WNYC-TV Presents Poetry Spots

Starting in the early 1980’s, municipal broadcaster WNYC-TV shifted from primarily broadcasting public ceremonies and government press conferences to creating original programming that highlighted the diverse cultures, events and people of New York. One such television program was Poetry Spots, originally conceived of by poet Bob Holman. Poetry Spots featured award-winning writers like Allen Ginsberg and paired readings of their poems with short video art segments usually featuring the authors themselves. Airing for six seasons from 1987 to 1993, the series won two New York Emmy awards and inspired other innovative programs on poetry and video art.

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Bob Holman, We Interrupt This Program

REC0047_2_158_2142: WNYC-TV Poetry Spots, April 26, 1989, Bob Holman - We Interrupt This Program

Before Poetry Spots, Bob Holman was an active organizing member of the New York City poetry community. Originally raised in rural Ohio, Holman attended Columbia University in the late 1960s, but found his artistic home in the Lower East Side. After graduating, Holman became a member of multiple local poetry organizations, like the Nuyorican Poet’s Café and the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, as well as an active director and producer of plays written by fellow poets at The Poet’s Theater. Learning from his experience producing Poetry Spots, Holman went on to refine the format for his award-winning PBS series United States of Poetry in 1996. Still active today, Holman now runs several Bowery-based arts organizations, like Bowery Poetry Club and Bowery Poetry Books.

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Jessica Hagedorn, Loft Living

REC0047_2_158_2142: WNYC-TV Poetry Spots, April 26, 1989, Jessica Hagedorn - Loft Living

Jessica Hagedorn is an award-winning American playwright, composer and author who first moved to New York in 1978 after growing up in Manila and getting her education in theater in San Francisco. She quickly wrote and staged several of her works like Mango Tango, Tenement Lover, Holy Food and Teenytown. Just after her appearance on Poetry Spots, Hagedorn released her 1990 novel Dogeaters, which caused controversy among Filipino communities for exploring themes of colonialization and westernization. At the same time, it won an American Book Award and has been adapted into successful stage productions several times.

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Allen Ginsberg, In My Kitchen

REC0047_2_158_2142: WNYC-TV Poetry Spots, April 26, 1989, Allen Ginsberg - In My Kitchen

Along with writers like Jack Kerouac and William S. Boroughs, Allen Ginsberg defined the Beat Generation of poets with his famous 1951 poem Howl. Born in Newark, New Jersey, Ginsberg lived in cities across the world, but spent much of his life living and working in New York’s East Village. For decades, Ginsberg was a prominent voice in the American counterculture, writing poems that denounced military actions like the Vietnam War, advocated for greater free speech and explored culturally taboo topics, like drug use and homosexuality. Ginsberg passed away in 1997 from liver cancer not long after a last public appearance at an NYU Poetry Slam. His last poem Things I’ll Not Do (Nostalgias) was written one week before his death.

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June Jordan, Financial Planning and Sara Miles

REC0047_2_158_2142: WNYC-TV Poetry Spots, April 26, 1989, June Jordan - Financial Planning and Sara Miles.

June Jordan blurred the lines between journalist and poet perhaps more than any other author featured in Poetry Spots. Along with more than two dozen major works of creative writing, Jordan was also known for her journalism as a regular contributor to the publication The Progressive from 1989 to 2001, shortly before her death in 2002. Growing up in Harlem to parents who had emigrated from Jamaica, Jordan won many awards and grants as she progressed rapidly in her career, focusing on issues of racial justice, feminism, and queer rights. Her awards included a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1982 and an award from the National Association of Black Journalism in 1984, to name just a few. In 2019, Jordan was added to the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor at the Stonewall National Monument in 2019 for her focus on LGBTQ issues in her writings, both fiction and non-fiction.

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The full version of this episode of Poetry Spots is now available on the New York City Municipal Archives digital gallery, as well as compilations and other full episodes. Hundreds of hours of other programs from WNYC-TV that focused on arts and culture are also freely available, such as New York Hotline, Neighborhood Voices and Heart of the City. From 1985 to 1996, programs like these helped New Yorkers explore their City in ways they never would have otherwise. We hope that by preserving and making them widely available, they can inspire not only New Yorkers, but people from around the world.

WNYC-TV Archives: A Public Broadcaster for the Public Good

Over the last year, the Municipal Archives has successfully digitized hundreds of reels of film created from the 1940s through the 1980s by WNYC-TV, the city-owned television station. Although there are thousands more films to digitize, those that have already been preserved indicate the breadth and quality of subjects featured within this vast collection. From 1949 to 1981, WNYC-TV produced more than 4,000 films featuring news-worthy figures, events, developments and places, usually with sound and in full color. In addition to these films, WNYC-TV produced thousands of video tapes in the 1980s and 90s.

WNYC began as a radio broadcast station in 1924, one of the first municipal-owned stations in the country. During the early days of radio, regulatory bodies designated sections of the radio spectrum for broadcast and would lease or sell licenses to specific channels, such as WNYC or CBS. In the 1930s, like many municipalities, New York City anticipated the invention of television networks and created television broadcasting licenses to be leased in the future. Unlike most places, however, City leaders did not sell these licenses during the Great Depression, enabling them to set up municipal television stations like WNYC-TV and WNYE-TV, operated by the Board of Education, in the post-war era. Although WNYC produced several films in the 1940s and 50s, the film production expanded after WNYC-TV Channel 31 officially launched on November 5, 1961.

One of the earliest items in the WNYC-TV collection is City of Magic, a promotional film released in 1949. With a narrator speaking in the classic mid-Atlantic accent, the film celebrates New York City as the center of industry, trade, education and entertainment in the western world. There is a particular emphasis on the City’s prosperity compared with other world cities in Europe, still recovering from the Second World War.

City of Magic, 1949. WNYC-TV: Moving Images Collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

Although there are other productions like City of Magic, much of the WNYC-TV film collection consists of live recordings of public events, featuring local, national and international politicians and figures. President John F. Kennedy speaking at the 1962 dedication of the United States pavilion for the 1964 World’s Fair at Flushing Meadows, is one example. Introduced by Mayor Robert Wagner and Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, Kennedy echoed the sentiments found in City of Magic. In his words, visiting New York City and the 1964 World’s Fair were both opportunities for the world “to see what we have accomplished through a system of freedom.”

1964 New York’s World Fair: United States Pavilion groundbreaking ceremony with President John F. Kennedy, Mayor Robert Wagner and Robert Moses, December 14, 1962. WNYC-TV: Moving Images Collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

Ten years later in 1972, WNYC-TV recorded another historic public event when Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress, announced that she was running for president. In her speech, she rejected the “political expediency” of the Nixon administration, calling for national unity, electoral reform, environmental rehabilitation, an end to wars abroad and a greater focus on the potential of women and minorities. Our recent blog featured Chisholm’s presidential announcement captured by the WNYC-TV cameras:  Shirley Chisholm

By the 1970s, production at WNYC-TV had increased significantly, including comprehensive documentation of the administrations of Mayors John Lindsay and Abraham Beame. WNYC-TV also focused on interviewing local politicians about their policies, current events and the inner workings of City government. These interviews may have been especially needed by New Yorkers, as the 1970s saw a precipitous drop in the City’s ability to provide services that millions had come to depend on. The City’s fiscal crisis and Mayor Beame’s response are highlights of this collection.

WNYC Golden Anniversary: A. Labaton receiving the United Nations Award, speech by Lee Graham, proclamation and citations by Mayor Abraham D. Beame to Seymour Siegel, Herman Neuman and A. Labaton, July 8, 1974. WNYC-TV: Moving Images Collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

In 1974, Mayor Beame celebrated WNYC’s 50th anniversary with an official proclamation that July 8th would be known as WNYC Golden Anniversary Day. He remarked that New York City’s broadcast system remained “the only municipally owned and operated, non-commercial broadcasting complex in the United States.” This remained true until 1996, when Mayor Giuliani sold off the Municipal Broadcast System, turning WNYC radio into a private entity that is today owned and operated by New York Public Radio and the WNYC Foundation. For better or worse, WNYC’s time as an active part of City government had finally come to an end.

Now, almost a century after WNYC began providing high quality informational and cultural shows to New Yorkers, its original television productions will be made available again. With funding from the New York State Archives’ Local Government Records Management Improvement Fund, staff at the Municipal Archives began a carefully coordinated project to assess, clean, repair and create preservation-quality digital scans of the films in this unparalleled collection. In the next few months, the Municipal Archives will stream more videos from the WNYC-TV collection online. Higher resolution copies are available upon request. You can browse the online collection here and the WNYC-TV finding aid here.

Remembering Neighborhood Voices, Part I

In 1985, New York City’s municipal broadcast television station WNYC-TV produced Neighborhood Voices, a limited series on unique and changing city neighborhoods.  Comprised mostly of interviews with longtime residents and prominent local figures, this series provided a vivid and personal window into the ever-changing City, its residents, and the communities they created.

One such neighborhood was San Juan Hill. Located in Manhattan from 59th to 65th Streets, between Amsterdam and West End Avenues, it had been site of the first affordable housing units in the country, the childhood home of jazz legend Thelonious Sphere Monk, and the inspiration for the musical West Side Story.

Beginning in the 1890s, Afro-Caribbean emigres and African-Americans migrating from the American South began populating the neighborhood along with churches and community organizations. The community also attracted veterans returning from the Spanish-American War of 1898, possibly giving the area its nickname—from the Battle of San Juan Hill. In the 1910s, philanthropist Henry Phipps, Jr. constructed the Phipps Houses on 63rd Street. These buildings constitute the country’s oldest affordable housing units and provided a quality of living that working-class people of color rarely had access to at the time. In 1940, Robert Moses, Chairman of the Mayor’s Committee on Slum Clearance declared the neighborhood a slum, displaced its inhabitants, demolished the buildings and constructed what stands there today—Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

Roseanna Weston, one of the last living residents of the Phipps Houses, remembered the neighborhood before Lincoln Center. She recalled that prior to moving into the Phipps Houses in 1917, her family had been living in a tenement with wooden stairs and toilets shared by the entire building. Roseanna’s family was vetted and approved for the Phipps Houses after her father’s boss, a wealthy businessman, personally vouched for him as a reliable worker and good man. Rent was set at $6 a week, making it equivalent to roughly $475 a month in 2019 dollars—less than a quarter of even the cheapest rents in the area today.

Roseanna Weston sits in the same Phipps Houses apartment she grew up in, the last of her family to live there.

Thelonious Sphere Monk, jazz legend and New York City icon grew up in the Phipps houses alongside the Weston family. Monk passed away in 1983 following years of ill health. Neighborhood Voices interviewed Monk’s son, Thelonious Monk Jr. about his father, his relationship to San Juan Hill and how it had changed since his childhood. Monk Jr. recounted how personally involved his father was in the San Juan Hill area and how the character of the neighborhood informed his musical development. Following his death, Monk’s family established the Thelonious Monk Foundation to improve music education across the country. One of their first projects was starting a jazz dance and music class for students in Martin Luther King Jr. High School at 122 Amsterdam Avenue. Students in this class learned how to play and breakdance to Monk’s music.

Thelonious Monk Jr. weighs the impact of urban renewal (or urban removal) on his childhood neighborhood. Neighborhood Voices, WNYC Collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

Nina Garland, a member of the Thelonious Monk Foundation as well as a long-time choreographer and dance instructor assisted Monk Jr. in this effort. Garland, still a dance educator today, admired how teenagers in 1985 adapted modern break dancing techniques to the unfamiliar beat of Monk’s jazz. Classes like these were part of a larger push to make the lessons taught in City schools reflect the lives and experiences of their students. In another interview, school Principal Nellie Jordan explained how the class was originally planned as an after-school activity, but thanks to its popularity, became part of the regular school schedule.

Nina Garland marvels at the impact many famous African American artists and performers who first rose to prominence in San Juan Hill made on American culture. Neighborhood Voices, WNYC Collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

In the 1980s, Neighborhood Voices was meant to empower members of rapidly changing and sometimes disappearing neighborhoods. In addition to the artists in San Juan Hill, the series also highlighted the departure of the fur and shipping industries from Chelsea, socialist cooperatives based in the Allerton Coops, community gardens in the South Bronx and much more. These programs are now being digitized. Recorded on ¾” u-matic tapes, these videos were some of the most degraded in the WNYC-TV collection. Many required special treatments prior to digitization. The tapes themselves will continue to degrade, but the personal oral histories of New Yorkers contained within them have been preserved for future generations.

I Lift My Lamp Beside the Golden Door

Signed into law on November 29th, 1990 by President George H.W. Bush, the Immigration Act of 1990 reformed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, fundamentally changing the way the United States evaluates and admits immigrants. In order to explore what this reform would mean for one of the greatest immigrant cities in the world, WNYC-TV produced an extra-long episode of their current events show, New York Hotline. This episode assembled a panel reflecting perspectives from City demographers, anti-immigration groups, recent immigrants to the City and experts from CUNY and Columbia University. Produced in 1993 after the end of the Bush presidency, it aired one year after the law took effect.

Passed by significant bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate, the Immigration Act of 1990 made a number of basic changes to America’s immigration system, by:

• Increasing the worldwide limit for immigration visas from 540,000 to 700,000[i]

• Specifically increasing the number of visas used solely for family unification

• Creating diversity immigrant visa lotteries to increase immigration from countries under represented in coming immigrant groups

• Clarifying the authority of Immigration and Naturalization Service enforcement officers to make arrests and carry firearms

• Expanding the number of non-immigrant H1-B visas and green cards for foreign laborers

• Providing for the more expeditious deportation of violent offenders

• Eliminating exclusion of homosexual immigrants by labeling them as mentally unfit or “sexual deviants”

• Ending English language tests for naturalization tests

President Bush commented at its signing that “The Act maintains our Nation’s historic commitment to family reunification by increasing the number of immigrant visas allocated on the basis of family ties.”[ii] This increase in visas to family members would prove to be a deeply controversial aspect of the 1990 Immigration Act. Opponents of the law, both then and now, argue that this policy leads to an unfair pattern of ‘chain migration.’ For advocates and those who benefit from the law, it is a humane way to keep families together and creates tighter community bonds.

REC0047_II_150_2007: Frank Vardy describes the historic family nature of immigration into the United States. WNYC collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

Perhaps more than any part of the country, New York embodies the country’s ‘historic commitment’ to immigrants, with more migrants passing through its port during the 20th century than any other city in the United States. Frank Vardy, then a demographer in the City’s Planning Department, traced the movement of immigrant communities through different City neighborhoods. He did this so the City could provide better services to new arrivals, like adult English language education, foreign language signs in public buildings or interpreters in schools. More than anything else, Vardy argued in his interview, the opportunity to find work and a better life for their families is historically what drove most immigrants to New York, no matter where they came from. Crucially, though, it was the family ties to already established prior immigrants that helped new arrivals find work, learn English and ultimately begin the process of becoming American.

One organization featured in this Hotline episode was FAIR, or the Federation for American Immigration Reform. FAIR, founded in 1979 by ophthalmologist John Tanton, sought to repeal the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 as well as the 1990 reforms.  The organization wanted to significantly reduce immigration into the United States on environmental, cultural and economic grounds. FAIR, still in existence today, has been a controversial group despite its non-partisan and non-profit status. On one hand, it has advised major politicians for years, contributed to countless studies on immigration and its representatives have testified in front of Congress many times. On the other hand, FAIR was labelled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2007 and its founder has made a litany of explicitly racist remarks in official internal memos, often referring to people of color in inhuman terms.[iii]

REC0047_II_150_2012: FAIR advisory board member Edward Levy expresses his concern that the 1990 law’s expanded family unification policy will fundamentally damage American democracy. WNYC collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

In the middle of this were people like Yan He, a Chinese immigrant who had arrived in New York in 1990 just as the Immigration Act was being debated in Congress. Following family members who had already emigrated from China, Yan He and her husband came to the United States seeking work and opportunities. Throughout her interview, Yan He details the difficult and often complex experience of coming to America, including conflicts with abusive employers and the hope she has for her children to get better jobs through the American education system.

REC0047_II_150_2010: Arriving in America was only one step in a much longer journey for Yan He, her family and the City of New York. WNYC collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

The NYC Municipal Archives has hours of interviews with Frank Vardy, Edward Levy, Yan He and other experts on the subject of the 1990 Immigration Act. Although in this blog post we focused primarily on family unification, the other provisions of the Act like the diversity immigrant lottery or the expansion of H1-B visas have also proven to be controversial. Underneath the debates over these narrow issues lies the larger questions that residents of New York and America have been asking about the place immigration holds in American society. Digitizing these interviews from the 1990s helps preserve the history of this debate for future New Yorkers of all kinds, whether they be native- born citizens or one of the 3 million-plus foreign-born residents in the City.

[i] Highlights of the U.S. Immigration Act of 1990, by Warren Leiden and David Neal, Fordham International Law Journal

[ii] Statement on Signing the Immigration Act of 1990, President George H.W. Bush https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-signing-the-immigration-act-1990

[iii] https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/federation-american-immigration-reform