34th Avenue Oral History: Place-based Storytelling in Jackson Heights

Bridget Bartolini

This project tells the story of the 34th Avenue Open Street and what it means to people who use it. New York City’s Open Streets program closes cars to streets and opens them to people. Besides the expected exercise and socializing, community members have appropriated 34th Avenue as a space for community connection, a resource for mental relief, and, for some, a means of financial livelihood. The transformation of 34th Avenue into an Open Street has strengthened the local sense of place and heightened topophilic sentiments, helping people feel more rooted in their neighborhood and more connected to their neighbors and the spatial environment. Accompanying the project website (www.34aveoralhistory.org) and multimedia profiles of narrators, this written thesis explores the impact of place on our lives and identities, sense of place, and the value of place-based storytelling.

Bridget Bartolini is an oral historian, socially engaged artist and writer with a specialization in New York City history, place-based stories and narrator profiles. She has published profiles of narrators in Urban Omnibus, Gothamist and City Limits. Bridget has conducted oral history interviews for the Columbia Center for Oral History Research’s NYC COVID-19 Oral History, Narrative and Memory Archive, Queens Memory’s COVID-19 Project, Educational Alliance’s Nonagenarians in the NORC, and family clients. She served as an audit editor for Columbia’s Obama Presidency Oral History. Her thesis project, 34th Avenue Oral History, was awarded the 2021-2022 Public Humanities Fellowship from the Heyman Center for the Humanities and the Public Humanities Grant from Humanities New York. Inspired by her love for New York City and belief in the power of storytelling as a tool for social justice, Bridget created the Five Boro Story Project in 2013 to produce community programs that bring New Yorkers together through sharing personal stories and art inspired by our neighborhoods. She has produced more than eighty community events and has led numerous workshops on oral history, storytelling, advocacy and social change.