Lower East Side residents will gather this weekend to celebrate the life of Nancy Rose Sparrow Bartow, a longtime Lower East Side (LES) resident, artist, dancer and civil rights activist, who died at home on Sept. 15 at age 93.
Born in Detroit, MI, to Scottish and English immigrants, Bartow developed an early appreciation for art, music and community. After earning a degree in movement therapy from Wayne State University, she moved to NYC’s LES, where she lived for more than 70 years.
In the 1960s, she became involved in the Greenwich Village folk music scene with her husband, folk singer and political activist Len Chandler. The couple attended the 1963 March on Washington, where Chandler performed and participated in environmental activist Pete Seeger’s inaugural monthlong voyage of the sloop Clearwater on the Hudson River in 1969.
Bartow also played an active role in the civil rights movement. She worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Mississippi during and after Freedom Summer in 1964, when volunteers worked to register Black voters.
In 1965, she founded multiple leatherworking co-ops through the Poor People’s Corporation, an organization affiliated with SNCC. The cooperatives provided former sharecroppers and domestic workers with opportunities to earn independent incomes. Bartow designed bags, sourced the materials and equipment, taught the co-op members to sew, and arranged distribution and sales channels like Liberty House, first as a catalog and later as stores in New York.
Her work received attention in the press, including mentions in the New York Herald Tribune and the Wall Street Journal.
An accomplished textile artist, Bartown studied weaving and design at NYU and produced textiles commercially while maintaining a personal weaving practice. She also worked as a leather artisan alongside longtime friend Barbara Shaum at Shaum’s East Village sandal shop.
She also studied with Martha Graham and later participated in Trinity Episcopal Church’s Movement Choir and volunteered with Dance for Parkinson’s Disease.
In 1985, Bartow married jazz guitarist and composer Jim Bartow, a longtime teacher at Harlem School of the Arts. The couple shared a love of music and dancing until his death in 2015.
Bartow was involved in her community. She helped establish the Coalition for a District Alternative, a progressive organization supporting grassroots political candidates on the LES and in the East Village. She also served on Manhattan Community Board 3, the Gouverneur Gardens housing cooperative board and Gouverneur Hospital’s community advisory board.
The City Council recognized Bartow with an award honoring her decades of community service this year.
She is survived by nieces, nephews, grandnieces and grandnephews, along with many friends and neighbors. A celebration of life will be on Nov. 14, 3–5 p.m., Community Room, 605 Water St.; organizers said all are welcome.
