Sites and Sounds (OHNY)
Winner of GANYC's 2021 Apple Award
For Outstanding Achievement in Radio Program or Podcast
& Nominee, 2019
Past awardees include WNYC’s “Brian Lehrer Show,” “The Bowery Boys,” and WFUV’s “Cityscape.”
Sites and Sounds
A podcast featuring scholars and experts talking about New York City’s most important historical sites and organizations, for Open House New York (OHNY) Weekend. Each recording presents a story or narrative about some participating location or institution, which can be used to supplement in-person visits, or to bring the OHNY Weekend experience home to anyone unable to see these NYC treasures.
Click the play button to listen, or right-click to download. You can also find the series on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Soundcloud. Sign up to our events newsletter on the right to get advance notice of each new season.
2022 Season
Judith Wellman, author of Brooklyn's Promised Land, on the history and legacy of this extraordinarily large, and nearly forgotten, free black community in Weeksville, Brooklyn
2021 Season
James E. Young, author of The Stages of Memory and the forthcoming Memory at Ground Zero: A Juror’s Report on the World Trade Center Site Memorial and Museum, on the 9/11 Memorial
Tyesha Maddox, author of the forthcoming study, From Invisible to Immigrants: Political Activism and the Construction of Caribbean American Identity, on the ICCADI in Harlem
Eric Jay Dolin, author of Brilliant Beacons: A History of the American Lighthouse, on the National Lighthouse Museum in St. George, Staten Island
Evan Friss, author of On Bicycles: A 200-Year History of Cycling in New York City, on Bike New York, which hosts the five-borough riding tour, and the history of cycling in the city
Melinda Hunt, founding director of The Hart Island Project, on the small landmass off the Bronx coast; the largest municipal graveyard and natural burial ground in the United States
Jane Garmey, the author of City Green: Public Gardens of New York, on the New York Botanical Garden, in the Bronx
Nicholas D. Bloom, author of The Metropolitan Airport, on the TWA Terminal at JFK International Airport on Jamaica Bay in southern Queens
2020 Season
Special Edition: “LOST NYC”
Because COVID-19 has robbed us of the many spaces Open House New York Weekend makes accessible to the public each fall, the 2020 season of Sites and Sounds focuses on locations that no one can visit — places that are gone, but were nonetheless of great importance to the city's history. The Gotham Center has commissioned eleven independent and professional scholars to discuss just a few of these lost treasures, from the military headquarters that served as the nucleus of the Dutch and later British colony to some of New York City's great and not-so-great 19th century social institutions, to icons of 20th century popular culture that still endure in local and national imagination. Listen and enjoy!
Russell Shorto, author of the national bestseller The Island at the Center of the World, on Fort Amsterdam and the Dutch colony it protected
Leslie Alexander, author of African or American? Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784-1861, on the African meetinghouse, headquarters of the secret society that created the state’s first incorporated black organization; for a century, NYC’s most prominent black mutual aid group
Alexander Manevitz, author of The Rise and Fall of Seneca Village: Remaking Race and Space in Nineteenth-Century New York City (forthcoming), on the free black community destroyed to build Central Park
Stacy Horn, author of Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad, and Criminal in 19th-Century New York, on the notorious “lunatic asylum,” prison, workhouses, and hospitals that once stood on Roosevelt Island
Bob McGee, author of The Greatest Ballpark Ever: Ebbets Field and the Story of the Brooklyn Dodgers, on the iconic stadium, formerly in Crown Heights, and its still-bemoaned departure
Randall Mason, co-author of North Brother Island: The Last Unknown Place in New York City, on this now-abandoned, once-feared part of Gotham’s archipelago, which served for decades as the often-forced quarantine site for the ill during various epidemics
Christopher F. Minty, author of “American Demagogues”: The Origins of Loyalism in New York City (forthcoming), on James Rivington and his controversial printshop in Hanover Square
Graham Russell Gao Hodges, author of David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City, on Mother Zion A.M.E. Church and its nationally influential antislavery leaders
Shane White, author of Prince of Darkness and Stories of Freedom in Black New York, on the African Grove, a theater company which played with an entirely black cast and crew to mostly black audiences in the last days of slavery in NYC
Sharon Zukin, author of Point of Purchase: How Shopping Changed American Culture, on “B. Altman’s,” the famous Midtown department store, and the new world of consumption it helped make
Brendan Cooper, author of “The Domino Effect: Politics, Policy, and the Consolidation of the Sugar Refining Industry in the United States, 1789–1895,” on the rise and fall of the enormous Williamsburg, Brooklyn factory
2019 Season
Charles Affron, co-author of Grand Opera: The Story of the Met, on the world famous opera company
Joseph Alexiou, author of Gowanus: Brooklyn’s Curious Canal, on the notoriously polluted creek, and the Conservancy working to restore it
Lindsay K. Campbell, author of City of Forests, City of Farms: Sustainability Planning for New York City’s Nature, on the Brooklyn Grange rooftop farm at the Navy Yard
Eric Dregni, author of Vikings in the Attic: In Search of Nordic America, on Scandinavia House in Murray Hill
Benjamin Flowers, author of Skyscraper: The Politics and Power of Building New York City in the Twentieth Century, on the Skyscraper Museum in Battery Park City
Angela Kane, professor of dance at the University of Michigan and the forthcoming author of the first critical study of Paul Taylor, on the famous choreographer’s studio in the Lower East Side
David E. Kaufman and Yitzchak Schwartz, architectural historians of Jewish New York, on Central Synagogue in Midtown
Martin Melosi, author of the forthcoming Fresh Kills: A History of Consuming and Discarding in New York City, on the infamous landfill-turned-park in Staten Island
Francis Morrone, the noted architectural historian, author of eleven books, on the Institute of Classical Art and Architecture in Midtown
Kathleen Murphy Skolnik, co-author of The Art Deco Murals of Hildreth Meière, on the lobby of the AT&T Long Distance Building in Tribeca
Amy Starecheski, author of Ours to Lose: When Squatters Became Homeowners in New York City, on Bullet Space in the Lower East Side
Mark R. Wilson, author of Destructive Creation: American Business and the Winning of World War II and The Business of Civil War, on the Brooklyn Navy Yard
Bonnie Yochelson, author of a forthcoming study of Alice Austen, on the pioneering Gilded Age photographer’s home in Staten Island
2018 Season
Andrea Frohne, author of The African Burial Ground in New York City, on the site containing the remains of 20,000 slaves in lower Manhattan
Richard Kopley, distinguished professor of literature at Penn State DuBois, author of Edgar Allan Poe and the Dupin Mysteries, on the writer's cottage in Fordham, the Bronx
R. Scott Hanson, NYC field researcher for Harvard’s Pluralism Project and the author of City of Gods: Religious Freedom, Immigration, and Pluralism in Flushing, Queens, on the neighborhood's famous Quaker meetinghouse
Marjorie Feld, author of Lillian Wald: A Biography, on the famous Progressive reformer’s Henry Street Settlement, celebrating its 125th year of offering social services, art, and health care to the immigrant families of the Lower East Side
Margaret Oppenheimer, author of The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel, on the Morris-Jumel mansion in Washington Heights, Manhattan's oldest house, famed for its notable inhabitants General Washington and Aaron Burr
Robin Nagle, author of Picking Up and the anthropologist-in-residence at NYC's Department of Sanitation, on the Newtown Wastewater Treatment Plant in Greenpoint
Peter Derrick, MTA veteran and the author of Tunneling to the Future: The Story of the Great Subway Expansion That Saved New York, on the Transit Museum in Downtown Brooklyn
Sergey Kadinsky, NYC Parks Department analyst and the author of Hidden Waters of New York City, on the Ridgewood Reservoir in Highland Park, on the Queens-Brooklyn border
David Gary, curator at the American Philosophical Society, on King Manor, , in Jamaica, Queens, the home of Alexander Hamilton's "right hand man," the influential Federalist and early antislavery leader Rufus King
Kurt Schlichting, author of Waterfront Manhattan: From Henry Hudson to the High Line, on the Waterfront Museum in Red Hook
Edith Gonzalez, historical archaeologist, on Wyckoff House, the oldest structure in NYC, a Dutch-era farmhouse situated in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Canarsie
Barbara Christen, author of Cass Gilbert, Life and Work, on Brooklyn Army Terminal, the military-site-turned-manufacturing-complex in Sunset Park, designed by the famous architect
Don Hawkins, "dean of Washington, DC architectural history," on the early city hall remodeled by Pierre Charles L'Enfant for the seat of America's first government, on Wall Street
May Joseph, professor of social science and cultural studies at Pratt Institute, and the author of Fluid New York: Cosmopolitan Urbanism and the Green Imagination, on Governors Island
Simon Baatz, John Jay College historian of crime and science in the 19th and early 20th century, on Jefferson Market Library, the Victorian Gothic courthouse in Greenwich Village
Steve Lang, professor of urban studies at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY and the author of “Striving for Sustainability on the Urban Waterfront," on the Newtown Creek Alliance
Olga Sooudi, anthropologist at the University of Amsterdam and the author of Japanese New York: Migrant Artists and Self-Reinvention on the World Stage, on the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City
Michael Hattem, co-founder of the Junto and historian of colonial NYC, on the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument, where the remains of nearly 11,000 P.O.W.'s in the American Revolution are buried, in Fort Greene
Blanche Wiesen Cook, Graduate Center historian and the definitive biographer of Eleanor Roosevelt, on her former home, now a CUNY-affiliated think tank in the Upper East Side
Pamela Hanlon, independent historian and the author of A Worldly Affair: New York, the United Nations, and the Story Behind Their Unlikely Bond, on the international body's headquarters in Turtle Bay
Fred Goodman, former Rolling Stone editor and the author of The Secret City: Woodlawn Cemetery and the Buried History of New York, on the Bronx graveyard next to Van Cortlandt Park
Gail Fenske, author of The Skyscraper and the City: The Woolworth Building and the Making of Modern New York, on the architectural landmark in Tribeca