“The story’s first function is to authorize, or more exactly, to found,” wrote Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life. Maps, then, represent a kind of story-telling about a place, often drawn by government agencies, in conjunction with city planners, developers, and communities themselves. Before official maps are drawn however, the stories we tell about the places in which we live, work, and play, constitute their own geographies. These are the stories that

. . As neighborhoods undergo rapid change and people are displaced, among the first casualties are their stories. As one of Brooklyn’s fastest changing neighborhoods, the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn has been such a place of vanishing stories.

In 2016, in partnership with Weeksville Heritage Center and Brooklyn Movement Center, Brooklyn Historical Society undertook Voices in Crown Heights, an oral history project designed to document and preserve histories of the neighborhood’s residents. This oral histories in this collection constitute a guide through the placed-based remembrances constitute their own neighborhood geographies, or maps, that counter the erasures or oral “maps,” that are sometimes in accord with official boundaries, but often counter them based on the neighborhood as it is lived and experienced.

Maps represent a kind of story.

In partnership with Brooklyn Historical Society, Weeksville Heritage Center and Brooklyn Movement Center each hosted a “listening session,” featuring deep listening of oral history selections and facilitated conversation, and an additional public program where community members, activists, and others were in dialogue about community issues.

At a time of heightened civic activity – driven in part by dynamic grassroots movements focused on race relations, policing, housing, and immigration – listening has become more critical than ever to American life. And on these national issues, the voices of Crown Heights have a lot to say.