Listen To Neighborhood Stories And Tell Your Own With BPL’s Oral History Project

In this rapidly changing Brooklyn we live in, it is more important than ever to record and document our own personal and familial oral histories, as much for us as for the neighborhoods we love and call home — sometimes for generations at a time.

CityLab reminds us of that this week in their feature on the Brooklyn Public Library’s (BPL) “Our Street, Our Stories” oral history initiative, which we highlighted last summer when they kicked off their Clinton Hill story and photo collection effort out of the Clinton Hill Library.

Explained BPL Department of Outreach Services’ Emma Clark to us last August:

“The goal of the project is to create neighborhood-specific history archives based around interviews with Brooklyn residents, in order to record and preserve the history of our changing neighborhoods before it is forgotten. . . As a public library, we are uniquely positioned to not only witness the change taking place all around us, but also to record and preserve the history of our neighborhoods before that history is forgotten.

“We want to know what makes Clinton Hill unique, and record the perspectives and memories of the people that live and work here in order to illuminate the changes in the neighborhood in a specific and personal fashion,” Clark added. “This is not a commercial enterprise in any fashion, rather it is an outreach initiative of the public library designed to connect neighborhood residents with their local history and to facilitate conversations about the changing face of the neighborhood.”

Some of these stories have since been collected and made visible on the project’s Tumblr page.

Right now, the “Our Streets, Our Stories” team is in other neighborhoods, including recent stops at Green-Wood Cemetery and Bed-Stuy. Partnerships have also been established with community groups such as Red Hook’s PioneerWorks and the Brooklyn Queens Land Trust — who documented life before and after Hurricane Sandy, and the evolution of community gardens from junkyards to gardens to city housing or luxury housing, respectively.

Here in Clinton Hill, stories have ranged from Christopher Dunne reminiscing about the neighborhood friends — “fellows who served in World War II” — and professors of his youth who are irreplaceable in his learning experience, to Erika Andino ruminating on what it was like adapting to life as a Nuyorican in Sunset Park, Bensonhurst, Puerto Rico, and now Fort Greene, and then fighting for HIV/AIDS awareness as her community and family fell victim to the disease.

If you would like to schedule a session to record your or your family’s story/stories/memories and scan photographs, email EClark@bklynlibrary.org.