HistoricSiteMarkers
Progressive & Modern Era

Eleanor Roosevelt

New York, New York, New York

Marker Inscription

Eleanor Roosevelt resided at 20 East 11th Street from 1933 to 1942

The Story

From 1933 to 1942, Eleanor Roosevelt kept a residence at 20 East 11th Street in Greenwich Village during the years her husband occupied the White House. It offered her a foothold in New York even as she remade the role of First Lady into one of activism and public advocacy. The plaque marks the address as one of her city homes.

Why it matters

It ties a Greenwich Village doorstep to one of the most influential women in American public life, whose work reached from the New Deal to the founding of human-rights principles worldwide.

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Nearby & related markers

Beatrix Farrand

New York, NY

The pioneering landscape gardener Beatrix Farrand (1872–1959) lived here from birth in 1872 until 1913. Over some 192 commissions she shaped the East Garden of the White House, the celebrated grounds of Dumbarton Oaks, and the Rose Garden at the New York Botanical Garden, and served for decades as landscape consultant to the Pierpont Morgan Library. A niece of the writer Edith Wharton, she was among the few women to lead the young profession of landscape architecture.

Dawn Powell

New York, NY

From 1931 to 1942 the novelist and diarist Dawn Powell lived at this Greenwich Village address, turning out sharp comic novels like Turn, Magic Wheel and A Time to Be Born. An Ohio transplant, she made a career of skewering both small-town Midwestern life and the glittering ambitions of New York. Nearly forgotten at her death in 1965, Powell found an ardent new readership in the 1990s.

Willa Cather and Richard Wright

New York, NY

Two towering American authors worked within these walls a generation apart. Here in 1912 Willa Cather, later famed for My Antonia, wrote her first novel, Alexander's Bridge. And here in 1945 Richard Wright, author of the searing Native Son, wrote his autobiography, Black Boy. The address quietly joins the prairie realism of one writer to the unflinching testimony of another.

Emma Goldman

New York, NY

The anarchist, orator, and free-speech advocate Emma Goldman lived at this address from 1903 to 1913, the years in which she published her influential radical magazine Mother Earth. A fierce champion of free speech and free love, she became one of the most watched and controversial voices in Progressive-era America. In 1919, amid the Red Scare, the government deported her to the Soviet Union.