The DSNY Oral History Archive project is the basis of a graduate seminar at New York University. Robin Nagle, clinical professor at NYU and anthropologist-in-residence for the city’s Department of Sanitation, designed and teaches the course.
In the class, students study the history of New York City, public health, street cleaning, solid waste management, labor, and infrastructure. They explore oral history as a discipline, as a research method, and as a rich node of theoretical inquiry. Each student completes one interview with a narrator who is connected to the Department of Sanitation, to Fresh Kills when it was a landfill, to Freshkills Park, or to all three. Every interview is transcribed, the transcription is edited, and both those documents, along with the audio record of the interview, are given to the narrator to review and either approve or request changes. Once the records are approved, they are uploaded to this website. The syllabus for the most recent version of the class can be found here.
The interviews archived here represent the start of our on-going effort. While the course has been taught approximately every third semester, the website was on hiatus until recently, so the collection in the fall of 2021 does not reflect all interviews. They will be included here across the next few months.
The class has benefited from the wisdom of many guests over the years, including Joseph Calvacca, retired sanitation worker; Raj Kottamasu of the Freshkills Park Team; Charis Emily Shafer of the Oral History Research Office (OHRO) at Columbia University; Mary Marshall Clark, OHRO’s director and one of the most well-known and respected oral historians in the United States today; and Edward Grayson, Commissioner of the Department of Sanitation.