After celebrating its fifth anniversary last week and the creation of an East Village/Lower East Side Historic District yesterday, the Lower East Side Preservation Initiative is already looking to the future (via the past, of course). The group wants to see the East 10th Street Historic, created in January, extended to other buildings around Tompkins Square Park.

Richard Moses, the organization’s president, said the L.E.S.P.I. is currently surveying buildings from St. Marks Place/Eighth Street to 12th Street, in the blocks on either side of the park, to determine which of them should be part of a proposal that will be submitted to the Landmarks Preservation Committee. The protected area, which would likely be called the Tompkins Square Historic District, would include Avenue B alongside the park, as well as the park itself.

“We don’t want to let the issue kind of fizzle out,” Mr. Moses said of the current preservation push. “We heard a lot of enthusiasm from the commissioners for the disrict the way it’s designated now, so we want to keep the momentum up and make sure that the other areas of the East Village that are intact get protected soon.”

Carolyn Radcliffe, vice president of the Preservation Initiative, recently took The Local for a walk in the area surrounding the historic park, to show off some buildings that might be included in the proposed district. (Watch the above video.)

“The park is the gateway area and includes Federal row houses, tenements, and the German Shooting Club, some of which are already designated as individual landmarks,” she said. “The Tompkins Square Park area is historically important, includes many intact buildings with cornices, lintels, fire escapes and should be protected.”

By the way, this isn’t the first time neighborhood preservation has been at the forefront. Last week another booster of the East Village/Lower East Side Historic District, the Greenwich Village Society for Historical Preservation, released a study examining the effects of a 2008 rezoning that “established height limits, reduced the allowable bulk of buildings on many sites, capped air rights transfers, and eliminated the zoning bonus for dormitories and hotels, as well as created incentives for the development and retention of affordable housing.” The study included the interesting graphic below, of recent development sites in the neighborhood. Click on it to read the entire study in PDF form.

G.V.S.H.P,