Borrowed & Returned

Brooklyn is constantly changing. This episode takes a look at the changes on just one street in one neighborhood: Eighth Avenue in Sunset Park, which many call Brooklyn's Chinatown. In the early 1990s, BPL and the Museum of Chinese in America collected oral histories about Sunset Park. We dive back into that archive, with help from Professor Tarry Hum, urban planner and former Sunset Parker....

At the start of World War II, 200 women were employed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. That number ballooned to 7,000 at the height of the war, but afterward—women workers were gone as rapidly as they appeared. We tell the story of this unique moment in history, using oral histories from women who worked at the yard during the war, and an interview with author Jennifer Egan, who helped create the collec...

In the middle of the 20th century, a ten square block area in North Gowanus was home to the largest Mohawk settlement outside of Canada. We hear about the Mohawk women who built that community while their husbands and fathers were building skyscrapers. And, we go back hundreds of years in Gowanus and tell the story of the original inhabitants of Brooklyn: the Lenape people, who gave the neighborho...

We're launching a mini-series about four neighborhoods that made Brooklyn the vibrant, diverse borough it is today! “Building Brooklyn” will take you to Gowanus, the Navy Yard, Sunset Park, and Canarsie to discover some of Brooklyn’s most unique and over-looked stories.  Episode transcript: https://www.bklynlibrary.org/podcasts/building-brooklyn-coming

It’s the start of summer, which means block parties, beach trips, and also, big primary elections here in New York City. This will be the city's first election cycle where voters will get to cast their votes for up to five candidates for each position. It’s called ranked choice voting.   Read our transcript and check out our book list here: https://www.bklynlibrary.org/podcasts/new-yorkers-ra...

"To me, what all these books say is independence and personal choice," says Nefertiti Matos of the stacks of Braille books at NYPL's Andrew Heiskell Library. In this episode, we talk about what inclusion means, whether it's creating tactile graphics so that all may encounter the visual world, or making our virtual classes accessible to kids with disabilities. Read our transcrip...

It’s been a rough year. So, we gathered all the good news we could find to brighten your podcast feed. Hear kids read to a therapy dog, a library love story, babies learning ASL, and adults age 90 and older learning to use Zoom. Read our transcript and check out our book list here: https://www.bklynlibrary.org/podcasts/good-news  

Ingrid Douglas never finished high school as a teenager. When she started looking for a better job at age sixty, she found not having a degree was a huge barrier. So, Ingrid came to the library to get her diploma. In this episode, we talk to students and instructors at BPL about how the library can be a refuge for those who have experienced trauma or adversity on their path to education. Read our...

Burnout from work is something a lot of us are thinking about right now. It's been on the minds of librarians, too. We talk to a group of library workers who got together to combat the stress of the profession, and support each other.   Read our transcript and check out our book list here: https://www.bklynlibrary.org/podcasts/rekindling-burnout  

Hear me out: A Vietnamese refugee opens a restaurant to keep her kids out of gangs, Brooklynites on their changing borough, a daughter seeks justice after her father's death from COVID-19, giving birth during a pandemic, the meaning of shelter for families experiencing homelessness, and the last lesbian bar in Brooklyn. These are all Brooklyn stories, created as part of BPL's first ever...

Hear me out: a Bed-Stuy kid grapples with her Brooklyn identity, a Chassidic woman follows her faith to from South Africa to Crown Heights, musicians find belonging in the South Indian music diaspora, a Brooklynite memorializes early activism in the borough, and a Black Puerto Rican land worker paves her own career path. These are all Brooklyn stories, created as part of BPL's first ever audi...

Our work in the correctional facilities in New York City didn't stop during the pandemic. We talked with the Justice Initiatives team at BPL to hear how they are connecting with patrons who are incarcerated and supporting families with loved ones in jails and prisons.    Read the transcript and check out our book list here: https://www.bklynlibrary.org/podcasts/showing  

What do librarians do all day? When they're not planning programs or working the reference desk, these librarians are also obscure trivia players, birders and ... sword fighters!   Read the transcript and check out our book list here: https://www.bklynlibrary.org/podcasts/secret-lives-librarians  

"We want all the kids to see themselves in all the stories," says Raakhee Mirchandani, author of  Super Satya Saves the Day.  This episode, we hear Drag Queen Cholula Lemon read Mirchandani's book, and we visit BPL's wildly popular Tibetan language storytime, which provides language refuge for thousands of Tibetan-speaking New Yorkers, and reaches thousands more across the worl...

A special episode, created in partnership with Queens Memory and the online newspaper The CITY, on grief and mourning during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how we can move forward as a community. Read our trasncript here: https://www.bklynlibrary.org/podcasts/missing-them  

Belle da Costa Greene and Nella Larsen are two librarians of color, one who is white passing, and the other of mixed heritage who wrote famously about the phenomenon of passing in her novels. We're telling the stories of these women and asking what they can tell us about race in librarianship and in literature. Read the transcript and check out our book list here: https://www.bklynlibrary.org...

To honor the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, we take a trip to Green-Wood cemetery to the grave of Sarah Smith Garnet, one of Brooklyn's Black women suffragists. We also talk with NYC Council Member Farrah Louis about how the women in her family encouraged activism through voting.   Read the trasncript here: https://www.bklynlibrary.org/podcasts/votes-for-women  

We dig into the history of a once-unacknowledged African burial ground in East New York, Brooklyn, and ask how a new library branch can honor that legacy.  Read the transcript and check out our book list here: https://www.bklynlibrary.org/podcasts/montgomery-east-new-york  

From Selma, Alabama to Brooklyn, New York — we look at how racial violence and racial memory impacts our country and our libraries.    Read the transcript and check out our book list here: https://www.bklynlibrary.org/podcasts/marching-onward  

You can physically borrow books again, Brooklyn! This episode, we ask how the pandemic can help us re-imagine what we use libraries for. Plus, we talk to LA County Library about how extreme weather is impacting their reopening, and dig into the science of how we are keeping you (and your books) healthy. Read the transcript and check out our book list here: https://www.bklynlibrary.org/podcasts/reo...

Since our libraries were closed for the last four months, we were on the lookout for organizations that were acting in the spirit of public libraries. We found one! Listen to an audio portrait of the food justice movement happening on street corners across Brooklyn. And we'll be back in your feed again in September for Season 3 of Borrowed.   Read the transcript here: https://www.bklynlibrary...

In honor of Juneteenth 2020, the anniversary of the day in 1865 when the news was finally delivered to Galveston, Texas that slavery in the United States had been abolished, we are returning to an episode from earlier in our season. "Free Brooklyn" tells two important stories about the struggle for freedom: a young girl “auctioned” at Plymouth Church in 1860 and the story of Weeksville,...

In an unprecedented time of stress and resilience, many Brooklynites are at the front lines of responding to the coronavirus crisis, and many more are encountering a new normal, as we adjust to changing work, education, housing, and even access to basic amenities. Listen to stories from people across the borough as part of our ongoing local oral history archive. Read the transcript and check out o...

In 1943, Brooklyn Public Library launched its first radio program, in partnership with WNYC. “Folk Songs for the Seven Million,” written and produced by Elaine Lambert Lewis, documented folk songs and stories from around the country and collected folk traditions from everyday Brooklynites. On this episode, we pay tribute to our audio ancestor.   Read the transcript and check out our book list here...

 Earth Day is here, but a lot of us are inside. On this episode of Borrowed , we gather sounds of the natural world from the stoops and parks of Brooklyn, and we look back at the first Earth Day fifty years ago, and ask what it means for us today.    Read the transcript and check out our book list here: https://www.bklynlibrary.org/podcasts/fifty-years