NYHS

I’ve participated in various extracurricular activities here at NYU and in high school. Nearly all of those activities have involved, in one way or another, the production of physical materials. I’ve helped make posters for concerts, brochures on what a group does, postcards, and flyers. Never once while producing these items did I think about people saving them, or the possibility that they would end up being considered historically significant. I doubt most people think of things like that when they create something. At the New York Historical Society, I was really struck by the NYU poster asking for funds for a new building. Someone, somewhere, decided that one day that might be important, and saved it. There are entire organizations now dedicated to saving the things that I daily toss into my trashcan. I admit, I’m a pack rat, but even I don’t save things like that. I wonder how important you have to consider yourself to save things like that. Did any of the famous Villagers of the early Washington Square days consider their work worthy enough to save? Journals, maps and public records I can understand saving, but what about flyers and posters and advertisements and pamphlets? I think you have to believe in the long-term validity of your work to save those things.

After the presentation of the various items, I wandered over to the collection of public directories. My mother’s parents both grew up on the Lower East Side, children of immigrants from Eastern Europe. The last time she visited, we walked around the Lower East Side trying to locate where her father grew up. I looked in the directory for her father, her grandfather, and her uncle’s names. I found some, but the records sometimes conflicted. I spent several minutes leafing through these records. It made me think about my connection to the New York Historical Society. My history is contained there, in a way. And perhaps, the history being made today of which I am a part will someday be housed there as well. I now live here, mere blocks from where my grandparents grew up 80-some years ago. I don’t think that my grandparents would have thought that someday their granddaughter would be looking for the addresses of where they grew up. History making can’t be a conscious project, but it relies on individuals to keep records and objects to be reviewed later on.