Part of our blog series Why Isn’t This Landmarked?, where we look at buildings in our area we’re fighting to protect that are worthy of landmark designation, but somehow aren’t landmarked.

Around the end of 1940, twenty-five-year-old artist Virginia Admiral (February 4, 1915 – July 27, 2000) moved into a loft apartment that rented for $30 a month overlooking Union Square at 30 East 14th Street. Admiral was a young, talented woman hoping to learn the art of painting at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts, just blocks away from her new home. She lived here first with friends and eventually with her sweetheart and husband Robert De Niro Sr. (and perhaps, for a short time, with their infant, the great movie actor Robert De Niro Jr.).

30 East 14th Street today

Admiral was just one of an almost-unrivaled list of artists who called 30 East 14th Street home in the 20th century. This stretch of 14th Street and the neighborhood immediately to the south played a formative role in making New York a center of political, industrial, and housing innovation. A hub of the publishing industry and a site of radical and progressive political activity, it also housed some of the great artists of the 19th and 20th centuries who drew the center of first the American and ultimately the global art world below Fourteenth Street. But amidst increasing development threats to this area south of Union Square, the city has failed to establish appropriate protections for – or even acknowledge the historic importance of – this and other nearby structures.

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