Picture a great neighborhood and you probably think about the local coffee shop, the parks, or the property values. You rarely think about the women behind the scenes who fought to make those spaces happen.
Women have been the backbone of our communities for a long time, but their contributions to how we live and breathe in our cities are often missing from the history books. This Women’s History Month, we want to spotlight five of the many (many) women who changed our streets, cities, and ideas of community.
Jane Jacobs: The Champion of Walkable Cities
If you love your neighborhood because it’s walkable and feels like a community, you can thank Jane Jacobs. Back in the mid-20th century, she didn't care for the city planners who wanted to tear everything down to build massive highways. She famously took on a major planner named Robert Moses to save Greenwich Village from being leveled for an expressway.
She argued that a city’s strength comes from its people and the daily interactions that happen on the sidewalk. She called it "eyes on the street." Her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, flipped the script on urban design. She showed us that the best cities aren't the ones following a rigid master plan, but the ones that grow naturally around the people living in them.
Elizabeth Coit: Architecture That Actually Makes Sense
In the 1940s, the world of architecture was largely a boys' club. Most designers were obsessed with making things look cool, but they didn't really care about the daily grind of running a house. Elizabeth Coit came along and pushed for home designs that prioritized what families actually needed.
She insisted that a house shouldn't just be an ego project for an architect. Instead, she spent years researching how people moved through their rooms and used their kitchens. She pushed for better storage and more durable materials in public housing, making sure that a home was a space that actually worked for the people living there.
Alice Austen: Showing Us the Real Side of Life
While other people were busy building structures, Alice Austen was busy capturing the life that happened inside them. She was one of the first really great female photographers in America, and she didn't just take stuffy, formal portraits. She took her camera into the messy, real-life moments of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
By capturing the lives of regular people - from immigrant families to folks just hanging out on their front stoops -she helped change how we look at what makes a house a home. Her work showed us that the heart of a city isn't the architecture; it's the people who are living their lives in it every day.
Dorothy Maynor: Keeping the Community’s Heart Beating
Dorothy Maynor knew that a neighborhood needs more than just buildings to survive. It needs a soul. In 1964, the internationally famous singer founded the Harlem School of the Arts. She took a historic building that might have been forgotten and turned it into an anchor for the whole neighborhood.
She proved that culture is the glue that holds a community together. By providing a space for kids to learn and create, she made sure the neighborhood stayed vibrant even when things were tough. She showed us that preserving a space for the arts is just as important as preserving the physical buildings themselves.
Aileen Hernandez: The Powerhouse for Fair Housing
Aileen Hernandez was an absolute powerhouse who fought to make sure the American dream was available to everyone. As a key leader in the National Organization for Women, she knew that housing was a human right, even though it was being denied to women and minority groups for years.
She was relentless in pushing for systemic changes that allowed people to get the credit and mortgages they needed. Without her advocacy, the landscape of who could buy a home would look very different today. She helped make the Fair Housing Act a reality, which changed the rules of the game so that more people could actually own their own piece of the neighborhood.
Finding a home with a story
At Vreeland Real Estate, we help a client find a home for sale, we look for way more than just walls and a roof. We’re looking for the history and the community those walls belong to. These women remind us that the way we design, preserve, and advocate for our local residential neighborhoods defines our quality of life.
Every single property has a story. That story’s usually shaped by someone who dared to challenge the way things were done. If you’re hunting for a place with character, you’re really just looking for a space that someone cared enough to fight for.
