Sonia and Nolia Lozano

During the month of March, StoryCorps Door-to-Door  traveled uptown in New York City to record interviews for the Historias Initiative at El Museo del Barrio, one of the City’s leading Latino cultural institutions.

El Museo, located on Fifth Avenue and 105th Street, has been a fixture of El Barrio since 1969, thanks to founder Raphael Montañez Ortiz. Our first participant of the day, a very lively Nolia Lozano, 90, who came with her daughter Sonia, remembered vividly the beginnings of El Museo.

“I came here with my children all the time,” Nolia reminisced in Spanish, “I always brought my kids here, and we’d sell empanadas and pasteles. They were in all the programs.”

Nolia was born in Puerto Rico and moved to the United States in her 20’s. While talking with Sonia, Nolia fondly remembered El Barrio of her youth: a neighborhood where everyone knew each other, and where families freely used fire escapes as a balcony extension of their living rooms.

“People slept with their doors open, didn’t they Mami?” Sonia asked

“Yes. It was beautiful! That’s why I’ve never wanted to leave this neighborhood.” And at 90, Nolia is still an active member of her community, still going to El Museo as often as possible. After having raised her four children in Spanish Harlem, Nolia likes to watch her neighbors play dominoes on the weekends and just have a good time with her friends.

“This is like my backyard,” Nolia said while jauntily walking out of the newly renovated Museo, “and it’s still beautiful.”

Brooklyn-born Nancy Morgenstern was working as an executive assistant at the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. She died in the terrorist attacks that day but left a lasting impression on friends and family. Nancy’s parents, Harvey and Suri Morgenstern, came to the MobileBooth at Lincoln Center to pay tribute to Nancy and share stories of her adventurous life which included world travel, skiing and cross-country cycling.

As an Orthodox Jew, Nancy had to be creative about observing her faith while she was on skiing or biking excursions. “In 1994 she decided she was going to take a back road trip out west, I think it was a 10 day bike tour, into southern Utah and northern Arizona. But she had no problems,” says Harvey. “One time she stayed in a tent over the entire Saturday and then ultimately caught up with the group subsequently on the Sunday.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week our community outreach department brought us to the Hungarian Cultural Center, for the first of a series of Door-to-Door days to celebrate Extremely Hungary, a year-long festival celebrating Hungarian art and culture in the U.S.

The Cultural Center and the Hungarian Consulate (where we conducted the recordings) brought in a diverse and fascinating group of Hungarians, including Evi Blaikie, a child survivor of the Holocaust. Evi brought with her a book (pictured below) she wrote about her mother, whom she was separated from as a toddler, and later reunited with.

We look forward to recording more stories at Extremely Hungary this weekend in New Brunswick, New Jersey!

Paul Binder and Michael Christensen came to the MobileBooth at Lincoln Center to tell the about their adventures that lead to starting the Big Apple Circus. The two longtime friends met as mimes in San Francisco. Then, while taking a road trip together, they paid their gas juggling on the street. That led them to pack their rucksacks, juggle on streets and pass the hat from England to Istanbul.  They made their living with juggling acts in many countries with many charming bad accents. Juggling in Paris, they were asked to join to the Nouveau Cirque du Paris. Michael remembers their first weeks as members of the circus.  “I have pictures of the early shows where you and I are running into the ring. It is the kind of picture where you are look into the dictionary, you see ‘happiness’ and there is that picture.”

After a trip back to New York, Paul proposed that they start a circus of their own in New York City. The circus is now about to celebrate its 32nd year. Michael, or Mr. Stubs, played for many years the hobo clown down on his luck. Michael, up until this last year, was the circus’ director and ringmaster. Their families grew up in the circus. Paul’s kids did all of their schooling on the road in the One Ring School House. Twenty-two years ago, the pair started  Clown Care, a program that integrates circus entertainers into childrens hospitals all over the country. They have seen the transformative impact the circus has on people. After the first act, “people are shimmering,” said Michael.

“At the circus, the audience leaves behind the woes of society, at least for a moment.” said Paul.

“We followed our heart. We followed our own joy. It [the circus] was challenging but not once did we look at each other and say let’s throw in the clown towel… Still after all these years there is that same sense of delight and wonder,” said Michael.

Although StoryCorps’ offices are located in Brooklyn, and we have a permanent StoryBooth at Foley Square in Lower Manhattan, this month the StoryCorps MobileBooth is in the midst of its first ever visit to New York City. A MobileBooth is an Airstream trailer outfitted with a recording studio that travels the country year-round collecting stories.

Since our arrival last week, we have heard love stories in Central Park, long gone delis of the neighborhood, the first days of Lincoln Center, the busker beginnings of a circus, and the rise of the Upper West Side skyline. We have heard from dancers, opera singers, student scientists, accountants, lawyers, writers, composers, teachers, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, computer programmers, unemployed people, nurses, doctors, therapists, trekkies, and many more to come to come.

Like the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. At the Museum of Modern Art, that same picture can spark a thousand memories. As part of its Meet Me at MoMA outreach program, the museum partnered with StoryCorps’ Memory Loss Initiative to assist its regular and most faithful visitors in capturing their lives’ most influential moments.

Throughout the afternoon, eight conversations were recorded on four StoryKits, affectionately known as our “recording studio in a briefcase,” between those living with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia and their family members and friends. A mother told her son of her part in the World War II war effort as an inspector for a parachute factory. A husband and wife remembered the family portrait drawn for them by their son. A niece chatted with her aunt about how she’d like to be remembered by the rest of their family. The scope of discussions was as bright and diverse as MoMA’s collection of pop art, and continued well after the recorders were stopped, spilling into its Metropolitan Garden reception.

Since 2006, StoryCorps’ Memory Loss Initiative has collected hundreds of recordings to support and encourage people with memory loss to share their stories. Our collaboration with MoMA was an innovative first for both organizations, whose programming invites the participation of Alzheimer’s groups and populations by providing much-needed creative space and flexibility. Hopefully, this is only the beginning.

To reserve your StoryKit through our Memory Loss Initiative, visit us at www.storycorps.org/initiatives/mli.

If you’ve ever considered yourself a “buff” on a subject (film buff, Civil War buff, oral history buff), you can attribute that term to the buff-colored uniforms worn by firefighting enthusiasts who volunteered for New York City’s firehouses during the 1920s. Dan Andrews, a buff for the FDNY during the 1960s, and his long-time friend, Manny Fernandez, who drove engines at the same firehouse, came to our Lower Manhattan StoryBooth to remember their days on the job, the firefighters they so admired, and one fire they want never to be forgotten.

_{Dan Andrews (left) and Manny Fernandez at StoryCorps in New York City.}

“It was a time in New York City when firehouse doors were always open,” Dan recalled with nostalgia. “They were a real part of the community.” Dan and Manny shared fond memories of touring New Yorkers and their children around the engines and providing them with fire safety tips. They also remembered working under the guidance of what Dan remembers as “a great group of men. It was like a brotherhood. We would go down there every night, pal around. We had a great admiration for them.”

On the night of October 17th, 1966, Manny was preparing himself some peppers and eggs in the firehouse kitchen when he heard the ringing of the bell that in those days signified a fire. At the sound of that bell, the firefighters (”firemen” back then) would “jump into their boots and get ready to roll” and Manny would drive the engine to the scene. Their destination on that night was East 23rd Street, just outside a shop called Wonder Drug.

Read the rest of this entry »

Just before the holidays, Facilitator Michael Brodlieb and I visited the Bronx Library Center to do interviews with members of the Bronx River Alliance. Our first participant was Ruth Anderberg, who started the project to uncover the Bronx River. When she began her work there were few accessible sections of the river in the Bronx, and the parts you could see were overflowing with junk. Anderberg and many others have since cleaned up the river and continue to work on its greenway.

The organization now umbrellas many inspiring projects. For more info, or to schedule a canoe trip with these incredible people, visit www.bronxriver.org

Last week the Door-to-Door department visited Sandy Ground Historical Society in Staten Island, New York. The Society is a small, over-flowing museum of artifacts that document the Sandy Ground settlement, the oldest community of free slaves in North America.

Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday, November 17th, the Lower Manhattan StoryBooth opened its doors to the public, inviting area organizations and passersby to learn more about the StoryCorps project and tour the StoryBooth.

Visitors were offered donut holes, hot cider, and literature on StoryCorps and our upcoming National Day of Listening. Eight inviteesóthe Museum of Chinese in America, South Street Seaport Museum, National Parks Service, African Burial Ground, Tsingtao, Charles Wang Health Center, Eldridge Street Synagogue, NYPDóand about four times as many curious pedestrians stopped long enough to hear a StoryCorps pitch, add their names to our mailing list, and treat their ears to some New York stories. We witnessed the fruits of our labor right away when a NYC Parks & Recreation employee was spotted spreading the word to people on the opposite side of the park.