Brooklyn Arcadia: A Conversation with Author Andrew Garn
2023-11-08 18:30 - 20:00 (America/New_York)
Join Photographer and Author Andrew Garn for a Discussion of Brooklyn Arcadia, a New Book Highlighting Brooklyn’s Majestic Green-Wood Cemetery
Green-Wood Cemetery
500 25th Street
Brooklyn, New York 11232
(Enter at the Modern Chapel near the Main Entrance at Fifth Avenue and 25th Street)
Free Tickets Available Here
Green-Wood Cemetery draws nearly half a million visitors every year who marvel at its unique combination of art, history, and nature. Photographer and author Andrew Garn is one such visitor. Discovering a love for the cemetery—its stately monuments, complex history, and fascinating flora and fauna—during his almost daily walks, Garn began taking thousands of photographs documenting his explorations and discoveries.
Brooklyn Arcadia: Art, History, and Nature at Majestic Green-Wood, just published by Rizzoli, beautifully chronicles Garn’s observations in hundreds of stunning images taken primarily between 2020 and 2023. At once a celebration and an invitation, the book ranges from a consideration of Green-Wood’s natural landscape to a close look at its architecture, statuary, symbols, flora, fauna, and typography.

Join Garn in the Modern Chapel for a discussion of Brooklyn Arcadia. You’ll hear about his artistic process and how the book came to be, followed by an opportunity to ask questions.
This program is presented in partnership with The Green-Wood Historic Fund.

Victorian Carol Sing-Along Holiday Concert & Reception
2023-12-06 19:00 - 21:00
In Partnership with Friends of the Erben Organ at the Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral
261 Mott Street, New York, NY
Wednesday, December 6th
7:00 pm–9:00 pm
We are pleased to join the Friends of the Erben Organ for a merry evening of Victorian-era carols, seasonal music, and readings. Afterward, enjoy festive treats and the chance to see and hear the cathedral’s two historic pipe organs—including the 1868 Erben pipe organ—up close with Jared Lamenzo, Director of Music.
Tickets Available Here
VSNY Members: use code VICTORIAN for 50% off. All donations on top of ticket price will be matched with the Friends of the Erben Organ’s $25K Fall Matching Grant.
Nineteenth-century attire is encouraged!
(Image: “Christmas Eve” painting by J. Hoover & Son, 1878)

Max Beerbohm: The Price of Celebrity at the New York Public Library
2024-01-10 18:00 - 19:00
Enjoy an Exclusive Curator-Led Tour of Max Beerbohm: The Price of Celebrity
Wachenheim Gallery, New York Public Library
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building
476 Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street
New York, NY 10018
Tickets ($25/$20 for Members) Here!
Today we live in a world of celebrity culture, but celebrity became an international industry in the late 19th century, and the English artist and author Max Beerbohm (1872–1956) was at the center of it. From the 1890s through the 1920s, to be a celebrity meant the hope—and fear—of turning up in a drawing or a parody by “Max,” as he was known in England and the United States. His brilliant skewering of famous people in his visual caricatures and of their writing styles in his satirical works made him a celebrity himself. This was an identity he enjoyed at first, but later shrank from. In essays and fiction, he explored the price of achieving and maintaining celebrity status in human terms in ways that still resonate with us.
This exhibition, the first on Beerbohm in New York for half a century and featuring rarely seen items from the New York Public Library’s own collection as well as loans from private and institutional collections, maps the career of Beerbohm in relationship to the idea of celebrity, following him from his early days in the decadent circles of Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley through his late career as a radio performer on BBC broadcasts during World War II. Along the way, he knew, drew, and wrote about many other celebrities, from Henry James to Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw, and members of the British royal family.

📷 Dante Gabriel Rossetti in His Back Garden, illustration from The Poet’s Corner, 1904
📷 Self-caricature by Max Beerbohm, c. 1893

Walter Scott Lenox and American Belleek
2024-01-18 18:30 - 19:30
Online Talk! Curator Brian Gallagher Discusses the Exhibition Walter Scott Lenox and American Belleek at The Mint Museum
Tickets ($10/$5 for Members) Available Here
Brian Gallagher, Senior Curator of Decorative Arts at The Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina, will present noteworthy examples of art porcelain produced in late nineteenth-century Trenton, New Jersey, at the three factories—Ott & Brewer, Willets Manufacturing Company, and Ceramic Art Company—where Walter Scott Lenox (1859–1920) served sequentially as artistic director. Lenox was instrumental in developing a version of the eggshell-thin, ivory-colored porcelain first manufactured in the village of Belleek in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, but that achieved new aesthetic heights in the United States thanks to his vision and artistic talent. This subject is the focus of Gallagher’s exhibition, Walter Scott Lenox and American Belleek, on view at the Mint Museum until January 21, 2024.
Brian Gallagher joined the Mint Museum’s curatorial staff in 2007, and before then he was an assistant curator in the Department of European Art at the Detroit Institute of Arts. He has organized numerous exhibitions during his museum career on a variety of decorative arts topics. Recent projects include Classic Black: The Basalt Sculpture of Wedgwood and His Contemporaries (2020) and Portals to the Past: British Ceramics 1675–1825 (2016). He co-authored the catalogues associated with these two projects and was the sole author for Walter Scott Lenox and American Belleek (2023). Gallagher has an M.A. and an M.Phil. from the Bard Graduate Center, New York, and an M.S. in Library and Information Science from Drexel University, Philadelphia.

📷 Ceramic Art Company / Lenox, Incorporated, manufacturer; Depasse Manufacturing Company, silver mounts and overlay; Decanter Set, circa 1905-15, Belleek porcelain, glazed, decanter 6 11/16 x 6 5/8 in. Collection of Bob Cunningham.
📷 Ott and Brewer; Bowl, 1882-90, Belleek Porcelain with ivory glaze, polychrome enamels, and gilt decoration, 7 ¾ x 8 ¼ x 6 ½ in. Collection of Bob Cunningham.

Pregnancy in the Victorian Novel
2024-01-23 18:30 - 19:30
Online Talk! Livia Arndal Woods Discusses Pregnancy in British Literature
Tickets ($10/$5 Members) Here
Livia Arndal Woods will discuss her recent book, Pregnancy in the Victorian Novel, which argues that we need to be attuned to speculation and our own experiences of embodiment to read depictions of women’s reproductive capacity in nineteenth-century British literature as anything other than punishment. Victorian novels tend to avoid the direct representation of pregnancy except in cases of maternal immorality or immodesty. Without active resistance, we inherit and repeat pregnancy plots in which reproductive bodies are always already guilty.
Dr. Livia Arndal Woods (she/her/hers) earned a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center and is Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Springfield. Her research focuses on British Victorian literature and culture, women’s and gender studies, and the medical humanities.

📷 Illustration of a pregnant woman, with her abdomen sectioned to show the foetus, during the first (left), second (centre) and third (right) trimesters (top) and Illustration of a pregnant woman in repose (bottom). From An Improved System of Midwifery, by Wooster Beach (1794-1868), published in 1851.

La Amistad Mutiny and Long Island
2024-02-22 18:30 - 20:00
In-Person Talk! Historian Mia Certic Discusses How America’s First Civil Rights Case Emerged in Montauk
Bloomingdale School of Music
323 West 108th Street
New York, NY 10025
Tickets ($10/$5 Members) Here!!

In 1839, eight weeks after their dramatic mutiny, 49 trafficked African men aboard the schooner La Amistad dropped anchor off the coast of Montauk, desperate for fresh water and food. Instead of being helped, their ship was seized and they were transported to Connecticut as captives. These events would lead to an international diplomatic crisis and a series of momentous legal battles that brought into question basic tenets of American democracy and foreshadowed the Civil War. Mia Certic, executive director of the Montauk Historical Society, will talk about the Amistad case and how what happened on Long Island set the stage for what was to come.

📷 La Amistad anchored off Culloden Point in Montauk. Unknown artist. 1840. Watercolor. New Haven Museum.
📷 William H. Townsend. Amistad Survivors (l-r: Fuli, Marqu, and Pona). 1839. Library of Congress.

The Peculiar Story of Doesticks and the Fortunetellers
2024-03-07 18:00 - 19:30
In-Person Talk!
The Peculiar Story of Doesticks and the Fortunetellers

Rockwell Gallery at The Salmagundi Club
47 Fifth Avenue (at 12th Street)
New York, NY 10003
Free Tickets Here!!
Who knows what the future holds? Well, on March 7, we’re co-sponsoring a talk about 19th-century NYC fortune tellers with The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, the Salmagundi Club Library Committee, and Merchant’s House Museum! Author Marie Carter will introduce us to Q. K. Philander Doesticks, P.B. (real name, Mortimer Thomson), a reporter for The New-York Tribune who in 1857 investigated the fortune tellers of the Lower East Side and eventually wrote a book about them, The Witches of New York. When his articles were published in book form in 1858, they catalyzed a series of arrests that both scandalized and delighted the public. But Mortimer was guarding some secrets of his own, and in many ways, his own life paralleled the lives of the women he visited and vilified. This talk, in celebration of the release of Carter’s book Mortimer & the Witches: A Nineteenth-Century History of Fortune Telling (Fordham University Press), leads us into the world of Doesticks, who hobnobbed with literary luminaries of his time like Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, the wildly popular columnist Fanny Fern, and biographer James Parton. The talk will also examine some of the stories of those supposedly “evil” fortune tellers who showed up in the press in surprising ways.
Marie Carter is an New York City-based writer and tour guide who hails from Scotland. She works with Boroughs of the Dead, an NYC walking tour company that specializes in macabre, strange, and ghostly histories. Her most recent book, Mortimer and the Witches, will be published by Fordham University Press in March 2024. She is also the author of The Trapeze Diaries and Holly’s Hurricane, a historical novel set in the future.

📷 Madame Morrow’s Fortune Telling Cards, 1886, New-York Historical Society, The Liman Collection.
📷 Courtesy of Marie Carter and Fordham University Press.

Call for Proposals: Emerging Scholars 2024 Program
2024-03-11
Submissions Deadline EXTENDED: March 11th, 2024
Program Takes Place May 7th, 2024 in NYC, 6:00–7:30 pm
The Metropolitan (New York) Chapter of the Victorian Society invites university student historians and recent graduates to submit proposals by Monday, March 11, 2024, for its annual Emerging Scholars evening program on May 7, 2024. The nonprofit VSNY (vicsocny.org), founded in 1966, supports scholarship about every aspect of 19th-century and early 20th-century culture, including architecture, literature, theater, fine and decorative art, immigration, economics, politics, education, gender roles, reform movements, music, fashion, and food. Topics for recent event winners have included panoramic battlefield paintings, servants’ uniforms, and Black newspaperwomen.
For the May 7 program (6–7:30 pm), VSNY will invite three current students or recent grads to present their work at Greenwich Village’s Jefferson Market Library, in a 20-minute presentation and then field questions. Send 200-word proposals (preference given to American/New York topics) and CVs by March 8 to info@vicsocny.org. Speakers will receive a free 1-year VSNY membership ($40 value).
📷 – Past Victorian Society New York Emerging Scholar topics have included Gilded Age servants’ uniforms. (My Lady and My Lady’s Maid, 1871. Library of Congress.)

Titanic Discoveries: A Niece's Journey
2024-04-17 18:30 - 20:00
In-Person Talk! The Brothers Peracchio Aboard the RMS Titanic

Jefferson Market Library
425 6th Avenue
New York, NY 10011
Free Tickets Here!!
On April 14, 1912, the RMS Titanic hit an iceberg at 11:35 pm; within a few hours, it sank in the Atlantic Ocean off Newfoundland, taking 1,496 lives. Two of the victims were author Angelica Harris’ uncles-in-law, Alberto and Sebastiano Peracchio, who were waiters in one of the ship’s restaurants. Harris will lecture on her recent book, Titanic: The Brothers Peracchio–Two Boys and a Dream, the result of 40 years of research and a labor of love. She will discuss her archival discoveries and far-flung travels and will report on a recently uncovered secret: a twin of the Titanic’s Steinway piano, which traveled on a sister ship, the Olympic. Long believed lost after the Olympic’s retirement in 1935, the Steinway surfaced last year at a piano store in Britain. Lecturing with Ms. Harris will be Christopher Mulholland, an expert on the Olympic and Titanic who is a cofounder of the RMS Olympic Steinway Association, which plans to save the piano.
Angela-Filomena LoCascio, aka Angelica Harris, is a recent honors graduate of Fordham University, with a bachelor’s degree in social justice, feminist theory, and writing for publication and journalism. In addition to writing Titanic: The Brothers Peracchio: Two Boys and a Dream, she serves on the boards of three organizations dedicated to the legacy of the Titanic, including the Friends of the Titanic Memorial Lighthouse. Scholar Christopher Mulholland has researched his family’s service on ocean liners and created hand-drawn blueprints for the Olympic and Titanic.

📷 Alberto and Sebastiano Peracchio, c. 1912. Angelica Harris.
📷 The Titanic, 1911. Library of Congress.
📷 The Veranda Cafe and Palm Court of the Titanic, 1912. Library of Congress.

Finding Prospect Park
2024-05-05 11:00 - 13:00
Finding Prospect Park: A Historic Walking Tour
Prospect Park
Brooklyn, New York
Tickets Here ($20/$15)
Join the Victorian Society of New York and Historic Districts Council for a tour through the northern half of Prospect Park, Olmsted and Vaux’s masterpiece. A brief introduction to the park’s history and design will be provided while will investigate lost rustic and picturesque shelters and bridges, the marvelous “electric fountain,” the mysterious “Culvert Arch,” the park’s “Dairy,” the “braiding of the ways,” the still present but deteriorating Litchfield Villa, the circular yacht, and other sites and features of the original park. The main focus of the tour will be discovering lost features and why their loss matters. Some of these features are gone without a trace; others remain only as archaeological remnants. Some are largely intact but have been “lost” to the public for other reasons.
Your tour guide is VSNY’s own Jeremy Woodoff, who chairs our Preservation Committee. Jeremy is a city planner and historic preservationist currently serving on the Advisory Board of the Historic Districts Council as well as the VSNY Board, both of which are sponsoring this tour. During his 20-year employment at the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, Jeremy was responsible for setting up the Commission’s review procedures for work in scenic landmarks like Prospect Park and for reviewing all work proposed for the park by the Parks Department and the Prospect Park Alliance.
For those who register, a QR code will be available that will allow you to download a series of historic images to use on your cell phone or tablet during the tour. The tour leader will have a set of images that can be viewed as well.

📷 Prospect Park. Photo by Elizabeth Keegin Colley. Courtesy of Prospect Park Alliance.
📷 Rustic Bench and Drinking Fountain, the Midwood near the Dairy, Prospect Park Concerts Programme Brochure, 1897 season. Center for Brooklyn History.
📷 Jeremy Woodoff. Courtesy of Jeremy Woodoff.

Emerging Victorian Scholars Night
2024-05-07 18:30 - 20:00
Emerging Scholars:
Gilded Age Escalators, Windows, and Women on the Rise
The Center at West Park
165 West 86th Street
New York, NY 10024
Tickets Here!!
The Victorian Society New York’s 2024 Emerging Scholars winners will shed light on little-known yet influential aspects of Gilded Age culture, activism, and architecture. Sophia Kamps, recent graduate of Queen’s University in Ontario, will report on surveying 1,200 Gilded Age stained-glass windows at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. Diane Dias De Fazio, a graduate student at Kent State University, will lecture on how the forgotten c. 1900 inventors of the ubiquitous, oft-unheralded escalator changed the way people experienced and used department stores and other public spaces. Deena Ecker, a student at the CUNY Graduate Center, will look at late Victorian streetscapes and culture (popular, consumer, and sexual) through the lens of prostitution. How did these maligned women maintain some agency? Amanda Westbrook Brennan, a CUNY Graduate Center student, will analyze Black women activists, writers, and club women who elevated communities while defying stereotypes.

📷 “Inclined Elevator” at Coney Island, Street Railway Review, 1896.
📷 Gordon Ross, “The Dance of Death,” Puck, v. 71, no. 1822 (1912 January 31), centerfold. 1912. N.Y.: Published by Keppler & Schwarzmann. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
📷 C.M. Bell, Mrs. A.J. Cooper, 1901. Photograph from a glass plate negative. Library of Congress, C.M. Bell Studio Collection, Prints and Photographs Division.
📷 Elizabeth Hunter. Sophia Kamps with a Mausoleum’s Religious Window, 2023.

The “Italian” Angel of Central Park
2024-05-20 18:30 - 20:00
The “Italian” Angel of Central Park
The Story Behind One of NYC’s Most Popular Icons
Casa Italiana
24 West 12th Street
New York, NY 10011
Tickets Here!!
Cental Park’s Bethesda Fountain, topped by the “Angel of the Waters” sculpture, is one of the most popular icons of New York City. Scenes from countless movies have been filmed at its feet. But very few people know that the artist who created the Angel was a woman, New Yorker Emma Stebbins, who is the first woman to receive a public art commission in New York City. Also, very few people know that the “Angel of the Waters” was created in Rome, Italy, and that it is a symbol of love, harmony, healing, and rebirth.
Emma Stebbins (1815–1882) was a true pioneer as an artist and as a woman who, together with her companion Charlotte Cushman, defied prejudice and social conventions, living openly as a “married” gay couple 150 years before it became legal in the United states.
Maria Teresa Cometto, author of Emma and the Angel of Central Park (Bordighera Press, 2023), will be in conversation with VSNY’s own Eve M. Kahn, independent scholar and our vice president, moderated by Stefano Albertini (NYU).

📷 “Angel of the Waters,” Bethesda Fountain, Central Park. Francisco Diez, 2009.
📷 Portrait of Emma Stebbins. Emma Stebbins scrapbook, 1858–1882, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Victorian Elegance on the Upper West Side
2024-05-22 18:30 - 20:30
Annual Margot Gayle Fundraiser:
Victorian Elegance on the Upper West Side
170 West 74th Street
New York, NY 10023
Tickets Here!!
Join the Metropolitan Chapter of the Victorian Society in America (Victorian Society New York) for its annual Margot Gayle Fundraiser! This year we will enjoy a private tour of an exquisite, historic Upper West Side home. Located in a 1910 building originally built as a residence hotel for Broadway actors and Manhattan “bachelors,” the spacious 2800-square-foot apartment covers the top two floors of the building and includes a 4000-square-foot private rooftop terrace. Five apartments were combined to create this large, multilevel abode that features expansive cityscape and Central Park views. Furnished with nineteenth- and early twentieth-century antiques and historic wallpapers, it is a rare glimpse into the genteel lifestyle of New York City’s late Victorian period.
The Margot Gayle Fundraiser enables the Metropolitan Chapter to contribute monetary grants in support of projects relating to the preservation, conservation, and scholarly exploration of Victorian material culture in the New York Metropolitan area.
Tickets: $50. Please register early as space will be limited.
📷 Private collection.

57th Annual Meeting
2024-06-05 18:30 - 20:00
The Metropolitan Chapter of the Victorian Society in America
57th Annual Meeting

Rutgers Presbyterian Church
236 West 73rd Street
New York, NY 10023
Tickets Here!!
All are welcome at Our Annual Meeting, Awards Showcase, and Reception!
Current members, new members, and guests are invited to join us at the historic Rutgers Presbyterian Church on the Upper West Side, where we will vote in new board members, showcase this year’s award winners, and hear our Treasurer’s and President’s reports.
Celebratory reception to follow with libations, light bites, and (of course) general merriment.
We so look forward to seeing you there!
Tickets: Free for members. Guest tickets include a 1-year VSNY membership.
📷 Mulberry Street, New York City. c. 1900. Library of Congress.

Women, Egyptology, and Gilded Age New York
2024-09-18 18:30 - 20:00
Women, Egyptology, and Gilded Age New York

The Center at West Park
165 West 86th Street
New York, NY 10024
Tickets Here!!
Women built American Egyptology. When Britons Amelia Edwards and Kate Bradbury arrived in New York in November of 1889, the first thing they saw was a still-copper-hued Statue of Liberty. They had arrived for a five-month whirlwind lecture tour, hoping to fan America’s spark of Egyptological interest into flames. Their plan worked. The women toured Egyptology collections, including at the New-York Historical Society and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Over the next 25 years, American women took up the mantle, building and curating these collections in New York.
On September 18, from 6:30 to 8:00 pm, Dr. Kathleen Sheppard (@kathleensheppardwrites), author of the new book Women in the Valley of the Kings: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age (St. Martin’s Press), will take attendees on a tour of New York between 1889 and 1916, shedding light on some of the city’s oldest Egyptological sights. Dr. Sheppard will be signing copies of the new book. Dr. Sheppard, a Professor in the History and Political Science department at Missouri S&T in Rolla, Missouri, has dedicated her career to telling the stories of women in Egyptology. She earned her MA in Egyptian Archaeology at University College London in 2002, and her PhD in History of Science from the University of Oklahoma in 2010. Her 2013 book was a scientific biography of the archaeologist and Egyptologist Margaret Alice Murray (2013). Her 2022 book, Tea on the Terrace: Hotels and Egyptologists’ Social Networks, 1885–1925, investigated how Egyptologists traveled and worked their ways through Egypt.
📷 Sphinx – Boston Public Library / William Vaughn Tupper
📷 Author and Book cover – Courtesy of Dr. Kathleen Sheppard and St. Martin’s Publishing Group
📷 Egyptologist Amelia B. Edwards – Heath Trust Digital Library / University of Wisconsin – Madison;

Rediscovering Architect-Trailblazer E. G. W. Dietrich
2024-10-16 18:30 - 20:00
Rediscovering Architect-Trailblazer E. G. W. Dietrich

The Center at West Park
165 West 86th Street
New York, NY 10024
$7.18 members / $12.51 general public
Tickets Here!!
Ernest George Washington Dietrich, AIA (1857–1924) is one of the most prolific yet least studied architects of his generation. A native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Dietrich first attracted attention in the 1880s for his eye-catching designs of Shingle Style country residences. Finding success on the East Coast, he relocated to New York, New York, where he practiced for nearly 40 years. He was an early proponent of the Colonial Revival and Arts and Crafts styles. Through his collaboration with tastemaker Gustav Stickley, Dietrich is recognized as designing the first Craftsman house published in Stickley’s magazine The Craftsman in May 1903.
Independent scholar Christopher Jend will give a lavishly illustrated talk about Dietrich’s career with a focus on projects in and around New York City. Jend discovered Dietrich while researching and writing the successful National Register nomination of the c. 1893 John Mollenhauer House in Bay Shore, New York. For the last twelve years, Jend’s rigorous and enthusiastic research of the architect has resulted in the documentation of more than 450 of Dietrich’s designs and visits to his built projects in six states. Jend has presented his research on Dietrich to communities in New York, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania.

📷 Flyer, courtesy of Christopher Jend
📷 Author photograph by Lori Savaree
📷 Louise E. Wisner House in Warwick, New York, designed by architect E. G. W. Dietrich and built circa 1884

Fall Benefit with Bob Shaw, Production Designer of "The Gilded Age"
2024-11-12 19:00
Keeping It Real:
How Bob Shaw, Production Designer of “The Gilded Age,” Resurrects Nineteenth-Century New York

Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10065
$50.00 members (plus fees)*
$70.00 general public (plus fees)
$30 live stream (plus fees)
Tickets Here!!
From the opulent mansions of Fifth Avenue to the original interiors of Brooklyn’s brownstones, HBO’s “The Gilded Age” has brought to life a New York City lost to the demands of progress, changing tastes, and the march of time. Join us for a special evening with Bob Shaw, the show’s Emmy-winning production designer, to learn how he balances historical accuracy against creative license, the penchants of a modern audience, and the realities on the ground to resurrect nineteenth-century Gilded Age New York City.
The talk will take place in the Veterans Room and Library of the Park Avenue Armory. Designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany and Stanford White and completed in 1881, these historic interiors are among the few remaining American Aesthetic Movement spaces and the only fully extant interiors created by Tiffany’s cooperative design firm, Associated Artists.
Reception to follow.
All proceeds benefit the preservation efforts of the New York Metropolitan Chapter of the Victorian Society in America.
Bob Shaw’s work as a production designer includes Martin’s Scorsese’s film “The Irishman,” for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Production Design, and the television shows “The Sopranos,” “Mad Men,” and “Boardwalk Empire,” for which he received Emmy nominations, winning for the latter two.
*Members must use the presale code sent via e-mail to access the members discount.

📷 Alison Cohen Rosa/HBO
📷 Alison Cohen Rosa/HBO
📷 Barbara Nitke/HBO

Newport and Stained Glass: La Farge, Tiffany and More
2025-02-05 18:00 - 20:00
A presentation by Richard Guy Wilson, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Architectural History at University of Virginia and Director of the Newport Summer School
A major American design creation in the later 19th century was the stained glass window. The work of John La Farge and Louis Comfort Tiffany pioneered opalescent stained glass but there were other types that appeared in houses, churches and public buildings. This talk will examine some of these windows in Newport and elsewhere, some of which is seen in the Victorian Society Summer School.
The event will include remarks about the Victorian Society Summer Schools in Newport, Chicago, and London, which first started back in 1974, and include brief presentations by recent program graduates. There will be a reception following the presentations.
Draesel Hall of the Church of the Holy Trinity
316 E 88th Street
New York, NY 10128
Register here

The event is cosponsored by the Alumni Association of the Victorian Society Summer Schools, the Victorian Society in America, the Victorian Society New York, the Friends of the Upper East Side Historic Districts, and the New York Landmarks Conservancy.
📷 John La Farge, “Trompe L’Oeil” window 1882–84; Photo courtesy of Richard Guy Wilson
📷 Richard Guy Wilson; Photo courtesy of Richard Guy Wilson

Amelia Bloomer: So Much More than Bloomers
2025-03-19 18:30 - 20:00
Scholar Sara Catterall will discuss her new biography of the oft-misinterpreted activist Amelia Bloomer.
Amelia Bloomer (1818–1894) is best known now for the garments that bear her name. But rational dress was “but an incident” in her life and career, and the last thing she wanted to be remembered for. From a village childhood and minimal education in Central New York, Bloomer became a key figure in the temperance and women’s rights movements. She was publisher and editor of The Lily, the U.S.’s first newspaper by and for women, which became a vital information hub and source of community for progressive women. She introduced her friends and collaborators Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, held a groundbreaking position as deputy postmaster of Seneca Falls, and, despite scandal and chronic illness, she continued to speak, organize, write, and travel East to participate in national meetings after her move to the frontier town of Council Bluffs, Iowa.
Sara Catterall’s new book, Amelia Bloomer: Journalist, Suffragist, Anti-Fashion Icon (Belt Publishing), is the first fully researched biography of Bloomer since one published in 1895 by her widower Dexter Bloomer. At this illustrated talk, Catterall’s book will be available for purchase and signing. A starred review in Booklist called it “A timely and exhaustively researched biography . . . that resonate[s], given our current political climate.”
The Center at West Park
165 West 86th Street
New York, NY 10024
Purchase tickets

Catterall is a writer with a Drama degree from NYU and an MLIS from Syracuse University. She was born in Ankara and grew up in South Minneapolis. She has worked as a librarian at Cornell University, a reviewer and interviewer for Shelf Awareness, and a book indexer. Her work has been published in the NEH’s Humanities magazine and The Sun magazine, and she co-authored Ottoman Dress and Design in the West: A Visual History of Cultural Exchange. She lives with her family near Ithaca, NY.
📷 “The Bloomer Costume,” N. Currier (New York), 1851; The Library of Congress
📷 Courtesy of the author

2025 Mayoral Candidates Forum with Preservation Organizations
2025-03-24 18:00 - 19:00
Please join the Victorian Society of New York as we co-sponsor a mayoral candidates’ forum hosted by Village Preservation. The forum will focus on historic preservation and development issues and will be held via Zoom on March 24 at 6:00 PM. Registration is free and is required to attend.
Register

Emerging Scholars: Cliff Dwellers’ Portrayals & Furniture on the Move
2025-05-13 18:30 - 20:00
The Victorian Society New York’s 2025 Emerging Scholars winners will shed light on little-known yet influential aspects of Gilded Age history, literature, international trade, and design.
Center at West Park
165 West 86th Street
New York, NY 10024
Register
Sarah Egan, a graduate student at the Bard Graduate Center, will discuss Illinois education advocate Clara Kern Bayliss (1848–1948) who authored early 1900s children’s books about Lolami, a fictional “Little Cliff Dweller” in Arizona. In the books, Lolami becomes orphaned, explores abandoned cliff settlements, and then becomes ingratiated with another local indigenous group, the Hopi. Egan will look at Bayliss’s archaeological and historical sources, including displays at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and the books’ classroom uses that shaped children’s thinking about American history and Americanness and reflected and transmitted harmful and reductive racial and social hierarchies.
Top photograph: Edition of Clara Bayliss book about Cliff Dwellers. Library of Congress.
“Cliff Dwellers at 1893 World’s Fair, The Columbian Exposition, Chicago.” Photograph in Glimpses of the World’s Fair: A Selection of Gems of the White City Seen Through a Camera. Chicago: Laird & Lee, 1893. Northern Illinois University, courtesy Sarah Egan.
Edition of Clara Bayliss book about Cliff Dwellers. Library of Congress.
Steven Baltsas, a graduate student in the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, University of Delaware, will explore how, in the mid-19th century, Alexander Roux and his brother Frédéric organized a transnational furniture enterprise between New York and Paris. The brothers catered to cosmopolitan customers via networks of manufactories, retailers, and display rooms.
Alexander and Frédéric Roux (retailers), cabinet in mahogany, brass, gilt bronze mounts, ca. 1855. Credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Detail of head on rosewood library table carved by worker for Alexander Roux, ca. 1858–60, in New York. Heidelberg Hall Collection, PA.

Metropolitan Chapter of the Victorian Society 58th Annual Meeting
2025-05-28 19:00 - 20:30
All are welcome at our annual meeting, awards showcase, and reception!
Current members, new members, and guests are invited to join us at our Annual Meeting, where we will vote in new board members, showcase this year’s award winners, and hear our reports for 2024-25.
Celebratory reception to follow on a 36th floor’s outdoor terrace (weather permitting) with libations, hors d’oeuvres, and (of course) general merriment.
The Kips Bay / Murray Hill location will be sent upon reservation as the building requires a list of attendees.
We so look forward to seeing you there!
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Book Talk: Under-Sung Monument Sculptor Evelyn Beatrice Longman (1874–1954)
2025-06-07 14:00 - 15:30
Pat Hoerth Batchelder, author of the new book Evelyn Beatrice Longman, The Woman Who Sculpted Golden Boy, Thomas Edison, and Other Monuments, has mined long-forgotten archives to explore how Longman arose from Midwestern poverty to portray luminaries and allegorical figures in stone and bronze for public and private spaces nationwide. Longman navigated an art world where hardly any other women hammered at marble blocks and created works that topped skyscrapers. Hoerth will be in conversation with Dana Pilson, Curatorial Researcher & Collections Coordinator, Chesterwood National Historic Trust Site and Museum, and the panel will be moderated by Eve Kahn, journalist, independent scholar, and New York Times contributor. Hoerth’s book will be available for sale and signing at the event.
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Top photograph: Sculptor Evelyn Beatrice Longman, 1921, Arts & Decoration, November 1921; Credit: Keystone View Co.
Memorial plaque for John Ansley Storey, sculpted by Evelyn B. Longman, 1905, located in the Lowell Cemetery, Lowell, Massachusetts; Credit: Marty Aligata via CC 4.0
Spanish-American War Memorial titled “Spirit of Victory” by Evelyn B. Longman, 1926, located in Bushnell Park, Hartford, Connecticut; Credit: Marty Aligata via CC 4.0

Spring Benefit: Victorian Splendor in a Brooklyn Brownstone
2025-06-09 18:00 - 20:00
Join the Metropolitan Chapter of the Victorian Society in America (Victorian Society New York) for its annual Margot Gayle Fundraiser!
This year we will enjoy a private tour of an exceptional Brooklyn brownstone. Built in 1862 in the affluent neighborhood of Fort Greene, bordering downtown Brooklyn, it was designed as an upper-class residence featuring large rooms outlined with intricate molding and woodwork, tiled and marble mantles, and ornate stained glass. As the neighborhood fell into decline, the home fortunately was never divided into apartments. It has been in the care of its current owner since 1971, when he began restoring it. Now faithfully returned to its nineteenth-century opulence, the house teems with a museum-quality collection of furniture, textiles, lighting, sculptures, and paintings.
The Margot Gayle Fundraiser enables the Metropolitan Chapter to contribute monetary grants from the Margot Gayle Fund for the Preservation of Victorian Heritage in support of projects relating to the preservation, conservation, and scholarly exploration of Victorian material culture in the New York Metropolitan area. The Margot Gayle Fund for the Preservation of Victorian Heritage was established in 2003 to honor Margot Gayle (1908–2008), an eminent preservationist who was one of the founders of the Victorian Society in America.
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Top photograph: Residence Dining Room © Bruce M. White 2025
Napoli Residence First Floor Parlor © Bruce M. White 2025
Napoli Residence First Floor Stair Hall © Bruce M. White 2025
Napoli Residence Library © Bruce M. White 2025

A Walking Tour of the Mansions and Monuments of Riverside Drive
2025-06-14 13:00 - 14:30
Join popular tour guide Stephanie Azzarone for a fascinating tour of Riverside Drive—best known for elegance and quiet. But behind its serene facades lie secrets, from intriguing architectural details to headline-making tales. This in-person tour will take a close look at the avenue’s most notable buildings—many of them built around the turn of the century—and reveal design delights and scandalous stories alike. We’ll discuss the sad fate of America’s first supermodel, see the mansion where William Randoph Hearst ensconced his paramour, Marion Davies, visit the Drive’s tallest apartment building and its only privately owned freestanding villa—among other eye-catching sites. Along with sharing the history of how Riverside Drive came to be, the tour will identify the famous architects responsible for the look of this lovely boulevard and unveil some of its most impressive, designated landmarks.
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Top image: Postcard, Riverside Park and Drive, New York, 1905; The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, The New York Public Library.

How French Flats Changed the Way We Live
2025-07-14 18:00 - 19:15
Join us this Bastille Day for a fun and enlightening talk about “French Flats,” which first began to appear in New York not long after the Civil War, and by the end of the 19th century had completely changed the way New Yorkers lived.
Until the late 19th century, no New Yorker of means lived in what we would now call an apartment, other than as a temporary measure. Private homes were the only appropriate place of residence for those well off enough to choose where and how they lived. But a new concept slowly entered bloodstream of our city, very consciously pegged to Parisian models, as an acceptable and later even a desirable way for middle- and upper-class New Yorkers to live. By the beginning of the 20th century, apartment living had become the height of chicness in New York, and no longer needed to allude to European models to achieve a veneer of respectability and acceptance.
We’ll take a look at how and why this revolution in housing took place in our city, examining the very first examples, and then honing in on how, where, and why French Flats spread throughout Greenwich Village and the East Village. While many of these groundbreaking first-generation early models of affluent apartment living are long gone, a surprising number survive all around us in our midst. While a few may be obvious to spot, many more hide in plain sight, providing only the faintest of clues to their original function and profound significance.
Zoom Webinar
Pre-registration required
Free
Register here.
This event is co-sponsored by Village Preservation.

Lecturers:
Andrew Berman has been Executive Director of Village Preservation since 2002. Andrew is an architectural historian and lifelong New Yorker who worked on development and preservation issues in Greenwich Village, Lower Manhattan, and the West Side for more than three decades.
Dena Tasse-Winter is a historic preservationist, writer, and Village Preservation’s own Director of Research and Preservation. A native New Yorker and Greenwich Village resident, she holds an MA in Historic Preservation and Cultural Heritage Management from the University of York, U.K., and a BA in Music History from the University of Rochester.

"Alexander Jackson Davis: Designer of Dreams" at Lyndhurst
2025-09-06 09:00 - 15:00
Tour the exhibition Alexander Jackson Davis: Designer of Dreams with the Director of Lyndhurst and enjoy a private tea in the Carriage House!
Lyndhurst is a National Historic Landmark located on the banks of the Hudson River in Tarrytown and is considered the masterpiece of architect Alexander Jackson Davis. Our private tour of the mansion will be led by Lyndhurst staff, along with executive director, Howard Zar, who will join us for the Designer of Dreams exhibit, which explores Davis’s career as an architect and furniture designer. Upon the tour’s conclusion, we will have an exclusively catered afternoon tea in the Lyndhurst Carriage House, which includes sandwiches, scones with cream and jam, mini desserts, and tea.
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Meeting Location: Northwest corner of 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue.
Departure Time: Bus leaves promptly at 9:00 a.m., please be sure to arrive at least 10 minutes early.
Ticket Price: $175 per person for current members; $200 for new and renewing members, which includes a membership at the $40/$50 level for $25—at a discount! (Please be in touch if you wish to join or renew at a higher level, or if you need to check on your membership level, status, or renewal dates: membership@vicsocny.org.)
Photographs: Bruce M. White

A (Nearly) Unknown 20th-Century Preservation Hero: Albert Sprague Bard, a Servant of Beauty
2025-09-17 18:30 - 20:00
In Conversation with Anthony C. Wood and Robert Jaeger on Wood’s new book Servant of Beauty: Landmarks, Secret Love and the Uniminaged Life of an Unsung New York Hero
Anthony Wood, award-winning preservationist and author of Servant of Beauty: Landmarks, Secret Love and the Unimagined Life of an Unsung New York Hero (Bloomsbury, 2025), and Robert Jaeger, preservationist, co-founder of Partners for Sacred Places and author of Sacred Places at Risk, will discuss Wood’s new book and preservation battles in 20th-century New York City. They will focus especially on the life and work of unknown civic activist and preservationist, Albert Sprague Bard, whose story is told for first time in Servant of Beauty.
Wednesday, September 17
6:30–8:00 pm
St. Paul and St. Andrew United Methodist Church
263 West 86th Street New York, NY 10024
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Anthony C. Wood is a nationally recognized preservationist who has worked for, founded, served on the board of, and chaired multiple New York preservation organizations including Friends of the Upper East Side Historic Districts, the Preservation League of New York State, and Partners for Sacred Places; winning awards such as the 2020 New York Landmarks Conservancy’s Lucy G. Moses Award for Preservation Leadership. Wood has served as an adjunct faculty member at Columbia University and founded the non-profit New York Preservation Archive Project whose mission is to document, preserve, and celebrate the history of preservation in New York. He is also the author of Preserving New York: Winning the Right to Protect a City’s Landmarks (Routledge, 2008).

Albert Bard; Courtesy of Chi Psi Fraternity

Anthony C. Wood; Photo: Eric Vitale Photography

Beyond Self-Reliance: Biography, Recovery, and Women’s Contributions to the American Renaissance
2025-09-30 18:30 - 20:00
Scholars Kate Culkin and Patricia Valenti will discuss the role of biography in recovering the lives and contributions of 19th-century women, in conjunction with the publication of Culkin’s Emerson’s Daughters: Ellen Tucker Emerson, Edith Emerson Forbes, and Their Family Legacy.
Ellen Tucker Emerson and Edith Emerson Forbes were the daughters of Lidian Jackson and the famous philosopher and author Ralph Waldo Emerson. Culkin and Valenti will explore Culkin’s groundbreaking investigations of how, in a culture that celebrated self-reliance, Ellen and Edith formed a partnership that allowed them to serve as their father’s secretaries and editors and shape his posthumous image, while they also pursued their own goals and passions. This talk will address how Culkin’s work, along with Valenti’s on Sophia Peabody Hawthorne (writer Nathaniel Hawthorne’s wife), contributes to the growing understanding of women’s contributions to transcendentalism and the American Renaissance, as well as the critical role biographies play in the recovery of influential but understudied women. Culkin’s book (University of Massachusetts Press, 2025) will be for sale and signing at the event.
Tuesday, September 30
6:30–8:00 pm
St. Paul and St. Andrew United Methodist Church
263 West 86th Street New York, NY 10024
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Kate Culkin, Ph.D., is Professor of History at Bronx Community College and on the faculty of the Biography and Memoir MA program at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Harriet Hosmer: A Cultural Biography and Emerson’s Daughters: Ellen Tucker Emerson, Edith Emerson Forbes, and the Emerson Legacy and was an associate editor of The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers.
Patricia Dunlavy Valenti is Professor Emerita in English at the University of North Carolina Pembroke. An award-winning teacher who held visiting professorships at the US Military Academy and the US Air Force Academy, she is the author of five books and numerous articles on American literature and biography. Her two-volume Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, A Life will be re-issued by Louisiana University Press in 2026.
The images are from the William Munroe Special Collections, Concord Free Public Library.

A sketch of Ellen and Edith Emerson by Caroline Hildrith, c. 1847

Ellen Emerson leads Edith Emerson on Gloriosa, Ellen’s donkey, c. 1870s

Family portrait of the Emersons, 1879

Queens: From Agricultural Hinterland to Vital Urban Corridor
2025-10-14 18:30 - 20:00
In celebration of the late Jeffrey A. Kroessler’s book Rural County, Urban Borough: A History of Queens (Rutgers U. Press, 2025), his widow, Laura Heim, will discuss with Eve Kahn and Frampton Tolbert the unique production process and engaging content of this first comprehensive, scholarly, and readable history of the great borough of Queens.
Laura Heim, architect and widow of author Jeffrey A. Kroessler, will discuss with Eve Kahn, lectures committee co-chair of the Victorian Society’s New York chapter, and Frampton Tolbert, Executive Director of the Historic Districts Council, the genesis, evolution, production, revelatory content, and impact of Kroessler’s posthumously published book, Rural County, Urban Borough: A History of Queens. A former wetlands, Queens today is a crowded cityscape of dense urban neighborhoods and suburban sprawl. Rural County, Urban Borough is a history of place, charting the rapid transformation of the Queens landscape, identifying what drove the borough’s development, from public infrastructure, architecture, and transportation to technological innovation and urban planning. The book dramatically chronicles how Queens’s relationship with the city has evolved and highlights how Queens residents, from all backgrounds, care for their neighborhoods and build their communities. Queens is integral to New York City and the wider world and reveals, in its evolution, the whole arc of American urban history.
Tuesday, October 14
6:30–8:00 pm
St. Paul & St. Andrew United Methodist Church
263 West 86th Street New York, NY 10024
The book will be available for sale and signing at the event.
Purchase tickets.
Laura Heim, FAIA LEED AP, is an award-winning architect with a firm in historic Sunnyside Gardens, Queens. Her firm has a particular expertise in historic preservation and adaptive reuse/renovation. She has served as the Chair of Architecture on the Steering Committee of the Sunnyside Gardens Preservation Alliance, as president of the AIA Queens chapter, and on the Board of Directors of AIA New York State. She was the Co-Chair of the AIANY Fellows Committee in 2023. Currently, she is on the Board of Directors of the Historic Districts Council. She frequently collaborated on historic preservation work with her late husband, Jeffrey Kroessler, author of Rural County, Urban Borough.

Village of College Point, 1876. Courtesy of the Queens Borough Public Library, Archives, Borough President of Queens Photographs.

Steinway and Sons Factory, Astoria, New York, 1895. Courtesy of the Queens Borough Public Library, Archives, Illustrations Collection-Astoria.

Borden Avenue, Long Island City, as it appeared in an Earlier Day, Looking from the roof of the Long Island Railroad Station, n.d. The LaGuardia and Wagner Archives, LaGuardia Community College/The City University of New York.

View of Steinway Street, 1923. Courtesy of the Queens Borough Public Library, Archives, Eugene L. Armbruster Photographs.
