan, the threat of nuclear war, and the specter of AIDS.

Our new Peter Bennett collection was taken by the longtime resident who lived in the East Village from 1979 through 1988. He bartended by night and photographed the punks, street performers, vacant lots, abandoned buildings, artists, eclectic local businesses, and vibrant street life of the neighborhood. Emerging from an era of intense disinvestment and abandonment, the East Village in the 1980s was on a razor’s edge of creativity and chaos, artistry and anarchy. Bennett captured all this and more ─ including the Rolling Stones recording their Waiting on a Friend video and some of Keith Haring’s earliest street art works ─ from a deeply personal perspective reflecting his profound connection to the neighborhood and its colorful characters.

Plaque Honoring Sculptor Isamu Noguchi. Our 28th historic plaque marking the places where history was made in our neighborhood was unveiled in April at 52 West 10th Street, the former home of the groundbreaking sculptor, landscape architect, and furniture and set designer. We were joined by the Isamu Noguchi Museum to highlight the artist’s incredible work contributing to the landscape of New York as well as cities across the globe with prominent public art installations. His many collaborations over the years, with other artists such as Greenwich Village based “Picasso of Dance” Martha Graham, added to his legacy. Our other plaques have marked the homes of Jane Jacobs, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Allen Ginsberg, the former NAACP Headquarters and the Fillmore East, among other locations.

Oral Histories Cover 80 Years of Village Politics. Our latest oral histories feature two giants of the neighborhood with a collective 150 years of Village experience.

Carol Greitzer (1925-2026) moved to Greenwich Village in the 1950s. Inspired by the Adlai Stevenson presidential campaign, she was involved with what would become one of the most impactful local political organizations in New York City, Village Independent Democrats (VID). VID was founded to translate the Village’s spirit of progressive ideals and political reform into the local political landscape. In doing so, they ended Tammany Hall domination of local politics and ushered in a new era of more open and democratic local politics. Greitzer played a key role, winning a district leader position alongside fellow VIDer Ed Koch, dislodging the Tammany Hall machine, and eventually becoming the City Council representative for Greenwich Village from 1969-1991. She fought against Robert Moses. She fought to save Jefferson Market Library and the Public Theatre and to expand women’s rights and to remove traffic from Washington Square. Her oral history discussed all this and more as well as her personal recollections of campaigning for president with Bobby Kennedy.

Tony Hiss’ (b. 1941) memories of Greenwich Village go back 80 years, having lived in the same apartment on West 8th Street since 1947. Hiss is the author of 15 books, most recently Rescuing the Planet: Protecting Half the Land to Heal the Earth, and the award-winning The Experience of Place: A New Way of Looking at and Dealing With our Radically Changing Cities and Countryside. He was a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine for 30 years and has been a visiting scholar at New York University for over 25 years. Hiss has lectured around the world, consults on planning, place, biodiversity, and conservation issues, and is now at work on a new book, The Biosphere: A Biography.

Highlights from his oral history include memories of corresponding with his father, Alger Hiss ─ a government official accused of spying for the Soviet Union during the McCarthy-era Red Scare ─ during Alger’s incarceration, reflections on watching the Village change from his apartment window, and thoughts on how to tell the story of a neighborhood while looking both to the future and the past.

To access all of these, visit villagepreservation.org/newresources

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Andrew Berman is executive director of Village Preservation.