Documenting the City: A Research Project Inspired by the Journalism of Edith Evans Asbury
By Molly Rosner
“[The students] feel really empowered now to tell stories about New York because of this project.”
— Maureen Drennan, Photography Faculty and Mentor, LaGuardia Community College
On November 20th, 2019 more than 100 people attended the celebration of the release of a book of student work at LaGuardia Community College. The book, Documenting the City: Journalism Inspired by Edith Evans Asbury, is comprised of essays and photographs by students and faculty who worked for a full year on a research-based project funded by the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation focused on introducing students to history and historical research practices.[1] The group is called the Gardiner-Shenker Student Scholars, in which students take on assignments outside of their classroom work and receive individualized mentoring and payment for their participation. The students have demonstrated a deep commitment to the program and produced rich materials ranging from photography to writing, to podcasting and video projects. Most importantly, though, through publication, presentations, and fieldwork the students learned that archival work is vitally important to understanding the world around them and can help them participate in the life of the city in new and profound ways.
Guided by the “queen mother of the pointed question,”[2] as Edith Evans Asbury was dubbed by Dan Barry of The New York Times in his article with a title starting, “Sweet, She Ain’t...” the Gardiner-Shenker Student Scholars were the first researchers ever to access her recently acquired collection. Ms. Asbury (1910-2008) was a journalist at The New York Times for over thirty years, writing for the Metro desk at a time when most women were relegated to writing only about fashion and domestic topics. Asbury investigated an array of issues facing New York City — including landmark court cases about adoption, housing discrimination, land-use debates, Black Panther trials, and gentrification. Her papers illustrate the journalistic process as well as the challenges of being a woman in a male-dominated field. In 1958, Ms. Asbury covered “a simmering controversy over an unwritten ban on contraceptive counseling in New York City hospitals. Her work was widely credited with helping to spur the city’s Board of Hospitals to lift the ban that September.”[3] Asbury had a tumultuous friendship with painter Georgia O’Keeffe, corresponding through letters and visiting the artist repeatedly at her home in New Mexico. She wrote O’Keeffe’s obituary in 1986, calling her “the undisputed doyenne of American painting and a leader, with her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, of a crucial phase in the development and dissemination of American modernism…”[4]
In the book that accompanies this project, Dr. Navarro writes, “Our student scholar journalists have seen New York City for what it is — a laboratory and microcosm for the great social changes in the United States. A liminal space, the city often reflects the very best and very worst of American culture.” Margalit Fox wrote in the New York Times that, “Ms. Asbury made it clear from the start that covering quivering aspic was not for her,”[5] and the students took to heart that the subjects they were covering were important to the life of the city.
For many students, this was their first primary archival research experience. They learned how to navigate the collection and organize their research, and began conducting interviews of their own.
Kelly O’Brien researches the controversy over Greenwich Village coffeehouses that Edith Evans Asbury reported on in the 1960s. O’Brien has since visited the Village and interviewed coffeehouse owners about their businesses today.
The students published their writing and photography in issues of the college’s newspaper The Bridge, throughout the school year. Tasha Balkaran covered adoption and foster care in her piece “Forbidden Journey of Adoption Through Foster Care,” and tracked down the subject of one of Ms. Asbury’s most groundbreaking stories about and family who spent years trying to adopt Beth Liuni. Anthony was able to track down Ms. Liuni for an interview about her experience and relationship with Asbury. Mariuxi Moran wrote a piece called “Medicaid Fraud in Nursing Homes: an Endless Fight” and Zilla Tofte titled “The Not-So-Golden Years: Violence and Mistreatment in New York City’s Nursing Homes,” and the two of them transformed their writing into a 5-episode podcast.
Mariuxi Moran presents her profile of Edith Evans Asbury at the Women and Gender Studies Conference at LaGuardia Community College.
The project used the city as a tool for understanding the archival research the students were conducting. They drew connections between the issues facing New York in the past and today. New York-based journalists visited with the students, to help them see that they are part of a broader legacy such as Nellie Bly, Edith Wharton, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Guest speakers included, New York Times retired journalist Dinitia Smith, freelance journalist and former New York magazine journalist Morgan Sykes, Newsday journalist Sophia Chang, New York Times photo editor Amanda Boe, freelance photojournalist whose work is regularly featured in the New Yorker and New York Times Jonno Rattman, New York Daily News reporter Barbara Ross, and Pulitzer Center journalist Melissa Noel. Each guest speaker shared their writing or photography and answered students’ questions about careers in journalism, process, ethical dilemmas as well as gender and discrimination in the workplace.
Barbara Ross speaks with Gardiner-Shenker students about her career and friendship with Edith Evans Asbury at the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives at LaGuardia Community College.
One of the photography mentors, Lidiya Kan, shared that the students were able to get the kind of face-to-face meetings with established photographers while still enrolled in community college, “It’s a unique opportunity. Not everybody would have a chance to talk to a New York Times photo editor. It’s the kind of connection you make after you graduate after many years of struggle but this is something they can get right now.”
Photojournalist Jonno Rattman reviews his portfolio of work with students at the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives
The students, staff, and faculty also visited the American Folk Art Museum’s Self-Taught Genius Gallery in Long Island City and received a private tour of their current exhibition, “New York Experienced” with curator Steffi Duarte. The students learned how artists have interpreted New York City and touched on the topics they were researching through different media. They also visited the AFAM archives and looked at documents from their collections to see how different organizations operate.
Students examine the exhibition New York Experienced at the American Folk Art Museum’s Self-Taught Genius Gallery in Long Island City.
With the support of faculty at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, the students had the opportunity to present their work to a room filled to capacity. They each presented their essays to a captivated audience with poise and confidence. Kelly O’Brien wrote a piece entitled, “The G in Greenwich: Once Groovin’ now Gentrified” about coffeehouses in the Village during the 1960s. These were not coffee shops like Starbucks, she explained, “they were cabarets, music venues, filled with dozens and dozens of people who came every single night.” She realized this history had largely been erased from the city’s landscape and asked, “What do you do when you find out that everything you’re looking into is kind of… gone. Well, I decided I was going to be a journalist… So with several trips to the village, numerous interviews, and daily research, I found out exactly what happened to the coffee shops. A village war… and that village war between irate Villagers and coffee shop owners led to boundless gentrification of the bohemian capital of the world.” The audience was taken with stories like these that the students shared — both about the stories they uncovered and their process of learning to be journalists.
Three photography students (left to right) Janai Julien, Zoey Xia, Saveliy Ukhlin, present their work to a crowd at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY in May 2019.
The event featured a keynote speaker from Journalism Professor Ellen Tumposky, who talked about her career and what it means to be a female journalist. She started, “New York is full of uncovered stories — that never changes.” And discussed that when she began her career women in journalism, “were proud of being feisty and kind of tough and that was what you needed to be. The maxim ‘never cry in the newsroom’ is one that I’ve carried with me throughout my whole working life. I still think… that women have an extra burden of remaining calm under pressure.” After the presentations, faculty from the graduate school expressed interest in partnering with LaGuardia students for future programs.
During the summer months of 2019, the students’ photography work was exhibited at Spring Street Natural restaurant in SoHo. The opening reception drew more than 40 people and the students proudly showcased their work, which the restaurant owner informed them had received a lot of attention and compliments from their customers.
The photographs that the students produced were informed by their research at the archives. Janai Julien shared that he found out that his neighborhood was part of the Underground Railroad and that the changes he is seeing in Bed-Stuy are a part of a bigger and ongoing shift in many New York City neighborhoods. He researched Asbury’s articles about Co-Op City in the 1960s and compared some of the ideas and motivations that Asbury noted with the ways politicians and realtors pitch changes to his neighborhood today.
Photo by Janai Julien, “Grandma.” Julien writes, “On the corner of Greene & Nostrand Avenues there is a mural with black female leaders who are from around the area. Recently, a city bike station was added.” Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.
The photography students had to consider their audiences as they worked. They had to select, edit, print, and write about the photographs that they wanted to exhibit at CUNY, then which single photograph to display in the exhibit in SoHo, they chose which photographs would be the best contributions to the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives’ collections, and finally they each selected seven photos they would contribute to the published book.
Three students worked together to document Roosevelt Island. Through interviews, attending local events, and many trips to the Island, they came to understand the history of the community and the changes it faces today as it becomes a hub for Cornell’s tech campus. They documented old landmarks, such as the Octagon which dates back to 1839 and the Lighthouse from 1872, new construction and development, and the residents of the island who garden, raise pigeons, preserve the Island’s history, amidst the bustling boroughs surrounding them. The island was only beginning to develop when Asbury wrote about it, describing “the 147 acres on the two-mile-long island… was virtually unoccupied, except for a few crumbling city buildings, two city hospitals… and cast expanses of weeds.”[6]
Photograph by Zoey Xia, Island Reflection, Roosevelt Island, New York
The implications of primary research extend far beyond the archives. Zilla Tofte, a student from South Africa who studies Biology at LaGuardia, explained that the research skills that she gained during the project will serve her far beyond writing papers and doing humanities-based projects. Her experience helped her to get an internship in a research hospital over the summer. Mariuxi Moran, who is from Ecuador, explained that presenting her work has helped her with her English language speaking skills and given her confidence in a space beyond words on a page. One of the students, Tasha Balkaran, who is also the Editor-in-Chief of the College newspaper, noted that after doing primary research in an archive, when she hears about the impeachment trial going on that da,y she better understands that she is a part of an important historical moment and that she has the ability and skills she needs to get involved, to document this moment as a journalist.
Dr. Lauren Navarro explained at the event that the project was tackling three endangered communities of people: journalists, who are under attack throughout the world, higher education institutions, which are being villainized as elitist havens for leftist academics, and, of course, women. Having Edith Evans Asbury a “tenacious urban journalist who once so irked Mayor Lindsay, he broke his phone”[7] as their primary guiding historical voice helped the students become tenacious in their own work.
Dr. Meghan Fox notes in the book that one student, Tasha Balkaran, contributed the following thoughts to their group blog, “After going through some of the articles Mrs. Asbury had written, I realize how many drafts it took just to get to her ‘perfect’ final draft and it gave me a sense of encouragement, knowing a writer with as much experience as she still struggled with trying to get the right lead down and going through six or seven drafts before figuring out what works together.” Dr. Fox shared, “Our students, perhaps unknowingly, became the teachers, and we were all able to learn from their discoveries in the archive.”
Molly Rosner is Assistant Director of Education Programs at the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives at LaGuardia Community College in Queens. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Rutgers University-Newark and her MA in Oral History from Columbia University.
A PDF version of the book is available at the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives website, here.
A film about the project can be seen here.
[1] This piece has been modified from portions of the book based on this project of the same title as this post.
[2] Dan Barry, “Sweet She Ain't, and She Has the Stories to Prove It,” New York Times, March 11, 2006.
[3] Margalit Fox, “Edith Evans Asbury, 98, Veteran times Reporter,” New York Times, October 31, 2008, B10.
[4] Edith Evans Asbury, “Georgia O'Keeffe Dead at 98; Shaper of Modern Art in U.S,” New York Times, March 7, 1986, A1.
[5] Margalit Fox, Oct 31, 2008, “Edith Evans Asbury, 98, Veteran times Reporter,” New York Times, B10.
[6] Edith Evans Asbury, “Welfare Is A Problem For Housing: Welfare Island Project Woes Mount as Executive Resigns,” New York Times, February 16, 1972, 41.
[7] Margalit Fox, “Edith Evans Asbury, 98, Veteran times Reporter,” New York Times, October 31, 2008, B10.