March 24, 2008

Lehman’s Library Preserves Childhood in the Bronx Photo/Audio Material
Like Peter Pan, some children in the Bronx will never need to grow up — online, that is — once a Lehman College librarian digitizes a collection of 18 vintage and 40 contemporary photographs dating back almost a century.
     Prof. Janet Butler Munch, special collections librarian at Lehman’s Leonard Lief Library, has received a $10,000 grant from the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) for the project, which will include audio excerpts selected from over 300 hours of interviews with adults about what it was like to grow up in the borough. The website should be completed in January and housed at the College’s website (www.lehman.edu).
     In addition to the public interest served by making the collection available to all, Prof. Munch hopes the site will provide curricular support for a variety of Lehman courses. “The collection is intended for the people of the Bronx and to encourage research on the Bronx—where it was, where it is, and hopefully where it is going,” she said.
     The vintage photographs were taken during the early twentieth century and donated to the College, while the contemporary images were taken mostly between 1983 and 1986 by Georgeen Comerford, currently a professor of art at Brooklyn College, and given to the Bronx Institute, which is based at Lehman. Both sets document Bronx children in their neighborhoods and illustrate their relationships with adults, each other and the Bronx.
     “We are planning to include the oral testimony that complements the photographs,” Munch noted. This is part of an oral history project that will find its way to a Web site in 2009, when digitizing the audio is concluded.
     In 2006, Prof. Munch digitized photographs of Bronx businesses, landmarks and streets for another project — Bronx Business for Everybody (http://www.lehman.edu/provost/ library/BronxBusiness/index.htm) — that was also funded by METRO, a nonprofit organization that assists libraries in the New York area. “Childhood in the Bronx,” however, also poses the challenge of synching sound clips with text.

Fred Schwartz in his wagon on the Grand Concourse near Kingsbridge Road, ca. 1913. From the Fred W. Schwartz collection.

Julio, 1977. The collection of The Bronx Institute, Herbert H. Lehman College. Photographer: Georgeen Comerford.