Visit historic sites where NYC women made their mark forever
Around the city and throughout the five boroughs are sites dedicated to women and their place in our history. You might walk past them every day and never notice. Next time you find yourself near one of these sites, take a moment to reflect on the badass New York women who trod these same city streets before us in shoes far less comfortable than ours.
Here are a few suggestions:
See the Women’s Rights Monument in Central Park. The sculpture by Meredith Bergmann is located at the northwest corner of Literary Walk along The Mall.
Visit Shirley Chisolm State Park on the waterfront in Brooklyn’s East New York neighborhood.
Stop by the Guggenheim Museum. Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery had a 1943 show Exhibition by 31 Women, the first-ever dedicated to female artists in America.
Catch a show at the Apollo Theater where jazz great Billie Holiday performed more than 30 times.
Walk around the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir in Central Park and visit the Jaqueline Onassis main entrance to Grand Central Terminal. While there, tour the exhibit focused on her work preserving the station and other New York City landmarks.
Visit the Eleanor Roosevelt Monument in Riverside Park or stop by Washington Square West where she lived from 1920 until her death in 1962.
See Margaret Sanger Square at the intersection of Mott and Bleecker Sts.
Sit on the Gloria Steinem bench in Central Park located near the Met.
Visit the Whitney Museum, founded by artist and art patron Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney.
Tip your pink pussy hat to Fearless Girl, the statue erected in front of the New York Stock Exchange.
Visit the brownstone where Edith Wharton grew up at 14 W. 23rd St..
Stop by the Algonquin Bar to raise a glass to Dorothy Parker, the only woman admitted to the Round Table.
Next time you walk across the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan, take a moment to read the plaque commemorating Emma Warren Roebling, the engineer who led the completion of the work on the Brooklyn Bridge when her husband was injured.
Elizabeth Jennings Place on Park Row, between Spruce and Beekman, honors the woman who was forcibly ejected from a car on the Third Avenue Railway line at the corner of Pearl St. and Chatham Square. In 1854, Jennings became the first AfricanAmerican woman to bring a successful lawsuit seeking to end discrimination on public transportation in New York City. This case occurred a century before Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Ala.
A street sign at 37 Park Row designating “Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton Corner” honors these womens rights leaders near the site where the office of their 1868 newspaper, The Revolution, once stood.
The shrine to St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, the first Americanborn saint in the Roman Catholic Church, and its rectory in the James Watson House, at 7 State St. between Pearl and Water, is a charming anachronism at the southern tip of Manhattan.
Next time you’re at City Hall Park, look out for the stones honoring Marie Curie, scientist and winner of two Nobel Prizes, and Jane Addams, leader of the settlement house movement and first American woman to win the Nobel Peace prize.