Summary: The architectural innovation of New York City’s historic armories was not their medieval, fortress-like design or their ornamented vestibules, but the steel trusses of their purpose-built drill halls. In addition to indoor drilling practice, these spaces were historically used for public events, including art and technology fairs, sports, and music, serving an important role in Victorian social life. Today, these buildings rarely serve military purposes, risking the loss of this place-based history. To preserve the City’s historic armories, many of these structures have been readapted into community-facing centers, once again serving as local hubs for arts, culture, entertainment, and recreation.

Charlotte Crum recently earned her MS in Historic Preservation from Columbia University and is currently serving as Program Coordinator with the Historic Properties Fund at the New York Landmarks Conservancy. She has also contributed to the Historic American Buildings Survey as an Architectural Historian and is passionate about facilitating community engagement with historic and cultural resources.

Christina Hurtado-Pierson

“Pushing the Boundaries: Lillian Washburn’s Shifting Personas on the American Stage”

Few things are more American than our impulse to define and redefine our identity as we see fit. Actress Lillian Washburn embraced her ability to move across the borders of race and gender in Gilded Age America to build a decades-long career. The daughter of a white American showman and a Mohawk singer, Lillian traversed the nation from 1870 to 1910, playing white ingénues, newsboys, and Indian maidens. From her first performances as a character impersonator to her final burlesque tours with the Columbia Amusement Company, Lillian constantly repositioned herself to reflect the changing landscape of American popular culture.

Christina Hurtado-Pierson is a PhD candidate in History at Stony Brook University. Her work explores the relationship between technology, business, and cultural production in the Gilded Age entertainment industry.

Sam Simons

Summary: With the wildly successful New York City premiere of the “white slavery” film Traffic in Souls (1913) as a departure point, this research investigates how Progressive Era cinematic staging of “white slave” figures was informed by Victorian-era American visual culture. I anchor this artistic lineage in Hiram Powers’s sculpture The Greek Slave and its stage adaptation as Model Artiste shows, a sub-type of tableaux vivants that scandalized the public with semi-nude performers. These artworks sparked fierce public debates over displays of nudity, racialized erotic spectacle, and virtuous voyeurism—all of which set the stage for early American cinema.

Sam Simons is a master’s student at Bard Graduate Center, specializing in Public Humanities, Digital Humanities, and Museum Studies. Their research examines how erotic labor finds material and narrative expression in museum and archival collections.

Kate Singh

Summary: In a midwife’s bag tucked inside a closet, Anna Michaelson (1862–1941) left behind a remarkable archive of ledgers, birth certificates, and letters, now preserved at the Center for Jewish History. This project uses her papers to examine childbirth on New York’s Lower East Side at the turn of the twentieth century, when birth was shifting from a community-based practice to a medicalized one. While reformers cast immigrant midwives as a public danger, Michaelson’s records reveal a trusted caregiver embedded in neighborhood life. Paired with municipal and census records, the project reconstructs a broader midwife workforce and argues that modern obstetrics advanced by rendering women’s medical labor less visible, even as it remained essential.

Kate Singh (she/her) is an MA student in Biography and Memoir and an Advanced Certificate candidate in Public Scholarship at The Graduate Center, CUNY. A former classroom teacher and educator, she earned her BA in English and Religious Studies from Washington University and her MA in Humanities from New York University. Her research focuses on the history of childbirth in the United States, with particular attention to midwives and the ways their knowledge and authority were reshaped by medicalization and public health reform. For her capstone, she is developing a digital project that traces immigrant midwives’ work on Manhattan’s Lower East Side through archival records, neighborhood geography, and the city’s changing systems of care and regulation.

SESSION 2 – May 5, 2026

Qizhen Chen (Chi- jen Chen)

“Life, Death, and the Immigrant City: Funerary Architecture in 19th-Century NY Lower East Side”

This presentation explores the significant social and cultural role of funeral architecture in late 19th-century New York’s immigrant communities. As massive immigration reshaped the city, sites associated with death, including funeral homes, religious buildings, and related institutions, became crucial places where immigrant groups negotiated identity, maintained traditions, and established a sense of belonging. By considering these spaces as part of the “living city,” it offers a new perspective on New York’s Victorian urban landscape, connecting historic preservation, immigrant experiences, and the social life of the built environment. It invites the everyone to reconsider how often-overlooked sites have shaped community.

My name is Qizhen Chen (Chi- jen Chen), a first-year Historic Preservation student at Columbia University. My work focuses on how architecture operates within social and cultural systems.

Jacob Kayen

Summary: This presentation explores the architectural and social evolution of four extant Greek Revival row houses at 135-141 Henry Street. Constructed beginning in 1835 on land formerly belonging to the Rutgers estate, these structures serve as a physical synecdoche of the Lower East Side’s transformation throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. While initially built for upper-middle-class merchants during New York’s maritime trade boom, the buildings transitioned to serve a diverse array of functions, including immigrant tenements, a Catholic convent, a parochial school, a synagogue, doctor’s office, and immigrant charity headquarters.

By analyzing the vernacular row house typology and renovations, this study highlights how these buildings adapted to the shifting socioeconomic needs of Irish, German, and Eastern European Jewish communities. Beyond historical narrative, the presentation addresses modern preservation challenges for non-profit and religious owners. I propose that rather than traditional landmarking, the use of preservation easements can protect the significant nineteenth-century fabric like the Flemish bond masonry and Greek Revival stoops, while allowing for the continued, lived-in adaptability that defines this Lower East Side vernacular.

Jacob Kayen is a dual MS candidate in Historic Preservation and Urban Planning at Columbia GSAPP, where he focuses on integrating historic fabric and diverse narratives into the contemporary built environment. His work combines experience as an archaeologist at Hadrian’s Villa near Rome and a former career in software engineering to advocate for historic spaces as vital components of modern landscapes.

Bethany Laskin

Summary: This presentation will explore the work of Mary Gannon and Alice Hands, the founders of the first known all-female architecture firm in the United States. Begun in 1894, the New York–based pair garnered the attention and admiration of New York’s architectural elite for their revolutionary design of a new style of tenement housing. But despite the acclaim, the young women struggled to navigate the male-dominated industry and see their vision realized. Although their story may have ended differently than they hoped, Gannon and Hands demonstrated a cleverness, tenacity, and boldness worthy of recognition.

Bethany Laskin began her research into Gannon and Hands while completing her MFA in Architectural History at the Savannah College of Art and Design and has presented her findings at two Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians’ conferences. Originally from Santa Barbara, California, she also holds a BFA in Interior Design from Samford University and currently resides in Washington, DC, where she works for the Cultural Landscape Foundation.

Deborah Wolfson

Summary: “Under Fire: Immigrant New York and How the Safety Infrastructure of Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Was Forged in Fire” explores the material legacy of the makers and labor activists who created the framework of New York’s regulatory safety net. The physical infrastructure of safety in New York City was built literally and legislatively by immigrant workers in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The proliferation of the roof tank water towers spurred the city’s vertical growth and remains a vital tool in fire safety and disease prevention. The regulatory remaking of New York and its building codes in the aftermath of the Triangle Factory fire shapes our built environment even now. Easily overlooked, this is the foundation that defines the skyline and shapes the architecture of the city.

Deborah Wolfson is a student at the CUNY Graduate Center, pursuing a master’s in New York Studies and Public Scholarship. Her work traces the history of immigration, labor, and social justice through New York streets and has been seen in the Dead Lady Show NYC, Nerd Nite NYC, and her history newsletter, Leaves of Glass.