LW! is excited to welcome back one of our favorite guides to all things Central Park: Ron Korcak. Ron, a tremendously popular guide-of-guides and fount of knowledge about the park, will share--in one fun-filled evening-- his unique trove of Central Park secrets. Hidden messages, secrets of the sculptures, winks from the past, little known heros, […]
In this virtual tour with historian Lucie Levine, we’ll wind back the clock to when horses and horsepower reigned on the Upper West Side. We’ll discover Broadway’s Automobile Row and the Carriage Houses of West 58th Street. We'll visit buildings constructed in the 1890s along Amsterdam Avenue's “Stable Row”, which provided horses and carriages for […]
Join Landmark West! for this very special evening celebrating a truly landmark UWS institution. Herb Grosinger, in conversation with his daughter Liz Samuel, remembers more than half a century on and around Columbus Avenue. You won’t want to miss one family’s extraordinary journey from newly arrived immigrants to running a business during the Depression all […]
Wednesday, March 23, 2022 6:00-7:00pm via Zoom Revolutionary artist Mary Rogers Williams (1857—1907), a baker’s daughter, biked and hiked from the Arctic Circle to Naples, exhibited from Paris to Indianapolis, trained at New York’s Art Students League, chafed against art world rules that favored men, wrote thousands of pages about her travels and work, taught […]
The 20 years following the end of WWII marked a profound period of synergy and exchange between sculpture and architecture in the U.S. Leading modernist architects such as Gordon Bunshaft and Eero Saarinen turned to sculptors including Harry Bertoia, Alexander Calder, Richard Lippold, and Isamu Noguchi, to produce site-determined, large-scale commissions tailored for their buildings’ highly visible atriums, lobbies, plazas, and […]
Climb aboard for a history of the Hudson River and its local environs from Dr. Leslie Day, a 36-year resident of the 79th Street Boat Basin. As a young woman, she moved into the water-based community alone, eventually meeting her husband and raising their child at “the Basin.” She’ll share with us recollections and observations that are part of her soon-to-be-completed book River: Living on the Hudson – A Natural History. Leslie Day shares it all: from […]
Our FRIENDS on the Upper East Side have invited LANDMARK WEST! members for an evening with historian Lucie Levine and a virtual tour of many of Frederick Law Olmsted’s fabulous green spaces, both in New York and beyond. In addition to highlighting Prospect Park, Riverside Park and Fort Greene Park, she will dig deep into Olmsted’s life. She'll also […]
LW! is doing a little time traveling to explore the darker side of the development of Central Park. It is somewhat miraculous that the park even exists, as back in the 1850s real estate developers and politicians were just as cozy as today. Add in the nefarious reign of William Marcy "Boss" Tweed, notorious leader […]
What do the credit card, Oreo, and crossword puzzle have in common? All originated in New York City. From colonial times through the present day, first-of-their-kind achievements occurred in New York in every imaginable field, from the arts to sports, from business to social welfare. Author Laurie Lewis has tracked down an incredible collection of “firsts” for her […]
There is no book on San Juan Hill, the Westside neighborhood that was essentially erased in the 1950s by a sweep of urban renewal. For the past half-century, there has been little acknowledgment of it outside of references in “West Side Story,” the film that used the area's final days as a backdrop. The eastern and northern boundaries shift. The demographics are generalized. Various accounts describe this neighborhood of tenements, factories, shops, clubs and churches as “Hells Kitchen North” or “The Tenderloin.” It was also called a “Red Light District” or, most commonly, a “slum.” Regardless of the reality, the last epithet is the one that stuck, because after designating it a slum, the City of New York was allowed to take possession and "clear" San Juan Hill under the 1949 Housing Act. This maneuver displaced thousands of families in exchange for several internationally-renowned institutions. LANDMARK WEST! is proud to rebuild, block by block, the buildings and stories of the San Juan Hill community. The online San Juan Hill project has been launched with the support of a growing list of stakeholders. LW! especially thanks New York State Senator Brad Hoylman, former New York City Council Member Ben Kallos and the City Council’s Cultural Immigrant Initiative, who generously stepped in to support this body of research. We hope this project will serve as the foundation for a fuller history of San Juan Hill in the coming years, and we eagerly welcome community participation to more fully tell this story. We further hope that this effort will daylight the rich immigrant past of this once vibrant neighborhood and inform discussions about community, transparency, process, eminent domain and urban renewal across our resilient city. As preservationists, we recognize that once something is gone, it is gone for good. Hopefully, with this project, San Juan Hill will at least not be lost. Please be our guest as architectural historian Sarah Bean Apmann guides us through San Juan Hill, a neighborhood that there is only one way to visit...via history. LANDMARK WEST! will be joined for this special project launch by officials: New York State Senator Brad Hoylman City Council Member Gale Brewer This project for the Cultural Immigrant Initiative is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. Special thanks, as well, to the NYC Municipal Archives. TICKETS - FREE