From the 1950s she became increasingly active in preserving Greenwich Village working alongside Jane Jacobs, Doris Diether and Ruth Wittenberg among others. These women, in particular its long-lived Chair Doris Diether, founded in the 1960s what became Community Board II (CB2) in 1971, one of New York’s earliest community boards. When Janeway was not serving on the CB2, she regularly attended the meetings. The successful campaign to preserve the two linked mews, Patchin Place and Milligan Place, started in 1962 with appeals by local groups to the City’s Board of Estimates for rezoning. Janeway formed the Committee for the Preservation of Patchin and Milligan Place for this purpose.

A ceramics teacher at the infamous New York Women’s House of Detention for two years, 1962-65, she testified in 1965 before New York County’s Fourth May Grand Jury investigating the prison’s notorious mistreatment of prisoners.^] Janeway distinguished herself as a witness by reporting in The Villager newspaper a four-article series describing her treatment by the prosecutor in the Grand Jury. Her colleague at the prison was social worker Sara Harris who in writing her 1967 exposé on the Women’s House of Detention, Hellhole, relied on Janeway’s items in The Villager in writing Chapter 12. While she was initially in favor of prison reform, once the building was emptied of prisoners in 1971 she and the Patchin and Milligan Place tenants group called for its demolition in 1973.

In recognition of Janeway’s participation in preserving The Village, the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation recently posted an article about her on their “Off The Grid” weblog about her on their website (www.villagepreservation.org) entitled “Carol Janeway: Ceramist and Fierce Village Activist,” June 9, 2023, by Dena Tasse-Winter.