Your building’s stoop. A community institution as important as the barber shop or coffee shop. It is where you meet your friends, watch people pass by, flirt with girls, listen to your music, or talk with your super. The stoop in New York City is your building’s community center.

If you are blessed to experience that stoop in New York City, you are blessed to know of an experience that approaches the status of a national treasure. And if your stoop is in Brooklyn, well there is a good chance your experience with it has been immortalized in movies, books, poems, art work, and song.

What would the Rolling Stone’s ”Waiting On A Friend” look like without a stoop? A Bronx Tale? Spike Lee movies? Could you imagine your neighborhood without a stoop? We couldn’t. As a matter of fact, the importance of stoop culture is so important to us we have an event series that celebrates it: Stories from the Stoop.

And at the 92nd Street Y on March 26, presented in conjunction with The Storytelling Center, we start the series off with Stories From The Stoop: Borough Park, Brooklyn, with Laura Simms and Gioia Timpanelli. It is here you will be told fascinating stories of the people who live there. Folktales brought from distant shores as well as personal stories of life in New York today. These stories transmit the values, history, traditions and rituals of the array of people who live and work side-by-side in these neighborhoods.

These are your stories. These are your neighbors stories. Your city’s stories. And we want to celebrate and share them.

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