Too few know that the first permanent settlers of what is today Greenwich Village, and the surrounding neighborhoods of the East Village, Lower East Side, and SoHo, were former African slaves of the New Netherland colony who formed the first free black settlement in North America. Starting in 1643, just over two dozen former slaves were granted land in an area which would come to be known as “the land of the blacks” north of the New Amsterdam settlement in the southern tip of Manhattan. Among the first half dozen of these and the first woman was a widow named ‘Marycke,’ who was granted land in what would today be the western edge of Washington Square. She and the twenty-seven other freed Africans who won land grants north of the Dutch colony had to fight off Native American raids and try to cultivate rugged, hilly, swampy land. ‘Marycke’ was not only the first independent female settler of the ‘land of the blacks’ (a second widow was granted land four years later), but was, along with four other Africans, the first settlers of what would today be called Greenwich Village, and the very first in what is today the Greenwich Village Historic District.

75 1/2 Bedford Street, 1948 Few people are as closely associated with Greenwich Village as Millay. Perhaps that’s because the neighborhood appears right in her name – her middle name, St. Vincent, honored the hospital located on West 11th Street where her uncle’s life was saved just before she was born. The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet was known for her passionate writing and her advocacy of free love, which made her right at home in the Greenwich Village of the early 20th century. She lived in various locations throughout the Village starting in 1917, but most famously at 75 ½ Bedford Street, ‘the narrowest house in the Village’ (a location also indelibly connected to her in the popular mind, perhaps because of her poem “my candle burns at both ends”). Thought of as the embodiment of the “new woman” in the 1920s, she wrote of love for both men and women, and combined modernist and traditional forms in her poetry.

Abbott’s photography, especially her Depression-era, WPA-funded book Changing New York, crystalized the image of New York in the mind of much of the world as a place of dynamic but fragile beauty. First trained as a sculptor, it was during her time in Europe as Man Ray’s assistant that she began to pursue photography. In 1929, Abbott returned to the United States and began her career-defining photo-documentation of New York City. She lived in a loft here with her partner, the noted art critic Elizabeth McCausland, from 1935 until 1965.

Known as “Battling Bella,” the former congresswoman (1920-1998) and leader of the Women’s movement made her home at 2 Fifth Avenue in the Village. She, Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, and Shirley Chisholm founded the National Women’s Political Caucus. Her first successful run for Congress in 1970 used the slogan “A Woman’s Place is in the House – the House of Representatives.” She was known as much for her ardent opposition to the Vietnam War and her support for the Equal Rights Amendment, gay rights, and the impeachment of President Nixon as for her flamboyant hats. She ran unsuccessfully for the United State Senate and Mayor of New York City. 2 Fifth Avenue was also home to Edie Windsor. Windsor (1929-2017) may have done more than any single individual to advance the cause of gay marriage in the United States. Her 2013 Supreme Court case was the first legal victory for gay marriage in the highest court in the land, striking down the ‘Defense of Marriage’ Act and forcing the federal government and individual states to recognize same-sex marriages legally performed in other U.S. states and countries. This led directly to the 2015 Supreme Court decision recognizing gay marriage nationally. Windsor had sued to have the federal government to recognize her marriage to longtime partner Thea Speyer, which had been legally performed in Canada. Windsor met Speyer at Portofino Restaurant at 206 Thompson Street in Greenwich Village in 1963. In the 1950s and ’60s, Portofino was a popular meeting place and hangout for lesbians. Speyer and Windsor lived at 2 Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village until their respective deaths in 2009 and 2017.

Born into a financially successful family, Emma Lazarus became an advocate for poor Jewish refugees and helped establish the Hebrew Technical Institute of New York to provide vocational training for destitute Jewish immigrants. As a result of anti-Semitic violence in Russia following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, many Jews immigrated to New York, leading Lazarus, a descendant of German Jews, to write extensively on the subject. In 1883 she wrote her best-known work, the poem “The New Colossus,” to raise funds for the construction of the Statue of Liberty. In 1903, more than fifteen years after her death, a drive spearheaded by friends of Lazarus succeeded in getting a bronze plaque of the poem, now so strongly associated with the monument, placed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. It includes the famous lines: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Marianne Moore is considered one of the pioneers of 20th-century modernist poetry. Her early writings attracted the attention of such luminaries as Ezra Pound and T.S. Elliot, quickly catapulting her to literary prominence. In addition to publishing numerous award-winning and popular collections of poetry, she became the editor of the groundbreaking Greenwich Village literary magazine The Dial during what was considered the zenith of its influence from 1925 to 1929. When she first moved to New York in 1918 with her mother, they settled into an apartment in a townhouse at 14 St. Luke’s Place. With success, she moved on to a comfortable apartment in a middle-class apartment building at 35 West 9th Street (both of which still stand) before eventually moving to Brooklyn – pioneering an arc which many artists and writers followed.

Moore is considered one of the pioneers of 20th-century modernist poetry. Her early writings attracted the attention of such luminaries as Ezra Pound and T.S. Elliot, quickly catapulting her to literary prominence. In addition to publishing numerous award-winning and popular collections of poetry, she became the editor of the groundbreaking Greenwich Village literary magazine The Dial during what was considered the zenith of its influence from 1925 to 1929. When she first moved to New York in 1918 with her mother, they settled into an apartment in a townhouse at 14 St. Luke’s Place. With success, she moved on to a comfortable apartment in a middle-class apartment building at 35 West 9th Street (both of which still stand) before eventually moving to Brooklyn – pioneering an arc which many artists and writers followed.

Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) was a family planning activist who is credited with popularizing the term “birth control,” a sex educator, writer, and nurse. Sanger began working as a visiting nurse in the slums of the East Side. One of 11 children, she helped deliver several of her siblings and saw her mother die at 40, in part from the strain of childbirth. She became a vocal proponent of birth control, which was illegal in the United States. She opened the first birth control clinic in the United States in Brooklyn, for which she was arrested, though her court cases on this and other charges led to the loosening of laws around birth control. One of the clinics she ran was located at 17 West 16th Street, just north of Greenwich Village, and she lived at 346 West 14th Street and 39 5th Avenue in the Greenwich Village Historic District. Sanger established the organizations that evolved into today’s Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

While Cather is most noted as a chronicler of life on the American frontier, she, in fact, spent much of her life living, and writing, in Greenwich Village. Her novels My Antonia, O Pioneers!, and The Song of the Lark are considered literary classics, embedding in the public’s mind an image of the simple but challenging life on the American Great Plains. Cather lived from 1906 until her death in 1947 in Greenwich Village. She was an editor at McClure’s Magazine where she met a proofreader named Edith Lewis with whom she would eventually share her home and life. She first lived in a since-demolished house at 60 Washington Square South (just outside the Greenwich Village Historic District, and now the site of the NYU Kimmel Center) before moving to an apartment at 82 Washington Place. From 1913 to 1927 they lived in a house at 5 Bank Street (since demolished), during which time she won the Pulitzer Prize for her World War I novel One of Ours.

Willa Cather is most noted as a chronicler of life on the American frontier, she, in fact, spent much of her life living, and writing, in Greenwich Village. Her novels My Antonia, O Pioneers!, and The Song of the Lark are considered literary classics, embedding in the public’s mind an image of the simple but challenging life on the American Great Plains. Cather lived from 1906 until her death in 1947 in Greenwich Village. She was an editor at McClure’s Magazine where she met a proofreader named Edith Lewis with whom she would eventually share her home and life. She first lived in a since-demolished house at 60 Washington Square South (just outside the Greenwich Village Historic District, and now the site of the NYU Kimmel Center) before moving to an apartment at 82 Washington Place. From 1913 to 1927 they lived in a house at 5 Bank Street (since demolished), during which time she won the Pulitzer Prize for her World War I novel One of Ours.

These five notorious women all lived, at least temporarily, in the same spot in the Greenwich Village Historic District — the notorious Women’s House of Detention, or its predecessor, the Jefferson Market Prison, both located on the site of the present-day Jefferson Market Garden at Greenwich Avenue and 10th Street. In 1927, Mae West was jailed in the Jefferson Market Prison after being arrested on obscenity charges for her performance in her Broadway play “Sex” (just five years earlier, West got her big break in Greenwich Village with a starring role in the play “The Ginger Box” at the since-demolished Greenwich Village Theater on Sheridan Square). Not long after West’s internment at the Jefferson Market Prison, the jailhouse was demolished to make way for the supposedly more humane, Art Deco-style and WPA-mural adorned Women’s House of Detention. Ethel Rosenberg was held in the Women’s House of Detention in the early 1950s during her trial for espionage and before her execution (Rosenberg also lived at 103 Avenue A in the East Village, which still stands, and her memorial service was held at the Sigmund Schwartz Gramercy Park Chapel at 152 Second Avenue, which has been demolished). Dorothy Day was held there in 1957 for refusing to participate in a mandatory nuclear attack drill in 1957. Valerie Solanas, author of the S.C.U.M. (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto was held here in 1968 after shooting Andy Warhol (Solanas was known to sleep on the streets of Greenwich Village, to sell copies of the SCUM Manifesto on the streets of Greenwich Village, and by some accounts lived for a time at a flophouse on West 8th Street, now the upscale Marlton Hotel). In 1970, Black Panther Angela Davis, then on the F.B.I’s Ten Most Wanted fugitives list, was held here after her arrest in a Midtown hotel following claims she aided in the murder and kidnapping of a judge in California. Davis was no stranger to Greenwich Village, having attended the Little Red Schoolhouse just a half-dozen blocks to the south of the prison. The Women’s House of Detention was demolished in 1974.

Miné Okubo was a Japanese-American artist best known for her 1946 book Citizen 13660, in which she recounts her experience in a Japanese-American internment camp. The book was one of the first widely-circulated personal accounts of the repression and indignities faced by over 100,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II, and is considered to this day one of the most affecting pieces about that chapter in American history. After the outbreak of World War II in Europe, Okubo began working for the Works Progress Administration’s art programs in San Francisco. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 called for the imprisonment of thousands of Japanese and Japanese-Americans living on the west coast. Mine and her brother Toku were relocated to internment camps in San Bruno, California and then to Utah, where they lived in harsh conditions with about nine thousand other Japanese-Americans. Okubo documented her experience at the camp in her sketchbook, recording images of the humiliation and everyday struggles of internment. When she was freed from the camp, Mine moved to New York City, residing at 17 East 9th Street. There she completed her work turning her sketchbook into Citizen 13660, named for the number assigned to her family unit. Citizen 13660 is considered a classic of American literature and a forerunner of the graphic novel and memoir.

Throughout her life, Crystal Eastman was a prolific advocate for women’s rights. Her 1910 report ‘Work Accidents and the Law’ resulted in the first workers’ comp law, which she drafted herself. She co-founded the National Woman’s Party with Alice Paul and Lucy Burns and during the First World War helped found the Women’s Peace Party. She was also a member of the Heterodoxy Club. In 1917, she created The Liberator, a radical journal of politics, art, and literature, with her younger brother Max. The Liberator was based at 138 West 13th Street and they lived together in the building at 27 West 11th Street. Eastman died in 1928 and has since been called one of the most neglected leaders in United States History, having disappeared from historical memory for 50 years after her death.

Djuna Barnes was born in 1892. She first came to Greenwich Village in 1915, becoming part of the growing ‘bohemian’ community. Barnes shared an apartment on Greenwich Avenue with Berenice Abbott, Kenneth Burke, and Malcolm Cowley. She was involved with the Provincetown Players, was a member of the radical feminist Heterodoxy Club, and was openly bisexual, having many affairs with both men and women. She left the Village in 1921, for Paris. There, she lived with her lover, Thelma Wood, was part of Natalie Barney’s inner circle, developed her close relationship with Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and met James Joyce. In 1936, she published Nightwood, now her most famous work. Although it was well-reviewed, it did not sell, and Barnes made almost no financial profit from it. She began relying upon her friends for financial assistance and continued to drink heavily. After a suicide attempt in 1939 and a brief stint in Arizona, she finally returned to New York and the Village. She moved into 5 Patchin Place in 1941, where she wrote ‘The Antiphon,’ which was only performed for the first time in 1962, in Stockholm. She became a recluse, living out the last forty-two years of her life at Patchin Place. E. E. Cummings, who lived at 4 Patchin Place, was known to check up on her by shouting through his window: ‘Are you still alive, Djuna?’ She died in 1982, the last surviving English-language modernist.

Born in 1930, Lorraine Hansberry was a playwright and activist most commonly associated with Chicago, despite attending school and living much of her life in Greenwich Village. In 1953, she married Robert Nemiroff, and they moved to an apartment at 335-337 Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. It was during this time that she wrote A Raisin in the Sun, the first play written by a black woman to be performed on Broadway. The play brought to life the challenges of growing up on the segregated South Side of Chicago, telling the story of a black family’s challenges in trying to buy a house in an all-white neighborhood. Hansberry used the proceeds from Raisin to purchase the townhouse at 112 Waverly Place. Hansberry separated from Nemiroff in 1957 and they divorced in 1964, though they remained close until her death. It was revealed in later years that Hansberry was a lesbian, and had written several anonymously published letters to a lesbian magazine, The Ladder, discussing the struggles of a closeted lesbian. Sadly, she died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 34.

Born in 1930, Lorraine Hansberry was a playwright and activist most commonly associated with Chicago, despite attending school and living much of her life in Greenwich Village. In 1953, she married Robert Nemiroff, and they moved to an apartment at 335-337 Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. It was during this time that she wrote A Raisin in the Sun, the first play written by a black woman to be performed on Broadway. The play brought to life the challenges of growing up on the segregated South Side of Chicago, telling the story of a black family’s challenges in trying to buy a house in an all-white neighborhood. Hansberry used the proceeds from Raisin to purchase the townhouse at 112 Waverly Place. Hansberry separated from Nemiroff in 1957 and they divorced in 1964, though they remained close until her death. It was revealed in later years that Hansberry was a lesbian, and had written several anonymously published letters to a lesbian magazine, The Ladder, discussing the struggles of a closeted lesbian. Sadly, she died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 34.

In post-World War II America (and indeed much of the industrialized world), traditional older cities were considered anachronisms, ready to be replaced by highway-laced suburbs and radically rebuilt with tall towers surrounded by open space. The dense but low-scale, haphazard, sometimes antiquated pre-war city was considered a breeding ground for crime, poor health, decay, and inevitable decline. In response to this, urban planners like Robert Moses ordered the large-scale demolition of older sections of cities to be replaced or bisected by new motorways and identical complexes of “towers-in-a-park.” But one unlikely Greenwich Village resident saw the folly in this worldview, and not only challenged it, but arguably changed the fundamental way in which we thought about what makes cities work. Jane Jacobs was a writer who lived at 555 Hudson Street and noticed not only that the urban planners’ vision of the city not staunched its decay, it actually seemed to hasten it. Neighborhoods subject to “urban renewal” didn’t renew, but seemed to disintegrate, as longtime residents were pushed out and the fabric which held communities together – local institutions, common cultural touchstones, and the unique sense of place – were destroyed as part of the process. Observing what she called the “sidewalk ballet” outside her window on Hudson Street, Jacobs wrote in her highly influential 1961 tome “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” that keys to urban success were a vibrant and active mixture of uses, “eyes on the street” and engaged people at the ground level whose presence deterred crime or decay, spontaneity rather than overly proscribed planning, renewal and reuse of historic buildings which carry meaning for local communities, and giving local communities a voice in their futures. Jacobs and her book led to a fundamental rethinking of what cities needed and what people wanted in their built environment, and her observations proved remarkably spot on. Jacobs’ writings and principles informed everything from land use approval processes in cities throughout the world to the shape of new developments, big and small, around the globe. And in the 58 years since her book, the kind of human-scaled, historic, mixed-use neighborhoods Jacobs touted have become amongst the ‘hottest’ and most desirable places to live in the country.

The French-born novelist, short-story writer, and diarist Anaïs Nin moved to the top floor skylight studio at 215 West 13th Street with her husband Hugh Guiler in September 1940. She described the room in her diary: “Five flights up. A very large, high-ceilinged room, half of the ceiling an inclined skylight, the whole length of it, twelve windows in all. A small kitchen, with barely enough room for stove and icebox. A small bathroom. A door opening on a back of a factory, but one can smell the Hudson when there is a breeze.” After struggling to publish her fiction, Nin purchased a printing press, Gemor Press, at 17 East 13th Street. Here she printed her own books, which incorporated Guiler’s artwork under the name Ian Hugo.

According to the Susan Butler’s book East to Dawn: The Life of Amelia Earhart, by the 1920s, Amelia Earhart was developing a name for herself as a pilot, a writer in Cosmopolitan, and icon of female ambition. Nevertheless, she maintained a strong connection to social work, which was understood as the ideal profession for smart and capable women. Before becoming the first woman to fly across the Atlantic in June of 1929, Earhart wrote to Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch, the head of Greenwich House at 27 Barrow Street, to see if she could become a member of the settlement house’s staff. Simkhovitch agreed, and from 1928 until 1929, Earhart lived and worked at this location. Unlike the other residents, who were required to invest themselves more deeply in the house’s mission, Earhart was allowed to use the building as a temporary landing place as she pursued her other avenues of work. Nevertheless, over the course of her year living here, she developed a close relationship with Simkhovitch and her husband Vladimir, spoke at the children’s annual club council awards dinner, presented a trophy to the Greenwich House basketball team when it defeated the Denison House, and became a member of the committee for the children’s theater. Living here also gave her the opportunity to meet a slew of the leading social thinkers of the time, who passed through the settlement house to attend conferences and see the city.

The highly esteemed actress, teacher and author Uta Thyra Hagen (1919-2004), had one of the longest and most impressive acting careers in American theater. Born in Göttingen, Germany, she and her family moved to the United States when she was seven years old. She met her future husband Herbert Berghof in the 1947 Broadway production of The Whole World Over, after which she joined the Herbert Berghof (HB) Studio, at 120 Bank Street, as a teacher. She won her first Tony Award in 1951 as Georgie Elgin in Clifford Odets’ The Country Girl, and her second in the original role of Martha in the 1962 Broadway premiere of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, for which she also won the London Critics Award. A brazen actor, teacher, advocate, and theater icon who refused to participate in the witch-hunts of the McCarthy era, she was placed on the Hollywood blacklist for a number of years in the 1950s. She was the author of best-selling books including Respect for Acting and A Challenge for the Actor, and was featured in the 2001 documentary Uta Hagen’s Acting Class. Notable students of Hagen include Katie Finneran, Liza Minnelli, Whoopi Goldberg, Jack Lemmon, Debbie Allen, F. Murray Abraham, Rita Gardner, Steve McQueen, Amanda Peet, Marlo Thomas, Jerry Stiller, Charles Nelson Reilly, and Hal Holbrook. Over the course of her acting career, she received nominations for the Daytime Emmy Award and for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, and won the Obie Award for her title role in Nicholas Wright’s 1996-1997 production of Mrs. Klein. In 1981-1983, Hagen was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame and the Wisconsin Theater Hall of Fame. Three years later, Hagen was awarded the Mayor’s Liberty Medal along with The John Houseman Award and The Campostella Award for distinguished service in 1987. She won her third Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1999, and in March 2003, Hagen was awarded the National Medal of Honor for the Arts, for which she was honored at the White House.

During her time as First Lady, from 1933 to 1945, Eleanor Roosevelt changed the role from the passive hostess to active political leader and became an outspoken politician in her own right. She held press conferences on important issues such as women’s rights and children’s causes and led marches and protests. After the death of President Franklin Roosevelt in 1945, she resided at 29 Washington Square West until 1949. She later became a U.S. delegate to the United Nations, chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights, and is widely regarded as one of the most renowned civil rights activists of the 20th Century.

Louise Bryant was known as a daring and path-breaking journalist, feminist, and political activist, who chronicled and expressed sympathy for the Russian Revolution while engaged in tumultuous relationships with fellow journalist John Reed and Eugene O’Neill. Her coverage of the Bolshevik Revolution including writings about Red leaders such as Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky was carried extensively by Hearst newspapers across the U.S. and Canada. Her coverage was collected and published in 1918 as Six Red Months in Russia, further cementing the influence she had in shaping the public’s perception and understanding of the revolutionary activities in Europe. Not content to limit herself to her writing, she embarked upon a speaking tour across the country denouncing the U.S. joining other western powers in armed intervention against the Bolsheviks, and supporting the revolution. Byrant’s advocacy was not limited to support for the Soviet cause, however. In the United States, she was a militant suffragist, having been jailed for her activities in support of women’s right to vote. In Greenwich Village, she lived with her husband John Reed at 1 Patchin Place and became an integral part of the cultural scene which revolved around the radical publication The Masses as well as the Heterodoxy Club and the Provincetown Players.