Carol Greitzer, a lifelong New Yorker and long-serving member of the City Council who played a critical role in preserving the historic charm of Greenwich Village during the 1960s and ’70s as it faced constant attack from developers, gentrifiers and the demolition-happy urban planner Robert Moses, died on April 3 at her home on West 12th Street, where she had lived since 1959. She was 101.
Her daughter, Elizabeth Greitzer, confirmed the death.
If her friend and neighbor Jane Jacobs provided the intellectual heft behind the fight to preserve the Village, Ms. Greitzer supplied much of the political force, first as a Democratic organizer in the 1950s and ’60s, and then on the City Council from 1969 to 1991.
Born in Manhattan, raised in the Bronx and educated at Hunter College and New York University, Ms. Greitzer first moved to the Village in 1954, when it was still a sleepy, largely Italian American district of greengrocers, repair shops and diners.
She was part of a wave of young residents who in the mid-1950s took on the Tammany Hall-backed Democratic machine that had dominated Village politics for decades. Alongside her was Edward I. Koch, the future mayor, who was both an ally and occasional rival.
Ms. Greitzer also belonged to a generation of young women who were slowly pushing their way into the male-dominated world of New York politics — either as neighborhood activists, like Ms. Jacobs, or as politicians, like Bella Abzug, who represented the West Side of Manhattan in Congress for three terms during the 1970s. Ms. Greitzer was both.
As an activist, she stood on the front lines in a long list of preservation battles across the Village, beginning with the city’s plan in the late 1950s to demolish the Jefferson Market Courthouse, a Victorian Gothic building on Sixth Avenue.
With her flair for publicity, Ms. Greitzer invited reporters to an Easter egg hunt on the courthouse grounds and primed the participating children to talk about how much they wanted the building to become a library. The reporters duly printed the youngsters’ wishes, and Ms. Greitzer soon got hers: The Jefferson Market Library opened in 1967.
Ms. Greitzer joined Mr. Koch and others in 1959 in a campaign to ban cars and buses from passing through Washington Square Park. And she was a central figure in defeating Mr. Moses’s many designs on her neighborhood — including, in the mid-1950s, a proposed expressway that would have cut through its center, and a rezoning plan that would have most likely demolished 14 blocks.
As a member of the City Council, she continued to push preservation issues, but she also championed various progressive causes. She was a strong supporter of the gay rights movement that emerged in the wake of the 1969 Stonewall uprising, which took place in her district. She was a founder and the first president of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (now Reproductive Freedom for All).
Among her first actions as a councilwoman was to introduce a bill banning sex discrimination in public accommodations, including bars and restaurants, some of which, like McSorley’s Old Ale House, in the East Village, had long prohibited women from entering.
“As a woman scorned, I plan to assault and demolish your bastions of male retreat,” she announced in The New York Times in 1969.
The bill passed easily, and soon women were sidling up to the bar at McSorley’s.
Carol Hutter was born on Jan. 3, 1925, in Manhattan and grew up in an apartment just off the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. Her father, Harry, was a salesman, and her mother, Rae (Balinson) Hutter, was a seamstress.
She received a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Hunter College in 1945 and a master’s degree in English from New York University in 1949.
She married Herman Greitzer in 1952. The couple spent two years in Washington, where Mr. Greitzer worked as a lawyer, before moving to the Village — the only two of Ms. Greitzer’s 101 years that she lived outside New York.
She first became involved in politics as a volunteer for the 1956 presidential campaign of Adlai E. Stevenson II, a Democrat.
“I started ringing doorbells for him, never dreaming of getting more involved,” she told The Times in 1969. “Then one thing led to another and I was just swept along.”
Frustrated with the local Democratic club’s tepid support for Mr. Stevenson, Ms. Greitzer and other young activists founded the Village Independent Democrats, a group that was separate from the Democratic Party but aligned with it.
In 1960, she defeated Mr. Koch in the race for president of the organization. The next year, she and another activist, James Lanigan, defeated two longtime incumbents, Carmine De Sapio and Elsie Gleason Matura, for the position of Democratic Party district leader. (At the time, the office had both a male and a female leader.)
As a party district leader, Ms. Greitzer showed Robert F. Kennedy around the Village during his successful race for a U.S. Senate seat from New York in 1964; she even instructed him, in front of a crowd of reporters, on how to eat a New York slice. But she also crossed partisan lines, endorsing John V. Lindsay, a liberal Republican, for mayor in 1965.
Mr. Koch represented the Village on the City Council from 1967 to 1969, when he won a seat in the House of Representatives. Ms. Greitzer succeeded him, serving until she was unseated by a young, moderate Republican, Charles Millard, in 1991.
After divorcing Mr. Greitzer in 1965, she married Joshua Vogel, a lawyer, in 1990. He died in 2018. Along with her daughter, she is survived by her stepchildren David, Robert and Laura Vogel; two grandchildren; five step-grandchildren; and four step-great-grandchildren.
Ms. Greitzer’s work in office was not confined to the Village; her council district encompassed Chelsea and parts of Midtown as well.
She highlighted sex discrimination at the city’s public colleges, attention that spurred significant reforms in public higher education. She persuaded the parks commissioner to give neighborhood groups a say in redesigning green spaces. And she helped end the practice of referring to female police officers as policewomen.
In 1973, Ms. Greitzer was a founding member of the First Women’s Bank of New York, which gave women access to financial services that most major institutions did not then provide. She also battled workplace sex discrimination.
During one rally in 1977, she climbed on top of a truck and addressed a crowd of women on their lunch break from office work.
“If your boss calls you by your first name, you call him by his first name,” she shouted. “Above all, stop his saying, ‘I’ll get my girl to call your girl!’”
Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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