New York Branch: New York’s “Little Bohemia” Its Culture/Its Library

New York’s “Little Bohemia” Its Culture/Its Library

Wednesday, October 3, 5:30 PM

Webster Library | 1465 York Avenue, NY, NY 10075

For much of first half of the last century, Manhattan’s “Yorkville” was an insular cluster of Central and Eastern European communities, principal among them Czech (Bohemian, Moravian), Slovak and Carpatho-Rusyn. While these communities independently developed many social, religious and cultural organizations of their own, the Webster Library (or more popularly, the “Bohemian”), founded in 1897 and incorporated into the NYPL in 1903, served both as a nationally significant repository of Czech and Slovak publications, and as a hub for community cultural activities and a place of "acculturation” of the immigrant populations to the “New World.” In this illustrated presentation, Edward Kasinec--himself a one-time resident of the Bohemian “Riviera”--reflects on the post-World War I history of the community and Webster, and the fate of its vernacular collections in the wake of the transformation and gentrification of the Upper East Side and its Yorkville neighborhood.