City Lore

City Lore: the New York Center for Urban Culture was founded in 1986 and was the first organization in the United States devoted expressly to the "documentation, preservation, and presentation of urban folk culture." Their mission is to produce programs and publications that convey the richness of New York City—and America's—living cultural heritage. In addition to regular programming that includes the Place Matters Awards and the People's Hall of Fame, the organization works with a wide range of partners to develop exhibitions, publications, and documentary films, and to advocate for the rights of street performers, ethnic clubs, and other grassroots cultural expressions in New York City. City Lore works in four cultural domains: urban folklore and history, preservation, arts in education, and grassroots poetry traditions. Described by Sonnet Takahisa of the September 11th Memorial Museum as "wise renegades," their programs include People's Poetry Project, Place Matters (in collaboration with the Municipal Arts Society) and City of Memory.

City Lore works collaboratively with folk and community artists, embracing different aesthetics for the creation of art. Their collaborators include the Gotham Center for New York City History, the New-York Historical Society, Bank Street College of Education, and smaller groups such as Los Pleneros de la 21. City Lore’s staff consists of professional folklorists (Steve Zeitlin, the founder and executive director, Elena Martínez and Amanda Dargan), historians (Marci Reaven), photographers (Martha Cooper), ethnomusicologists (Roberta Singer and Lois Wilcken), and arts and education specialists (Anika Selhorst).

The City Lore office on First Avenue on the Lower East Side houses archives containing over 100,000 images, hundreds of oral histories, and traditional music and poetry performance tapes. The archives are part of the ongoing documentation project featured on City of Memory, a participatory online story map of New York City.

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