Community Archives & Memory: 8th Ave. Sunset Park, Brooklyn
Community Archives & Memory: 8th Ave. Sunset Park, Brooklyn
Searching the Brooklyn Historical Society’s Archives
While searching for oral history content for a class I searched the online archives of the Brooklyn Historical Society (BHS) and came upon an archive project from the 90s that took place in my neighborhood. The original archive project is called: 8th Avenue- Sunset Park Oral History, 1993-1994. Sound recordings: 38 cassettes (90 minutes each). Needless to say my curiosity was peaked. I tried to find out more information on BHS’s online archive, but there was no direct linkage to the thirty-eight files. This meant that a site visit was in order, so I made an online reservation to visit the archive library.
The Brooklyn Historical Society’s archive library seems like something out of a Sherlock Holmes’s reading room, with its wood paneling, high ceilings, tungsten lights and long shelves filled with books. After leaving my personal belongings in a separate section and making sure to only be caring a pencil and not a pen to conduct notes, I was ready to go to the computer to search the 8th Avenue archives. A brief note: the BHS worked on this project with the Chinatown History Museum (now known as MOCA) to gather stories that related to the Chinese community on 8th Avenue in Brooklyn. There are a total of twenty-eight interviews in English, Mandarin, and Cantonese. I initially had a difficult time actually locating the files. The computer itself was an older PC, but besides it being slow I was unable to find a direct link to the 8th Avenue Project files. I eventually asked the librarian for assistance and it took her awhile too to find the link. Which made me wonder how often people come in to search for these particular archives? I began listening to different oral history interviews to gauge which files I wanted to work with. I was only able to listen to about three-minute excerpts of the interviews (from the original 90-minute interview). This meant that I had to go off of that limited section to request the complete archive. Since, this project took place in the early 90s the recordings were compiled on cassettes. BHS is in the process of digitizing their oral history collections. Once I had a list of interviews I wanted to work with, I filled out paperwork and came back a few days later to pick up my CDs with the interviews and transcripts.
The stories I listened to gave me chunks of information that I was then able to piece together in order to better understand my community. There was an Italian pizza shop owner who took over the business from his dad, but you could tell in his interview he was worried about his business and if he would be around any longer because the new Chinese immigrant community was buying up most of 8th Avenue in Sunset Park. The next interview I listened to was from a female pastor at Trinity Lutheran Church; a church built by Norwegians in 1890. She mentioned that the Mosque on 8th Avenue use to be the Norwegian community center and those newly arrived sailors would head to the center to participate in social dances and dinners. I also learned by listening to the archives that 8th Avenue use to be called Lapskaus Boulevard after a Norwegian stew that is created from leftovers. I must mention that the librarians were very helpful and key to accessing the information.
By repurposing the digitized media files from the BHS into my own media project of sorts I have participated in nonsimultaneous dissemination, which Wendy Hui Kyong Chun in her article: The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future Is a Memory describes as “…the lag between a digital object’s creation and its popular or scholarly uptake- its nonsimultaneous dissemination- does not belie new media, but rather, as I explain later, ground it as new.” I see it as taking pieces. I have taken pieces (literally) of the digitized library archive and created a mashed up media project that used the interviews as the foundation and built upwards from there.
The 8th Avenue- Sunset Park Oral History collection is a memory incubator, holding important details to community history. Ms. Chun believes that “The major characteristic of digital media is memory.” So these digitized archives now are the bearers of the project’s memory and we should feel reassured. Or is that a false belief? According to Ms. Chun one should be cautious because all digital media will at some point or another need to be refreshed, replaced, backed up, and that although we can access the Internet at any hour of the day, we can not guarantee that the particular file or webpage we are looking for will be there when we search for it. I already noticed from working with the files, that some recordings have great sound quality and are sturdy to work with, but other interview recordings either in the actual recording or in the digitizing have low sound qualities that make them very difficult to work with from a production standard. A final quote from Ms. Chun explains, “Memory is an active process, not static. A memory must be held in order to keep it from moving or fading. Memory does not equal storage. While memory looks backward, …to store is to furnish, to build stock…” This is a great description of BHS’s efforts to preserve the Sunset Park 8th Avenue’s memories. When I think of storage I think of forgetting things, until someday in the future when one has a thought that pertains to an item in storage and goes searching it out. I wonder about how many people actively search out the 8th Ave. archive, I wonder about those audio files I listened to that are already in a state of degeneration with their loss of audio quality, I also wonder if by working with their files am I helping their memories from not fading away. One thing I know for sure is that this archival discovery has ignited a passion for me and helped me to understand my neighborhood in a richer way. I feel strongly about bringing the archives alive, to be part of a creative process that might continue even after I am gone.