Henry Street Oral History Project Acquired by The New York Public Library
By Henry Street Settlement
During the earliest days of the Covid pandemic, Henry Street’s public historian, Katie Vogel, launched an oral history project to record the Settlement team and community’s sudden shift, as employees throughout the agency found themselves in new roles as pandemic frontline workers, creating new programs practically overnight to respond to the community’s urgent needs. On March 11, 2025, The New York Public Library completed the acquisition of the set of 25 oral histories, called Henry Street Settlement Hope & Resilience on the COVID Frontlines.
Brief versions of 19 interviews are available on Henry Street’s website.
This collection is particularly significant because these interviews took place in the midst of the earliest days of the pandemic, rather than after it. They reveal details about people’s experiences during 2020 and the community work undertaken by Henry Street, but they also capture the mood of fear, uncertainty, and even chaos as the pandemic first unfolded on the Lower East Side and across New York City. The 25 oral histories included in the collection, featuring both team and community members, are each accompanied by a transcript.
“We’re incredibly pleased that the interviews we conducted in the midst of reorienting or opening new programs to serve those most affected by the pandemic will be available for generations of researchers who study this significant moment in New York’s, and the nation’s, history,” said Vogel.
The Settlement never closed during the pandemic. It established three food pantries, a helpline, and an emergency cash assistance program, while maintaining existing services and seeking to establish health measures to keep its team and community safe. Like so many other frontline workers in the early days of Covid, Henry Street staff needed a way to chronicle and process their own traumas, fears, and losses.
After Vogel began designing the oral history project, she was joined by Julie Napolin, a digital humanities scholar at The New School with expertise in oral history and sound production. Vogel and Napolin, with the additional help of Sylvie Douglis, an NPR producer, conducted 27 oral history interviews between May 17, 2020, and September 27, 2022, with the vast majority of them taking place in the spring, summer, and fall of 2020. Narrators chronicled the work they did with the Settlement—from operating transitional housing shelters to delivering food to providing resources through the Covid helpline—and the many ways they sought to balance the needs of the community, their families, and their own health. Because so many of the interviews were conducted in summer 2020, the majority of interviews also address the Black Lives Matter protests of that year and reflect on ways that the pandemic exacerbated structural racial disparities.
Henry Street Settlement Hope & Resilience on the COVID Frontlines oral histories are available at The New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building to anyone with an NYPL library card. To access the collection, researchers are encouraged to make an appointment online or to email Manuscripts@NYPL.org.
