Today’s photo of the week shows a moment from the opening of New Neighbors: Sunset Park's Chinese Community in June 1996. The event featured lion dancers, shadow puppets, food, games, and calligraphy workshops. In this photo, taken in the Othmer library, lions stand beside a shadow puppet theater as an excited audience (not pictured) waits for the play to begin.
In 1992, The Brooklyn Historical Society, in cooperation with The Chinatown History Museum (now the Museum of Chinese in America), received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to undertake research and exhibition planning for an interpretive history of the establishment and development of the Chinese immigrant community in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The project’s initial title was “Eighth Avenue: Sunset Park’s Chinese-American Settlement.” However, during the research, project planners discovered that many Chinese residents at the time were unfamiliar with the term Sunset Park; most residents knew the area as Ba Da Dao (Eighth Avenue). Based on this response, project planners changed the title to “Ba Da Dao: Avenue of Prosperity” to more accurately reflect the community’s description of its neighborhood.
The primary components of the project were oral history interviews, object collection, and photographic documentation of the community. In the end, BHS staff collected 32 oral histories (conducted in English, Mandarin, Cantonese, and Spanish), 300 objects, and over 1500 photographs.
The material gathered during the research resulted in New Neighbors: Sunset Park's Chinese Community, a family-centered exhibit focused on the experiences of the immigrants in Sunset Park’s Chinese community. It tied together the community's experiences with the more universal experience of immigration and assimilation in Brooklyn, which has historically been a borough of immigrants. A highlight of the exhibit was an object theater titled “Between the Bridges: A Fable of Two Tables.” This eight-minute multimedia show incorporated objects and oral histories collected during the research project to tell the story of a Chinese family living in Brooklyn. Four years after its debut, in May 2000, BHS installed New Neighbors in the Brooklyn Chinese-American Association’s Chinese Cultural School.
We’ll explore more of The Brooklyn Historical Society’s exhibition history in an upcoming blog post, so keep an eye out for future installments of Opening the Pocket Doors!
The Brooklyn Historical Society Institutional Archive Project is generously funded by the Leon Levy Foundation.
Interested in seeing more photos from CBH’s collections? Visit our online image gallery, which includes a selection of our images, or the digital collections portal at Brooklyn Public Library. We look forward to inviting you to CBH in the future to research in our entire collection of images, archives, maps, and special collections. In the meantime, please visit our resources page to search our collections. Questions? Our reference staff is available to help with your research! You can reach us at cbhreference@bklynlibrary.org.
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