Adieu!
After twenty years under sail as a Brooklyn Public Library crew member, your blog editor will be jumping ship on Friday 28th June, leaving in her wake a trail of 92--count 'em--92 blog posts on everything from Pigtown to alcoholic turtles. With an eye to the future, yet, as befits a local history librarian, with feet firmly anchored in fine examples from the past, let me now look forward to life beyond the library.
For an old special collections dame, collecting is going to be an attractive pastime.
Listen!
The Listening Project: Midwood is a collection of gripping oral history interviews collected by documentary film maker Dempsey Rice during a residency at the Council Center for Senior Citizens in Midwood. If you think of oral history as long-winded wallowing in nostalgia, think again--these interviews are riveting stories distilled from long lives and told with grace, humor and panache. There are so many wonderful interviews to choose from that I urge you to explore the site. Here to whet your appetite is Harriet Solomon recounting the story of how she almost died on…
Nazism in 1930s Brooklyn
We have grown accustomed--too accustomed perhaps--to thinking of Brooklyn as the borough that integrated baseball, a borough dominated politically by Democrats, in which liberal and left-wing politics historically have flourished. But a recent acquisition brought home the fact that other points of view--including some many of us would now find repugnant--have gained a foothold here in the not so distant past. The drumbeat of Fascism in the 1930s could be heard all over Europe. It should come as no surprise that Brooklyn in that era also had its share of Fascist sympathisers. On…
The Photography of Anders Goldfarb: A Form of Compassion
Anders Goldfarb: Buildings as Buildings (cut 9) from pm on Vimeo. Peter Mattei's short interview with our old friend Anders Goldfarb captures his wry humor and provides insight into the genesis of his stark worldview. The son of Holocaust survivors, Anders has spent most of his career photographing Brooklyn's neighborhoods, particularly Greenpoint, in black and white, with his Rolleiflex and Leica cameras. Some of his photographs can be seen here in Brooklyn Public Library's Brooklyn Collection. Look for more on Anders here soon!
A Black Church in Williamsburgh
Leslie's recent post on the Italian marionette theater reminds me that research can be rewarding--a useful reminder, because sometimes one's best efforts bring only moderate success, or worse. I discovered this anew while investigating the next stop on our continuing tour of the Center for Brooklyn History's manuscripts, the A.M.E. Zion Church Collection. This unassuming handful of mortgages and receipts, while superficially uninteresting, actually provides us with rare evidence of the activities of one of the earliest black churches in Williamsburgh. But finding further…
Brooklyn's Congressman for half a century, Emanuel Celler
It has recently been my pleasure to arrange and describe a small collection of photographs and papers that belonged to Brooklyn's longtime congressman, Emanuel Celler. These items--principally photographs and laws written by Celler and framed along with the Presidential pen used to sign them--as far as we know came from his apartment just across the road from the library, on Prospect Park West. For those unfamiliar with Celler and his work, allow me to plagiarize from my own finding aid: Sumner Ave, Brooklyn "Emanuel Celler was born on May 6, 1888 in a frame house on Sumner Avenue…