EVENT: January Events from GVSHP
from the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, www.gvshp.org
Lectures are free, but reservations required. Please call 212-475-9585 x34 or email [email protected]
La Grange Terrace: A slide lecture with Thomas Gordon Smith
Thursday, January 18
6:00-7:30 pm
Wollman Auditorium, Cooper Union
51 Astor Place
La Grange Terrace, familiarly known as Colonnade Row, was one of the city’s most fashionable addresses, Lafayette Place, when it was built beginning in 1831. It was home to some of New York City’s most influential citizens, including the Astors and Vanderbilts. Originally nine Greek Revival houses with facades of giant order Corinthian columns, today only four houses remain, hinting dimly at their former grandeur. Thomas Gordon Smith, a classical architect who teaches at Notre Dame and practices widely, will speak about the social changes that prompted an expansion into the neighborhood and the new architectural and urbanistic expression which the Colonnade signaled. Lecture co-sponsored by the Cooper Union.
First Houses—A Monument Of The Past—A Model For The Future?:
A lecture and discussion with Warren Shaw
Tuesday, January 30
6:00-7:30 pm
Neighborhood Preservation Center
232 East 11th Street (btw. 2nd and 3rd Avenues)
The year 2006 marked the 70th anniversary of America’s first publicly sponsored housing for low-income residents—the landmarked First Houses in the East Village— which inaugurated the era of Urban Renewal. Since the late 1960s it has been fashionable to deride urban renewal as an aesthetic and sociological failure. But with real-estate inflation squeezing more and more Americans and with such bastions of affordable housing as Stuyvesant Town going “up-market,” it is time to reappraise the legacy—and the value—of public housing and urban renewal. Warren Shaw, Assistant Corporation Counsel in the Real Estate Litigation Division of the New York City Law Department and a specialist in urban design history, will speak about First Houses and what they mean to us today.