About Moving Stories

Moving Stories is a Senior Led Walking Tour

Trying to sustain New York City’s Lower East Side, a community under development, by featuring seniors for whom each block and building is rich with personal memories. Combining movement and memory, character and persona, Moving Stories features senior citizens offering guided walking tours to the public, providing visibility and engagement in a changing neighborhood. These stories are especially important because we will eventually lose these seniors due to aging and the encroaching developments that may displace them.

Created in partnership with the Weinberg Center for Balanced Living at the Manny Cantor Center and the Educational Alliance, this immersive journey unravels stories of people and places and preserving personal identity, community and connection. An often overlooked population, many older New Yorkers who participate in the project have lived on the LES all of their lives. Others are newer – not only to the neighborhood, but to the United States.

Exercise and experience a personal tour of the neighborhood

We will meet 10 senior citizens from diverse backgrounds that reflect the neighborhood and combine elements of storytelling and exercise. In each episode we will be introduced to one character that exercises with us and tells a location-based story while considering how their neighborhood is changing. Some of these seniors have lived on the LES all of their lives. Others are newer, not just to the neighborhood, but the United States. We can view each episode on a smart device, exercising while traveling between each story location. If you are not in NYC, you can follow the mapped out stories on the web and move along with the characters as they demonstrate an exercise sequence. Practice ballet barre on the East River, follow a Kung Fu routine at Little Flower Park, walk up and down five flights of stairs as if you live in a tenement on Catherine Street. Engage with a senior led walking tour online by selecting a guide and connecting to their story on a map. Choose your own route through the Lower East Side based on location, storyteller or topic.

Imagine walking by Little Flower Park on Madison Street where the 89-year-old Kung Fu Master Poa Shen Wong leads International Lok Tung exercises. She tells her tale of learning Kung Fu and emigrating from Hong Kong when she was 50 something. Exercising in the park she gained a following from across the boroughs and began teaching Lok Tung, a form of Kung Fu twice daily. She believes it is a holistic practice that can heal the body and asserts that this is why she is 89 and still walking. Tensions rise when a meditation group tries to take over their exercise turf. Small in stature but not in strength, Poa reclaims her territory in the public park. Her episode contains an exercise sequence where the audience can participate along with her. She hopes that everyone will learn this form and become healthy and continue to pass it down to the next generation.

Next stop is on 209 Madison Street where Mendy Erez describes his old synagogue, where he celebrated his bar-mitzvah and his engagement. The synagogue was here for over one hundred years but then the congregation dwindled and now it is a laundromat. This seems fitting to Erez because, he says “a lot of the suffering that people have before passing on to the next world, they call it that the soul goes through the laundry, so it is interesting that a laundry would open up at that location. But this interpretation of the soul going through the laundry is more of the pain and suffering and it has a cleansing effect on the soul. The more cleansing you go through in this world, you have a greater share in the world to come.” The audience follows along with Erez, washing and folding their own laundry.

Gina vividly remembers arriving on a Pan Am flight from China on Sunday, August 13 at 4:30 in the afternoon and climbing 5 flights of stairs to her first tenement apartment at 22 ½ Catherine Street where there was a bathtub in the kitchen and a leaky ceiling. “When I arrived in America, I was 5 months pregnant. I was newly married, 8 months. Then I arrived to this street, in this apartment, in this country. The first thing I looked at was the kitchen right here, the bathtub right there, my bedroom just right this area and a little toilet inside the bedroom. I didn’t even want to sit down, I changed my clothes and then we go out, that’s it. I didn’t even take a bath because I cannot, how could I take a bath, nothing cover it, so I do not do anything. I was so uncomfortable.” She never imagined this is what people lived like in America. The audience gets to walk up and down stairs as if they live in a tenement. 

Audience

Each story contains an exercise sequence where the national audience, young and old, can participate along with the seniors. The mobile experience of following on a phone adds to the “physical cinema” that Susan Sontag referred to in her 1996 New York Times article on the Decay of Cinema. Moving Stories is uniquely suited to mobile devices as movement, motion, time, and space are a prime source of the story.   

Embodying the Jewish concept of l’dor vador (generation to generation), Moving Stories encourages senior citizens to combine physical movement and memory with an aim of sustaining community and engaging people across cultures and ages.  Creating dialogue between residents and tourists, grandchildren and grandparents, community organizers and developers, the seniors are not just leading a walking tour, they are creating new, communal experiences. In Moving Stories, physical movement responds to place as a stage for meaningful social interaction. It provides expansive tools to collaborate with communities that are often underserved and overlooked by mainstream media. Exercising storytelling, subjective and collective memory and the body - Moving Stories pulls all of these elements together.

Research and Development

To date, Moving Stories has interviewed 20 senior residents drawn primarily from the population served by the Weinberg Center for Balanced Living at the Educational Alliance. The center serves nearly 1,400 members. 47% are Asian; 10% are Latino; 5% are African-American; and 38% are White.  100% are over age 60.  98% of members have household annual income under $20,000. The seniors who participated in the walking group that meets once a week, were featured in an exercise video filmed at East River Park, conducted walking tours for the New Museum’s IDEA City festival and performed in a live storytelling show on the theme of Homecoming. By combining the stories of immigrants, new and old, the tour paints a picture of the remarkable diversity of the Lower East Side, and witness, through personal reflection, how the neighborhood and its residents come to terms with ever-accelerating change.