The Landmarks Preservation Commission took the first steps on Tuesday toward landmarking 50 West 13th St., a historical West Village rowhouse and theater that was home to both a prominent 19th-century abolitionist businessman and an African-American suffragist.took the first steps on Tuesday toward landmarking a historical West Village rowhouse and theater that was home to both a prominent 19th-century abolitionist businessman and an African-American suffragist.
Nearly all calendared properties are eventually approved for landmarking, according to the group — meaning that the 180-year-old property is likely on track to perpetual preservation. A public hearing and vote on landmark designation will follow within a year.In the process of researching the building, the preservationists discovered the building’s connection to New York’s Civil War and Reconstruction era civil rights movements.lived there for at least eight years, from 1866 to 1874.
Historians have linked Day to leaders of the underground railroad, and a hidden passageway in the basement of the house suggests that it may have been used in the abolitionist network’s operations — although there’s no historical record on the matter. It was a theater before it became a mainstay of the off-off Broadway theater scene in the 1970s. It hosted a pillar of Black theater history in the late 1960s when the Afro-American Folkloric Troupe used it to perform the works of Black poets and folklorists for predominantly Black audiences until 1971.