Exhibition Reviews

StoryCorps. Biltmore Room, Grand Central Terminal, 42d St. between Park and Lexington Avenues, New York, NY 10017.       Permanent exhibition, opened Oct. 23, 2003. 24/7. Suggested donation $10. David Isay, founder.       Internet: information on reservations, StoryCorps, and MobileBooths <http://www.storycorps.net> (March 27, 2006).
StoryCorps is a national project designed "to inspire and enable people to record each others' stories in sound." It was founded in 2003 by the radio documentary producer David Isay. Its Web site states that the organization wants "to help you interview your grandmother, your uncle, the lady who's worked at the luncheonette down the block for as long as you can remember—anyone whose story you want to hear and preserve." StoryCorps does not present an exhibition with specific content, but rather offers an experience in history: the program provides a venue for people to interview one another. StoryCorps archives the resulting recordings at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. The program models itself after an activity of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) of the 1930s, the federal project that recorded oral history interviews with average Americans across the nation. Calling the wpa oral histories "the single most important collection of American voices gathered to date," StoryCorps seeks to become a wpa project for the twenty-first century.	1
The Grand Central Station StoryBooth is one of several small recording studios in locations across the United States where people may record broadcast-quality interviews with their friends or family members for StoryCorps. The Grand Central location opened in October 2003, the first of two StoryBooths in New York City. Courtesy Christopher Weil Photography.
The organization maintains its main recording studio, called a StoryBooth, at Grand Central Terminal in New York City. A second booth, opened at the World Trade Center site in July 2005, records people's experiences of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Reservations may be made up to three months in advance at the New York locations. Since May 2005 two MobileBooths have traveled the country, making stops ranging from a few days to a few weeks in selected cities. In 2005, MobileBooths visited cities including Washington, D.C.; Columbus, Ohio; St. Louis, Missouri; Memphis, Tennessee; Madison, Wisconsin; Bismarck, North Dakota; Seattle, Washington; Portland, Oregon; and San Francisco, California.	2
We visited StoryCorps at Grand Central on October 6, 2005, after making a reservation online a few weeks earlier. A ten-dollar fee, a trip to the city, and the willingness to talk were all we needed to participate. We found the luminescent booth and were greeted by two upbeat staff members. The small space, designed to resemble a comfortable living room, put us at ease despite the potentially imposing recording equipment. We were given some simple instructions, signed a release form allowing the interview to be archived in the Library of Congress and to be broadcast on the radio or the Internet, and then one of us (Andrew Horowitz) proceeded to interview the other (Peter Lamothe). We were surprised at how quickly the allotted forty minutes passed.	. . .