West Village Home of Civil Rights Giants Moves Closer to Landmark Status

A Manhattan house that civil rights icons called home in the 1800s, located at 50 W. 13th St., may acquire landmark status. This is according to Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, which has mounted a campaign to preserve the house since 2020, when “longtime co-owner” Edith O’Hara died.

”The city has at last taken the first initial steps toward protecting this historic site, so strongly connected to our city and country’s often-forgotten Black history, civil rights history, the women’s suffrage movement, and of course our theater and cultural history,” Village Preservation Executive Director Andrew Berman said.

Specifically, the site has been “calendared” by the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission, which means that the city agency must hold a public hearing and a vote on granting it full landmark status within a year. Given the high rate of approvals for calendared sites, Village Preservation is optimistic. Calendaring provides certain protections for a building prior to official landmark designation.

Politicians such as City Council Member Erik Bottcher and then-Borough President Gale Brewer also took up the campaign’s mantle in 2020, and Village Preservation notes that it has received thousands of letters calling for the home to receive landmark designation status.

The nonprofit explains that Sarah Smith Tompkins Garnet lived at 50 W. 13th between 1866 and 1874. Garnet became the first Black woman to become the principal of a NYC public school–located in Manhattan–in 1863. She retired from teaching in 1900. She was also a suffragette and a seamstress, a business that she took up in the 1880s, after moving to Brooklyn. Around that time, Garnet founded the Equal Suffrage League, and later ended up being the superintendent of the suffrage department for the National Association of Colored Women.

The owner of the home between 1858 and 1884, which encompassed the period Garnet lived there, was Jacob Day. An entrepreneur working in the catering business, Day was described in contemporaneous reports as a major figure in the city’s Black community. For example, he was the treasurer of the legendary Abyssinian Baptist Church, which was then still located in its original site at 166 Waverly Place. Day was also regarded as a civil rights campaigner and a slavery abolitionist.

Indeed, the Abyssinian Baptist Church was widely linked to the Underground Railroad. Some have speculated that a hidden passageway in the W. 13th St. home was used to that end, as well.

The house became a commercial space until 1958, when it began a long second life as a hub of the drama community, with the opening of the Washington Players Studio. It went on to become a staple of the percolating Off-Off-Off Broadway scene.

In 1972, the aforementioned co-owner Edith O’Hara started the E. 13th St. Repertory Company in the building, which persisted until she passed away. She hosted Israel Horovitz’s Line in 1974, which went on to become the longest-running play in Off-Off-Broadway history (Horovitz is also the father of the Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz, better known as Ad-Rock).

O’Hara also served as a producer of the musical Boy Meets Boy, which was one of NYC’s first dramatic explorations of gay marriage. It ended up being an Off-Broadway smash.