Civic News

Close Encounters of the Best Kind: Learning from the Park Slope Oral History Project

Marjorie Smith is 92 now, and it has been more than 70 years since she was the best ice skater in all of Brooklyn, when she won national titles and when she would have made the 1936 Olympic team had ice dancing been included in the competition. It has also been more than 70 years since Smith was the same age as her small audience one morning in mid-October: four teenagers, all seniors at the Secondary School for Research (SSR) in Park Slope’s old John Jay school building. For nearly an hour, however, Smith’s stories of a long life lived in Brooklyn, much of it in Park Slope, transcended differences in age and circumstance and race (Smith is white; the students, like most of their compatriots at SSR, are of color). The teens peppered Smith with questions, scribbled notes, and listened attentively.

Similar interactions were going on at other tables around John Jay’s teachers’ cafeteria. Evadene Lovell, 87, was telling another four students how she had come down from the Maryland hills in World War II to work in a munitions factory in the District of Columbia before making her way to Park Slope. The kids who listened to John Murphy, 72, couldn’t believe that the genteel and gentrified Park Slope they know and where they are sometimes made to feel like unwelcome outsiders was once the site of violent clashes between Irish and Italian gangs. John Cortese, 80, talked about the days when 7th Avenue wasn’t lined with boutiques and expensive restaurants but delis, bars, butcher shops, and fruit and vegetable stores, like the one his father ran for 45 years before John took over and ran it for another 45.

Giggles rose from a table in the corner where Ruth Ebedohls, 65, had just confessed that the reason she moved from Park Slope to Manhattan in the 1960s was to be closer to her job as a Playboy Bunny — a passing cultural phenomenon she then had to explain to the students. Chalk it up to education.

Chalk it all up to education, on myriad levels.

Most obviously, the high school seniors in Mike Salak’s and Jessica Rofé’s Brooklyn History classes at SSR were learning about pre-21st century Park Slope from the most reliable possible sources: people who had lived through the neighborhood’s many swings in fortune.

The students, broken up into groups of three or four to interview 17 veteran Park Slopers on Oct. 16 and 17, were also learning about larger issues of economic and physical change over time. Gentrification and its effects are major themes of the Brooklyn History course, and much of the learning that goes on in the class is experiential, thanks to Rebecca Krucoff, co-founder of the Urban Memory Project. Krucoff has been helping develop the course curriculum for the last four years, and she regularly leads students at SSR and several other Brooklyn high schools on photo-taking tours of Brooklyn’s various changing neighborhoods. (The photos, accompanied by student-written text, have been exhibited at the Brooklyn Historical Society, the Old Stone House, and New York Methodist Hospital.)

The Park Slope oral history project, organized by Krucoff, Rofé, Salak, the Civic Council and the Old Stone House, with an assist from the Brooklyn Historical Society, took that experiential learning to a more intense and more personal level.

“Our students are used to learning about history from textbooks where they learn about huge events but not about individual lives,” said Rofé. “What they are learning from these interviews is that history is a mosaic of personal stories. They are learning that people’s lives affect big events, even as big events, inside and outside Brooklyn, affect people.”

Conversations with several of the students after the oral history sessions seemed to show that the lessons had taken root. Take Oscar Nuñez, for example. Nuñez has started going around his home neighborhood of East New York taking photos of old buildings and storefronts he had barely noticed before. He is assembling a scrapbook where he pastes up his photos next to historic photos of the same site he finds on the Web.

“I’ve started talking to people, too,” said Nuñez, an accomplished guitarist who hopes to study music in college. “In 30 or 40 years I’ll have this scrapbook to show people, to show what it was like. I’ll have my own stories to pass on.”

“I am so excited about Oscar,” said Krucoff. “Oscar has really been turned on to this class since the oral histories. Before we did them he was a bit more skeptical about what we were doing. To see a student as internally motivated as he has become is a teacher’s dream.

“Our hope is that there is something in this course that will grab every student at some point,” she continued. “I am hoping that by the time this semester is over, the students see their city as a richer place, and that they walk away with an excitement for learning in an in-depth manner.

“There are so many goals for this project — most of which rely on what we call ‘enduring understandings.’ These understandings include that Brooklyn is on a precipice of change, and it is our responsibility to understand what is happening so that we can take action in directing the consequences, as well as understanding that change in some respects is inevitable, and preserving what’s important to us is also important for the future. Add to that the understanding that history is personal and general at the same time, and that what we understand to be ‘history’ is made up of a lot of people’s stories that have been interpreted. These understandings are lofty, I know, but its what we are aiming for.”

The Civic Council had its own selfish reasons for the oral history project: we now have an invaluable archive of Park Slope stories, many of which we will soon be posting on our website. The interviews, however, yielded other, surprising dividends.

Most of the students at SSR and the other two schools in John Jay, the Secondary Schools for Journalism and Law, come from outside the neighborhood, and they and Park Slope regard each other with a certain wariness. Some shops along 7th Avenue have made it clear that the students aren’t welcome, and there is a large police presence in the afternoon when the schools let out.

Going in, none of us involved in this project knew for certain that it would succeed, or whether the distance between students and subjects could be bridged (besides the vast differences in age, 13 of the 17 interviewees were white). Some of the interviews did, indeed, start out slowly and haltingly. There were some awkward moments as the students reached the end of the questions they had prepared ahead of time. But then things began to click. The students leaned in closer; the talk became more animated. Even after time was up and the cell phones the kids were using as recorders were clicked shut, the stories continued.

None of us looking on could keep from grinning as we watched the connections being made all around the room ¬— connections that transcended differences in age, race, and geography. It was a lesson in the power of personal histories and personal interactions, in good teaching, and in the foolishness of stereotyping. Everyone was having fun, everyone was learning. It went so well we hope to do it again. There are troves of stories and storytellers out there. Oscar Nuñez and his fellow historians have barely scratched the surface.

–Ezra Goldstein