Around the city and throughout the five arrondissements there are sites dedicated to women and their place in our history. You can walk past them every day and never notice. The next time you find yourself near one of these sites, take a moment to reflect on the tough New York women who walked these same city streets before us in shoes far less comfortable than ours.
Here are some suggestions:
- See the Women’s Rights Monument in Central Park. The Meredith Bergmann sculpture is located in the northwest corner of the Literary Walk along The Mall.
- Visit Shirley Chisolm State Park on the waterfront in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn.
- Stop by the Guggenheim Museum. Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery had a 1943 31 Women Exhibit, the first exhibit dedicated to women artists in the United States.
- Catch a show at the Apollo Theater where the great Billie Holiday has performed more than 30 times.
- Walk around the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir in Central Park and visit the Jacqueline Onassis Main Entrance to Grand Central Terminal. While you’re there, tour the exhibit focused on her work to preserve the station and other New York City landmarks.
- Visit the Eleanor Roosevelt Memorial 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.
- Take a seat on the Gloria Steinem bench in Central Park, located near the Met.
- Visit the Whitney Museum, founded by artist and patron Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney.
- Tip your pink 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 Algonquin Bar to toast Dorothy Parker, the only woman inducted into the Round Table.
- The 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 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 Railroad line at the corner of Pearl St. and Chatham Square. In 1854, Jennings became the first African-American woman to file 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 seat on the bus in Montgomery, Ala.
- A street sign at 37 Park Row designating “Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton Corner” honors these women’s rights leaders near the site where the office of their 1868 newspaper, The Revolution, once stood.
- The sanctuary of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, the first American-born saint in the Roman Catholic Church, and her rectory at the James Watson House, at 7 State St. between Pearl and Water, is a charming anachronism on the southern tip of Manhattan . .
- Next time you’re in City Hall Park, look for the stones honoring Marie Curie, scientist and two-time Nobel laureate, and Jane Addams, leader of the slum house movement and first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. .
