Category Archives: News/Events

Greenpoint Walking Tour

Saturday, October 22, 2016
2:00-4:30 pm

Join veteran Brooklyn tour guide Norman Oder on a briskly-paced, wide-ranging introduction to the neighborhood, including historic blocks, converted historic buildings, commercial corridors, religious institutions, parks, and civic buildings. The tour will touch on industrial history, immigration (notably Greenpoint’s enduring Polish presence), and the current (and future) signs of gentrification.

This event is co-sponsored by Preservation Greenpoint and the Emerging Conservation Professionals Network of the American Institute for Conservation (AIC).

The tour is free, but space is limited. We will meet near the Greenpoint Avenue stop on the G train (exact meeting point will be sent upon RSVP).

Please RSVP to info@preservationgreenpoint.org to reserve your spot!

 

 

A Walk Through Audubon Park

Sunday, October 16, 2016

2:00—3:30 p.m.

Audubon Monument, 550 West 155th Street

The distinctive footprint that disrupts Manhattan’s grid west of Broadway between 155th and 158th Streets—the Audubon Park Historic District—did not come about by accident or from the demands of local topography. It unfolded from careful planning and alliances among like-minded property owners, whose social and political connections ensured that when progress swept up Manhattan’s west side, they would benefit.

Join neighborhood historian Matthew Spady for a leisurely walk through the architectural treasures in the Audubon Park Historic District on Sunday, October 16 from 2:00 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. The walk, sponsored by the Historic Districts Council, will begin at the Audubon Monument in Trinity Cemetery (155th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue) and from there wind through the historic district, ending at the historic row of twelve houses that John Leo and John Lilliendahl built on 158th Street between 1896 and 1898. The Historic Districts Council selected this row as one of its Six to Celebrate designations for 2016.

The cost of the walk is $10 for HDC friends, seniors or students, and $20 for non-members.

Participants may also pay at the start of the walk (cash only).

 

Monument to What?

Monument to What? will address the complicated history behind the monument to Dr. J. Marion Sims located in Central Park at 103rd and Fifth Avenue. In recent years calls for its removal have centered on the fact that it ignores how Sims exploited enslaved women for his medical research. Similar disputes are currently underway in cities across the nation in response to 18th, 19th and early 20th century monuments that celebrate slaveholders, racists, Confederate soldiers and corrupt politicians. Click here to learn more.

Monument to What? A Panel Discussion
Friday, October 7th, 2016 from 6:30-8:30 pm
Project: ARTSspace, 156 Fifth Ave. @ 20th St., Suite 308

Speakers:

  • Harriet A. Washington, author of Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present
  • Heather Butts, MA, JD, Health Policy Management Department, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health
  • Artist and designer Xenobia Baily
  • Laundromat Project 2016 Create Change Fellowship artists Vanessa Cuervo, Autumn Robinson, Rahviance Beme and Terence Trouillot
  • East Harlem Preservation founder, writer, and activist, Marina Ortiz

Monument to What? is organized by the Institute for Wishful Thinking as the final public event for the exhibition Making Progress. Closing celebration to follow panel discussion.

2016 Six to Celebrate Tours

Saturday, September 24, 11:00AM: East New York

Following up on the success of our first tour of East New York in the spring, HDC is pleased to offer a repeat tour of this fascinating corner of Brooklyn! East New York has certainly been the talk of the town lately, as the City moves forward to rezone the neighborhood, along with 14 others. However, East New York is also known for its rich and somewhat troubled history.  Join us for this tour, led by Farrah Lafontant, neighborhood resident and member of Preserving East New York, the newly formed civic group working to preserve the neighborhood’s built heritage. The tour will begin at the 75th Police Precinct Station and include visits to a Magistrates Court, the former site of the East New York Savings Bank, Maxwell’s Bakery and the Borden Dairy Company factory complex, which was recently heard by the Landmarks Preservation Commission for potential landmark status.

After the tour we will head to Arts East New York for a reception. The party will allow neighbors to learn more about PENY and the work they are doing in East New York. The party is free and open to the public, you do not have to attend the tour to attend the party.


Sunday, October 30, 11:30AM: Clay Avenue & Grand Concourse

Join us for a tour highlighting two very different historic districts in The Bronx! We will begin with a stroll through the charming Clay Avenue Historic District, a one-block stretch of remarkably intact and refreshingly unchanged rowhouses. Following this treasure of a block, the tour will loop back to the Grand Concourse Historic District to take in a smattering of Revival and Art Deco apartment buildings. This juxtaposition of small-scale, late 19th century rowhouses and large-scale, early 20th century apartment buildings will allow participants to compare and contrast trends in the development of middle-class housing a generation or so apart. The tour will end at another locally designated gem, the Andrew Freedman Home, located on the Grand Concourse at East 166th Street. The home has a colorful and unlikely origin story, having been built by millionaire philanthropist Andrew Freedman as a retirement facility for wealthy people who had lost their fortunes.

REGISTER


Sunday, October 30, 2:00PM:  East River Vistas: Architecture and Changing Lifestyles in Yorkville

Once home to bucolic farmland, the eastern edge of Yorkville was dotted with clapboard farmhouses and country houses before being transformed into an industrial factory hub at the turn of the 20th century. As immigrants settled in Yorkville, tenement buildings were constructed, and by the 1930s the area around East End Avenue was home to luxury apartments designed by elite architects. Join the Historic Districts Council and FRIENDS of the Upper East Side Historic Districts as we track this fascinating history of housing in eastern Yorkville with architectural historian and famed tour guide, Francis Morrone. Highlights will include East End Avenue, Gracie Square and Carl Schurz Park, model tenements such as the Cherokee Apartments, the idyllic rowhouses at Henderson Place and everything in between, including the largest white brick high-rise in the universe!

SOLD OUT


Support is provided in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and by the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. Additional support is provided by City Council Members Ben Kallos, Rosie Mendez, Mark Levine, Inez Dickens, Vincent Gentile, Corey Johnson, Stephen Levin, Margaret Chin, Dan Garodnick, and Rafael Salamanca and New York State Assembly Members Deborah Glick, Richard Gottfried, and Daniel O’Donnell.

NYSCA

DCLA

Advocacy in a Changing Lower East Side

Wednesday, August 10, 6:00PM

Join us for a tour of some of the highlights of one of Manhattan’s most historic and storied neighborhoods, the Lower East Side! The area has been experiencing rapid change in the form of large-scale development projects over the last decade. In the seeming blink of an eye, entire blocks have been demolished, leaving gaping holes in the landscape, while individual tenements have been replaced with glassy new condo buildings. Yet, its character-defining tenement architecture still exhibits the Lower East Side’s illustrious past as a dense immigrant enclave of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. To save a representative piece of this historic tableau, advocates have been working hard to preserve sections of the neighborhood so that its story might live on through its physical fabric. The tour will include the intact areas that are the subject of preservation focus, but will also explore its changing landscape.

Click here to register 

Yorkville: A Celebration of Home

Promo Image-sm

Scenes of Yorkville’s past (NYPL)

What was it like to live in Yorkville when 86th Street was known as German Broadway, when the smell of hops from the Ruppert and Ehret’s breweries filled the air, and when a stop at Paprika Weiss on 82nd Street preceded daily exercise at Sokol Hall? FRIENDS and the Historic Districts Council will celebrate Yorkville’s past while highlighting places that still offer a glimpse into this area’s rich immigrant history. The symposium will feature panels on Yorkville life and architecture, and cuisine from some of the neighborhood’s storied establishments.

Saturday, April 30th
10:00 a.m.

Bohemian National Hall
321 East 73rd Street

$15 friends / members, $20 non-members
To register, click here.

Performance by the Czech puppetry demonstration with the Czech American Marionette Theatre

Speakers include:

Majda Kallab Whitaker – Independent scholar and cultural historian contributing to the development of the Dvořák Room at Bohemian National Hall, a Board Member of the Dvořák American Heritage Association and the Bohemian Benevolent & Literary Association

Alexandra Kelly – Manager of Outreach Services and Adult Programming at the New York Public Library, and developer and director of the NYPL’s Community Oral History Project

Edward Kasinec – Born and reared in the post-war Czech, Slovak and Rusyn communities of Yorkville, serves as a Research Scholar at the Harriman Institute, Columbia University and since 2015 as Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University

Thomas Pryor – A native Yorkville resident, storyteller and author of I Hate the Dallas Cowboys – tales of a scrappy New York boyhood

Peter Walsh – Longtime Irish resident of Yorkville, writer, and musician

Irene Mergl – A lifelong Yorkville resident and member of the Sokol Hall, where she serves as 1st Vice President and Historian

Vít Hořejš – Co-founder of the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre, who showcases traditional Czech marionettes, many of which were discovered in Yorkville’s Jan Hus Presbyterian Church

Gregory Dietrich – preservation consultant and proprietor of Gregory Dietrich Preservation Consulting, graduate of Columbia University’s Historic Preservation program, and an Advisor to the Historic Districts Council

 

Co-Sponsored by the Friends of the Upper East Side Historic Districts

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and Council Member Benjamin Kallos.