In late summer of 2018, Linda Wilson sat down to tell a story. So too did Andre Stewart, Iris Harvell, Hattie Harris, and many others. They were, all of them, longtime residents of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, and theirs was a world that had changed greatly over the decades of their lives—from a close-knit community that survived under common duress and lack of resources, to a neighborhood stratified by a flood of incoming residents and wealth. Through winding and wonderful narratives, each of them described this lived history, the experience of traveling through this transformation, witnessing the accumulation of new and different until the present, when their home has become a place that their younger selves might not recognize. And their remarks, so rich with detail, so earnest and open-hearted, established the vitality and importance of the project that would be known as Neighborhood Stories.
Right away, a precedent was set. The wealth of information that was gained, as well as the warmth and kindness exuded by those early participants, made the mandate for such a program clear. But it also exposed a greater truth, that a trove of local history, held within the minds of those who lived it, was vanishing with each passing year, going un-learned and un-regarded, forgotten as gentrification marched onward across the boroughs. The inherent power of those Bed-Stuy interviews, and the homespun stories contained within them, made it clear that something needed to be done to document these disappearing urban ecosystems.
Because of our position as the caretakers of this city’s history, we at the Department of Records and Information Services (DORIS) are granted rare access into lives as they were lived, windows into times that seem at once both distant and relatable, impenetrable and human. To be granted such a view, to any admirer of history, is a tremendous privilege, and the Neighborhood Stories Project, although modest, is one attempt to earn that privilege.
Five years have passed since those early Bed-Stuy days, but the mission of the Neighborhood Stories Project remains the same: to provide a platform for the oral history of New York City by its (often marginalized) residents and connecting that history with the records of City government maintained in the collections of the Municipal Archives and Library. We have collected many stories in those years, but the project has only just begun.
New York City is in so many ways a special place, but particularly in this—our city offers an almost unimaginable intersection of race, social class, and historical experience, and often to some degree or another in every neighborhood. It is a great tragedy that much of the human texture of this vastness may go unobserved, unrecorded, and will inevitably—without intervention—disappear. It is this very tragedy that the Neighborhood Stories Project hopes to alleviate.
The aim of an oral history is not to reinforce an existing narrative; it is to allow the teller to articulate their experience as only they know it. There are times this may sit in defiance of the accepted history. Such times offer an ideal opportunity to reflect on the veracity of the narrative as it exists and to consider what these differences are telling us. An oral history asks us to consider who has a monopoly on the truth, and why?
This oral history project is unique in other ways, namely that such histories are seldom undertaken by city entities. To the best of our knowledge, no other large American city currently supports or deploys such a program from one of its organic agencies. The projects that do exist are typically conducted via proxy, by universities or research organizations, and are often forced (due to logistical and budgetary restrictions) to focus on a narrowly defined sample of participants. By taking on this project and expanding its scale, DORIS hopes to gather a well-realized and comprehensive library of stories and set a standard for other cities in the United States.
Bed-Stuy interview (Jamila Swift)
Progress was stymied by the COVID-19 pandemic, but it continues now unabated. Now, interviews for the project are conducted primarily remotely over the phone or via Zoom. While the conditions have changed, the potency of the stories has not diminished—in fact, the large-scale shift to platforms of remote communication presented a great opportunity for the agency to expand the scope of the project beyond the confines of Bed-Stuy, beyond even Brooklyn. Anyone, of any age, from any New York City neighborhood is encouraged to volunteer to share their story, or to conduct an interview, or both. Every experience is valuable, and so each interview is a treasure.
Once recorded, Neighborhood Stories interviews are saved and made available for viewing by the Municipal Archives. Currently they can be viewed upon request, but plans are in the works to create an all-digital, publicly-accessible platform where the interviews will be permanently available for anyone to access, at any time.
Additionally, the Neighborhood Stories project is largely volunteer-run and volunteer-sustained—participants, interviewers, and even some administrative personnel are volunteers, city residents who are provided with training and support by DORIS staff. These contributors arrive to the project in several ways: some feel an urgent need to tell their story, to map a vanishing landscape; others simply want a way to give back, or an opportunity to leave behind some footprint of themselves, however small.
In aggregate, the collected narratives begin to take on a greater shape, and they show the city to be something far vaster and more alive than statistical data or media records alone could hope to capture. And there is as well, in this aggregated portrait, a kind of quiet tragedy, as elder folk recount watching the reins of their communities slip into unfamiliar hands, as the common spaces that once served as the touchstones of their lives are remade. A place that might have once been all one knew becomes something that is no longer for you. This is one way in which Bed-Stuy, sadly, is not so different from other neighborhoods.
One can imagine the historians of the future analyzing these interviews, plumbing the depths of a humanized story, experiencing aspects of a city that would otherwise be lost to them, as so much of the New York of yesterday is lost to us.
Bronx Interview (Mary Anne Crowe)
In 2018, the Neighborhood Stories Project was spurred into existence through partnership with community-run green-thumb gardens in Bed-Stuy. Since that time, the project has expanded significantly, but the spirit of collaboration that animated it remains. Throughout 2023 and onward the project intends to add dozens of interviews to its archives through partnerships with local, community-oriented organizations, inviting residents of often-overlooked blocks the chance to have their stories preserved forever. In late 2022, the project was even able to interview its first sitting political figure—Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, who agreed to sit down and share a story of his own, his childhood memories of the rapidly changing area of South Williamsburg.
History is not a solid object, not an artifact that we can simply turn over in our hands and investigate. It expands in every direction, and it changes as we change. There is no clock to turn back, and this City will never return to something that it once was. But we can find the reflection of those places, the spaces made and left in their absence, and we can honor them by listening to the words of the people who once lived there. The Neighborhood Stories Project is a modest program, but it is one attempt to earn a historian’s privilege, to reclaim some of our shared history and to assist others in reclaiming it for themselves, before that history becomes lost forever.
You can find more information about the Neighborhood Stories Project here and here, or by emailing stories@records.nyc.gov.