""Many of the recordings that eventually became
Nueva York* were made in San Juan Hill and Lincoln Square, neighborhoods that planner Robert Moses slated for slum clearance in 1955 to develop Lincoln Center. In addition to living just blocks away from years' worth of earsplitting demolition and construction, Schwartz understood how thousands of his neighbors were silenced in order to create the quiet entertainment space for the powerful, prosperous, and privileged. Schwartz produced a radio program for WNYC in protest, drawing on the many Puerto Rican, Jewish, and Italian musician-residents he had recorded within the new center's looming footprint. A skeptical Schwartz closed the program with the equivocal 'hope [that] it [Lincoln Center] brings as much culture to the community as did the people who were displaced."
Source: Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman, writing in "Splicing the Sonic Color-Line: Tony Schwartz Remixes Postwar Nueva York,"
Social Text 102, Vol. 28, No.1, Spring 2010, p. 71.
*
Nueva York: A Tape Documentary of Puerto Rican New Yorkers is a 1955 Folkways album based on more than 120 hours of recordings by Tony Schwartz. Media pioneer Tony Schwartz was among the first to recognize the value of the portable tape recorder. For thirty-one years (1945-1976), he created and produced a weekly program on WNYC featuring many of the recordings that were compiled into albums for Folkways Records. Photographer Edward Steichen called Tony the man "who moved sound recording into the realm of the arts."
Note: Jennifer Stoever Ackerman is also the Editor-in-Chief of
Sounding Out!
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This week we marked the 69th anniversary of V-E Day with this
ditty.