Longtime New York City Council member Carol Greitzer died April 3 at her West 12th Street home, the apartment she’d kept since 1959. The 101‑year‑old activist spent more than two decades on the council, from 1969 to 1991, steering battles against Robert Moses and championing historic preservation in Greenwich Village.

Greitzer supplied the political muscle behind Jane Jacobs’s preservation vision, turning community rallies into legislative victories. She rescued the Victorian‑Gothic Jefferson Market Courthouse, orchestrating an Easter‑egg‑hunt stunt that persuaded officials to convert the threatened building into the Jefferson Market Library in 1967. Her early campaigns also blocked a proposed expressway and a rezoning plan that would have erased fourteen Village blocks.

Beyond bricks, Greitzer forged progressive policy: a 1969 bill ending sex discrimination in public eateries, support for the nascent gay‑rights movement after Stonewall, and co‑founding the First Women’s Bank of New York, which opened doors for female borrowers. Her legacy endures in the Village’s protected streetscapes and in the legal frameworks that still guide New York’s real‑estate and hospitality sectors.

A Bronx native educated at Hunter College and NYU, Greitzer entered politics door‑to‑door for Adlai Stevenson in 1956, later founding the Village Independent Democrats. She mentored future mayor Ed Koch and backed liberal Republican John Lindsay in 1965, illustrating her willingness to cross party lines for citywide reform.