Brooklyn 'As Told' By Its Seniors: New Book Tells Story Of Change

CLINTON HILL, BROOKLYN — Lately, Maria Baker will be going about her day when a memory from the last 70 years in Brooklyn will pop into her head.

Sometimes, it's something simple, perhaps a family sitting in silence for 1930s and 1940s broadcaster Edward R. Murrow's nightly newscast. Other times, the memories are more complex – like learning to be comfortable as the only black woman in a room of white men at Bank of New York in the 1980s.

But, most complicated of all, is that these aren't Baker's memories. They're the stories of a dozen seniors she has spent the last year interviewing about life in Brooklyn, New York City, and beyond.

"Sentences and experiences they’ve shared are now part of the way I experience the city," Baker, a Pratt Institute instructor, said.

"We heard about businesses that have closed and are missed... living in NYCHA buildings, work histories, relationships with police, family histories, parenting in NYC... heartbreaks and losses, and memories of defining city events," she said.

Baker and her team of Pratt students and fellow staff are now hoping those stories will stick in the minds of a new audience: the readers of their book "As Told."

(Photos by Samuel Herrera). "As Told" book cover.

"As Told" is a collection of stories from eight Brooklyn seniors, along with their portraits and old photographs, that the Pratt team says will ensure their memories are archived even as the neighborhoods around them transform. It was released this week by Pratt publisher and writing journal "The Felt."

"We wanted to focus on and center on the experiences of those who lived and worked here before us, and resist the emerging glossy, young and hip narrative about the neighborhood," organizer Luke Degnan, who also works at Pratt, said. "We wanted to find out: What does it mean to carry long life-experience in a relentlessly changing city? What no longer / still feels like home?"

To do that, Degnan, Baker and Pratt students Aarushi Agni and Samuel Herrera teamed up with Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership to find people who wanted to tell their stories, some of whom were part of a seniors writing workshop Baker held when she was in graduate school.

Thanks to funding from Pratt and other organizations, the group spent a year meeting with the residents everywhere from community centers, to food courts, to the Brooklyn Public Library.

(Samuel Herrera).

The resulting stories delve into decades spent throughout New York City, the country and travels across the globe, but focuses specifically on ways Fort Greene and Clinton Hill have changed over the years.

Seniors like Yvonne Bodrick — who settled in Clinton Hill Coops in 1985 after growing up in Bed-Stuy — remember favorite restaurants long gone, new ones popping up on a once-barren Myrtle Avenue, or her fear that moving was the wrong call back when the neighborhood was more "treacherous" than it is now.

"It was a quaint neighborhood, but it was going through changes," Bodrick said. "It was borderlining. It could go this way or that way. At one point I was afraid about my investment, because I didn’t know what was gonna happen, but it turned out for the better, and I’m glad it did.

(Samuel Herrera) Photo of an old photo of Bodrick.

Others recall why they moved to Brooklyn in the first place.

Whether its Darrell Robinson's matter-of-fact, "I fell in love with a young lady who lived here in Brooklyn...It lasted for three years. We separated. I’ve been here ever since."

Or, for Whitman Houses's Tenant Association President Isabella Lee, a determination to leave Southern life behind in South Carolina.

"My mother used to worry about me a lot," she said. "I said, 'Don’t worry ’cause I’m determined to do what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna make things work out.'"

And, finally, for some, the stories became a reminder why they decided to stick around.

"That's my life in a nutshell," one senior, Marilyn Findlay said. "But anyway, I’m not leaving New York because I was born here."

The book is available to order or look at online on the "As Told" website.