New York Folklore recently announced $225,000 in grants from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA). These funds are the result of 21 successful applications submitted to NYSCA by New York Folklore on behalf of folk and traditional artists in the Capital Region. New York Folklore hosted an awards reception to celebrate this great achievement by folk and traditional artists in the region on February 23 at The Linda, WAMC-Albany’s public radio network’s Performing Arts Studio. The celebration featured food representing the grantees heritages.
Feature Article
A History of the Adirondack Pipes and Drums
It is recorded that the founders of the band wanted to pay tribute to the highlanders that fought in the area during the French and Indian War. The band sought permission from the appropriate officials of the British military in Canada to wear the Royal Stuart tartan for pipers and the Black Watch tartan for drummers. A charter was obtained for the organization from a local judge. Instruction in piping and drumming was arranged through members of the Schenectady Pipe Band.
Miller’s Mills’ Ice Harvest
As many of us in the Northern parts of the country push
through the winter’s chilly wind, sleet, and snow with the same
determination our ancestors did, looking back at history reminds us that our ancestors had “harvest” on their minds. An ice harvest.
Unadilla Lake in Miller’s Mills, where the ice comes from. For two centuries in the winter, the people of Miller’s Mills have come to Unadilla Lake with long saws, pikes, and tongs to cut pond ice, and then store it for refrigeration needs in warmer months
A Visit to City Lore’s Archives
In September 2022, City Lore, located in Lower Manhattan, had a visitor who told us that she believed we might have a photograph of her mother in our archives. The image that she was looking for showed her mother working at their family-owned vegetable stall in New York City’s Chinatown, shortly after her parent’s immigration from Hong Kong in the 1970s. Fortunately, she knew who had taken it.
May Baskets
Come springtime, generations of children in the greater Glens Falls area spent weeks making May Baskets to distribute to friends and neighbors on the first of May….The custom traveled to America, noted in the late 19th century by Lina and Adelia Beard in their 1887 book, The American Girls Handy Book: ‘A May-day custom, and a very pretty one, still survives among the children in our New England States. It is that of hanging upon the door-knobs of friends and neighbors pretty spring-offerings in the shapeof small baskets filled with flowers, wild ones, if they can be obtained; if not, the window-gardens at home are heavily taxed to supply the deficiency.’
Portrait of an Artist: Ellen Fjermedal
It was in my fingers!” Ellen Fjermedal explained. Ellen, a demure, but determined and spry elder, started drawing when she was a child in Arendal, on the south coast of Norway. Now living in Victor, New York, she has a studio and display area at home where she paints rosemaling (Norwegian) or kurbits (Swedish) decorations.
Redwork Embroidery and the Suffragist Tea Cozy Project
The focus on suffragists from upstate
New York was a conscious decision that I
made, based on my own research and desire
to highlight lesser known people within the
movement. I was inspired to put faces to
the over 70 names I had uncovered in meeting
notices and articles in Warren County
newspapers by creating embroidered portraits
of suffragists throughout New York
State. So far, I have embroidered six Warren
County women.
A Banjo Story
Everyone listened intently to the words and the lovely trills and his earnest expressive demeanor. There was encouragement mid-song: “Good man, yourself.” “Good man, Paddy.” There was a circle of aunts and uncles and American visitors in attendance. A few others had songs that night. Aunt Peg, from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, offered The Wild Colonial Boy. But Paddy was the real singer, with a seemingly endless store of songs, most of which I had never heard. All the same, I was delighted and moved. We drank and listened and talked. I heard about cousins in Germany and uncles in the Bronx, and I tried to piece it all together and remember who was who. As my grandmother was one of thirteen, there were many people to discuss and to hear about.
My Menstruation Ceremony
At the time that the menstruation ceremony was to begin, we all took our mats and blankets to the unfinished concrete balcony of the house, with 360-degree views. Juana had a small bonfire going. She played the bowls. She put crowns of marigolds on our heads. We drank water out of plastic cups, water that had been purified in the singing bowls.
The Spy Who Snubbed Me
Lake George? Ian Fleming famously wrote about places he had actually been. My antihero had been to Lake George? How much time Fleming spent here I have not been able to ascertain,but clearly, he was here. He sets The Spy Who Loved Me somewhere between Glens Falls and Lake George, in the Dreamy Pines Motor Court, where our heroine tries to hold off but is unable to escape the thugs until James Bond shows up. The “Spy” is Bond himself, not a Russian woman Bond gets mixed up with, as in the movie.
YMCA Camp Chingachgook on Lake George Celebrates its Centennial
Established in 1913, YMCA Camp
Chingachgook is one of the oldest
children’s camps in America and is presently
celebrating 100 years of operation.
Over 350,000 children have participated
in Camp Chingachgook programs in the
last century….Today, Chingachgook serves over
10,000 children and adults annually in
year-round programs on Lake George in
the Adirondack Mountains.
Hittin’ The Streets With The NYC Tranzformerz
For almost four decades, b-boying,
otherwise known as breaking or
break dancing, has been a staple of New
York City street life. B-boying is an artistic
and improvisational mode of non-verbal
communication and competition between
individuals and groups, usually in relationship
to music. It arose out of the streets of
the South Bronx in the early 1970s and, at
times, became an alternative to gang fighting:
that is, a non-violent resolution to the
problems of the street through the creative
use of the body, mind, and space without
weapons.
The Holocaust, the Catskills, and the Creative Loss of Power
The American and immigrant Jews,
who had made the many hotels, bungalow
colonies, and farms of Ulster and Sullivan
counties their summer retreats year after
year, were always looking for family, for
landsmanshaftn (society of immigrants from the same town or region), for a home away
from home. As a second home to generations
of Jews, the Catskill Mountains became
a place where a Jewish family could
bond as a Jewish family—that is, they could practice the culture of Judaism without the
pressure to assimilate.
Spirit Dolls (Muñequitas) in New York Puerto Rican Homes:
Forms, functions, and meanings of altars in Puerto Rican homes on the island or the US mainland are already well documented in association with Espiritismo and Santería, two forms of Caribbean religious belief and practice. Ethnographic descriptions of the roles that dolls play within these contexts of belief are less common. In the New York Puerto Rican homes in which I was welcomed between 2004 and 2007, as a participant observer in Puerto Rican Espiritismo, altars decorated with flowers, food, water offerings, and statues of the saints co-existed with mesitas and other doll displays. Mesitas are little tables, set with offerings for the dolls who sit beside them.
AGUDA ACHIM
In January 1909, Max Schwartz, a Jewish immigrant from Russia, brought his family to Livingston Manor. He opened a butcher shop on Main Street,and his family thus became Livingston Manor’s first Jewish residents. In April of that same year, my grandparents, Mottel and Manya Sorkin, along with their infant daughter Leya, also settled in the village and opened a tailor shop. Other families soon followed. Livingston Manor was now on the way to becoming a multiethnic community, but not without some bumps in the road.