November 30, 2025 | By Yukie Ohta, Board Member

When Judith Stonehill was a child, New York City was the city of her dreams. Born in a small town in faraway upstate New York, “closer to Ohio than Manhattan,” as she wrote in an autobiographical essay, Judith moved to Greenwich Village and raised a family with her husband John in an 1834 red-brick Federal house. Her historic neighborhood inspired her to “become active in helping preserve the architectural heritage and cultural history of this corner of the city.” Throughout her life, Judith worked joyfully and tirelessly as an urbanist and preservationist, while also planting many seeds to grow New York’s cultural landscape.

Like many women of her generation, Judith’s career took many zigs and zags. After receiving a master’s degree in Literature from New York University, she worked at the South Street Seaport Museum as a vice president and then as the director of the Corporate Fund at Lincoln Center, where she fundraised for its Chamber Music Society, New York Film Festival, Metropolitan Opera, and everything in between. In 1989, she became co-owner, with Barbara Cohen, of the legendary New York Bound Bookshop on the ground floor of the Associated Press Building at 50 Rockefeller Center. The store sold all manner of Newyorkania: new and vintage books, maps, prints, photographs, and ephemera. The New York Times reported on the store’s closing in 1997 as “a loss to the cultural life of the city.”

Perhaps it was New York Bound that inspired Judith to write books about New York. Her oeuvre includes the books Greenwich Village: A Guide to America’s Legendary Left Bank and New York’s Unique and Unexpected Places, among others. She also created and edited Greenwich Village Stories, a book for Village Preservation (formerly the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation), where she was a trustee from 1989 to 2024 and board chair from 1993 to 1999. During this time, Judith initiated several still-extant programs that helped steer the organization’s expansion, including its Annual House Tour Benefit, Annual Village Awards, Children’s Education Program, and Oral History project. Trevor Stewart, Village Preservation’s president, wrote that “Judith’s gifts to our neighborhoods and our organization are almost too great to count.”

Judith was also a dear friend and mentor to many, including myself. She had a talent for remembering everyone she met, collecting and connecting like-minded folk whose newly kindled relationships lifted everyone up together. In this and many other ways, she made magic happen, and was adored and respected for her dedication to the people and places that were dear to her. Without Judith’s support and connections, I would not be where I am today, and I am certain that there are many others who would say the same.

“New York is still the city of my dreams, after all these years,” Judith wrote in her essay, after seeing her adopted hometown through a rapidly changing twentieth century and well into tumultuous twenty-first. “I love its frenetic energy and its cultural achievements and, most of all, its amazing contrasts: this remarkable city has eight Vermeer paintings, 800 Chinese restaurants, poetry readings and farmers’ markets in every neighborhood, 722 miles of subway tracks as well as 270 different species sighted by avid birdwatchers in Central Park alone.”

Judith loved New York, and New York loved her back. She was at once highly influential and incredibly generous. And so very modest about her many accomplishments. As such, Judith left an indelible mark on her friends and family, on her neighborhood, and on her city, and she will be long remembered and sorely missed. §

This article was printed in the Archive Project’s Fall 2025 newsletter.