City Lore: the New York Center for Urban Culture was founded in 1986 and was the first organization in the United States devoted expressly to the "documentation, preservation, and presentation of urban folk culture." Their mission is to produce programs and publications that convey the richness of New York City—and America's—living cultural heritage. In addition to regular programming that includes the Place Matters Awards and the People's Hall of Fame, the organization works with a wide range of partners to develop exhibitions, publications, and documentary films, and to advocate for the rights of street performers, ethnic clubs, and other grassroots cultural expressions in New York City. City Lore works in four cultural domains: urban folklore and history, preservation, arts in education, and grassroots poetry traditions. Described by Sonnet Takahisa of the September 11th Memorial Museum as "wise renegades," their programs include People's Poetry Project, Place Matters (in collaboration with the Municipal Arts Society) and City of Memory.
City Lore works collaboratively with folk and community artists, embracing different aesthetics for the creation of art. Their collaborators include the
Gotham Center for New York City History, the
New-York Historical Society,
Bank Street College of Education, and smaller groups such as
Los Pleneros de la 21. City Lore’s staff consists of professional
folklorists (Steve Zeitlin), the founder and executive director; Elena Martínez and Amanda Dargan),
historians
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human species; as well as the ...
; (Marci Reaven),
photographers
A photographer (the Greek φῶς (''phos''), meaning "light", and γραφή (''graphê''), meaning "drawing, writing", together meaning "drawing with light") is a person who uses a camera to make photographs.
Duties and types of photograp ...
; (
Martha Cooper);
ethnomusicologist (Lois Wilcken); and arts and education specialists (Anika Selhorst). Amanda Dargan and husband Steve Zeitlin are the parents of Oscar-nominated director
Benh Zeitlin.
Projects and programs
Urban folklore
The City Lore office on
First Avenue on the
Lower East Side
The Lower East Side, sometimes abbreviated as LES, is a historic neighborhood in the southeastern part of Manhattan in New York City. It is located roughly between the Bowery and the East River from Canal to Houston streets. Historically, it w ...
houses archives containing over 100,000 images, hundreds of oral histories, and traditional music and poetry performance tapes. The archives are part of the ongoing documentation project featured on City of Memory, a participatory online story map of
New York City
New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...
.
City Lore's People's Hall of Fame, established in 1993, honors grassroots contributions to New York's cultural life and presents winners with a plate-sized bronze version of the New York City subway token. Recipients have included the Pearls of Wisdom Storytellers, Peter Benfaremo ("
The Lemon Ice King of Corona"), Jim Power ("New York's Mosaic Man"), and Renee Flowers (original member of the Gowanus Wildcats Girls Drill Team).
People's Poetry Project
In the aftermath of
September 11, 2001 attacks
The September 11 attacks, also known as 9/11, were four coordinated Islamist terrorist suicide attacks by al-Qaeda against the United States in 2001. Nineteen terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners, crashing the first two into ...
, City Lore found and collected anonymous poems and other writings that had been left at memorials, hospitals and gathering places throughout the city. A selection of these anonymous poems was published in the book, ''Words In Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam''.
[Aptowicz, Cristin O'Keefe. (2008). ''Words in Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam.'' New York City: Soft Skull Press, 288. .] and appeared in Steve Zeitlin's essay, "Oh Did You See the Ashes Come Thickly Falling Down."
Special projects
City Lore produces
documentary film
A documentary film (often described simply as a documentary) is a nonfiction Film, motion picture intended to "document reality, primarily for instruction, education or maintaining a Recorded history, historical record". The American author and ...
s and collaborates with filmmakers whose work relates to the organization's mission. Sponsored films include
Ric Burns' ''Coney Island'' and the five-part series ''
New York: A Documentary Film''; ''City of Dreams'', a film about female artists in New York City; ''From Mambo to Hip Hop'', a documentary which traces the history of music in the
South Bronx
The South Bronx is an area of the Boroughs of New York City, New York City borough of the Bronx. The area comprises neighborhoods in the southern part of the Bronx, such as Concourse, Bronx, Concourse, Mott Haven, Bronx, Mott Haven, Melrose, B ...
; and the forthcoming ''DeAf Jam'', which highlights the poetry and storytelling of the deaf performed in
American Sign Language
American Sign Language (ASL) is a natural language that serves as the predominant sign language of Deaf communities in the United States and most of Anglophone Canadians, Anglophone Canada. ASL is a complete and organized visual language that i ...
.
Funds were raised by City Lore to support Peter Siegel's project to restore and issue tapes he made in the 1960s of folk music concerts by
Mississippi John Hurt,
The Carter Family,
Jesse Fuller,
Bill Monroe, and others. The recordings became the box set ''Friends of Old Time Music'' released by
Smithsonian Folkways in 2006.
[Ratliff, Ben]
"Rounding Up the Best of the Boxed; Friends of Old Time Music -- The Folk Arrival, 1961-1965."
''New York Times'' 24 November 2006.
References
{{Authority control
American folklore
Storytelling
Preservation (library and archival science)
Organizations based in New York City
Culture of New York City
Organizations established in 1986
1986 establishments in New York City