Stories residents tell ‘fill the gaps’ left by historians

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Riverdalian Sam Gellens, a former CUNY history professor, recorded an interview on May 12 with his neighbor Roscoe Brown. Mr. Brown was a former president of Bronx Community College and member of the Tuskegee Airmen, the first group of black pilots admitted to the U.S. Air Force during World War II. The conversation was likely one of Mr. Brown’s last interviews before his death on July 2 at age 94.

It was part of the oral history project Remembering Riverdale: Our Neighborhood Oral History Project for the local branch of The New York Public Library. The goal is to record the life stories of Riverdalians, from ordinary residents to the area’s movers and shakers.

“This is a bird’s eye view, in a sense, of their neighborhood,” said Helene Samberg, a supervising librarian at the Riverdale branch. The project provides an opportunity to “get the stories that regular academic histories normally don’t get,” Ms. Samberg said. “You can’t get this in a textbook.”

Alexandra Kelly, a manager of outreach services and adult programming at The New York Public Library, said interviewers were “looking for the stories that are often undocumented, the stories of people’s everyday lives.”

“Their stories are leaving us and we want to make sure that they are recorded,” Ms. Kelly said.

Those stories that fill in the gaps in history include tales of small businesses that are no longer around, or people’s recollections of dinners at home, she said.

For Emilie Kaufman, who moved to Riverdale as a newlywed in 1958, the project is also a chance to spark new conversations with longtime neighbors and learn something new about the area.

“When I first moved here, it was like the country. The shopping center wasn’t here,” she said. “We had no banks. We had to pull the car out and we had to go down to 238th Street. It was really quiet.”

And then there was a time when tolls on a bridge to Manhattan was 10 cents, and when they later went up to 25 cents, people complained, Ms. Kaufman recalled.

Riverdale Avenue once had a red brick street, Ms. Kaufman learned from her conversation with neighbor Neil Conway, she said. The avenue was later paved over with black tar. In the gutter on 259th Street, some of the original bricks can still be seen.

Another interviewer, Debbi Dolan, who moved to Riverdale in 2001, said her involvement has been “a wonderful way, for me, to get to know my neighbors and friends even better, as well as getting their perspectives on the Riverdale community.”

She has posted six interviews on the library website so far. From the interviews, she learned of the shift in Riverdale’s demographics from a predominately Irish and Jewish neighborhood to a more diverse population, Ms. Dolan said.

Mr. Gellens, the retired history professor who interviewed Mr. Brown, said that “listening to people’s memories [and] giving them the space to talk about things, which they might have not otherwise talked about, is very precious.”

It was also a way to give back to the community, said Mr. Gellens.

“It’s something I could set up, which would make a contribution to posterity particularly for the person I was interviewing,” Mr. Gellens said. He added his second interview will be with Rabbi Avi Weiss of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale.

“I think the most important thing to take out of an oral history project is that a person’s reminiscences are fleeting, and if we don’t get these reminiscences while we can, chunks of our potential history are gone,” Ms. Samberg said. “It’s important that while we can, to speak to as many people as possible, to get their insights recorded and made available.”

The audio recordings done by volunteers are posted at http://oralhistory.nypl.org/neighborhoods/riverdale. The project is expected to run until the end of September. For more information or to get involved, contact the Riverdale Library at 718-549-1212.

Riverdale Library, Oral History Project, Sam Gellens, Debbi Dolan, Emilie Kaufman, Alexandra Kelly, Helene Samberg, Lisa Herndon

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