The Lost City of New York: Stories of Growing Up in the 1950s and ’60s

5:30 PM Cash Bar
6 PM Program in the Lecture Hall, followed by reception

“Once there was another city here, and now it is gone. There are almost no traces of it anymore, but millions of us know it existed, because we lived in it: the Lost City of New York.” —Pete Hamill, New York magazine

Five storytellers—Harris Cooper, Philip Costanzo, Iris Tillman Hill, Peter Lange and Benjamin Reese—recount scenes and experiences from their years growing up in New York City in this event organized by Peter Lange, Provost Emeritus and Thomas A. Langford University Professor of Political Science and Public Policy Emeritus at Duke University. Prompted by a projection of stunning, contemporaneous black-and-white photographs by Frank Oscar Larson, the storytellers share their New Yorks, from the Upper and Lower East Sides to the Bronx and Harlem to Brooklyn. They will also share images from their own family archives to illuminate personal insights into times and places that no longer exist, except in memory—all the lost cities that have made up New York, a many-faceted metropolis constantly reinventing itself. Co-sponsored by Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies.