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Honoring Greta Greenberger on her retirement after 25 years as tour director of City Hall and recognizing her dedication to the promotion and preservation of the history, heritage and beauty of this City.
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WHEREAS, For the past 25 years, Greta Greenberger has been the public face of City Hall to visiting tourists. She has been on her job through five mayoral administrations and has become an expert on all matters of the building, its workings and its occupants as anyone in the City. She has been a curator for the building, working with the City Hall Art Program and Public Property on issues of preservation, maintenance and even the portraits of former mayors. At one moment, she is lovingly communicating the amazing story of the building and within the same day can be organizing to have a missing part of the bronze chandelier in the Mayor's Reception Room replaced - with money she personally raised. She has become a dogged defender and advocate for the building and the City's obligations to the visiting public and has seamlessly blended that visitation with the day-to-day workings of City government; and
WHEREAS, Greta Greenberger was trained as an arts educator, originally at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, eventually getting her degree from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston where she grew up. She became a high school art teacher in Portland, Maine where she taught for ten years. In 1979, she was offered a position with a national program based in Philadelphia called Architecture in Schools and moved here with her five-year-old daughter, Erika, during that summer; and
WHEREAS, A colleague of hers in Architecture in Schools happened to be an architect who graduated from Rensselaer with Greta's eventual husband, Alan Greenberger. They all met on the street by chance near 23rd and Walnut. By 1981, Greta and Alan married and had a daughter, Julia, in 1984. Greta left her job with Architecture in Schools to become...
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