We've been busy these last two weeks at the Neighborhood Video Project conducting interviews and starting our video diary projects. 

The interviews, with long term and recent residents of the neighborhood, business owners, and other community members have yielded some really great stories.

It's been exciting to be invited into homes, gardens, and businesses to conduct these interviews and to get real life stories to complement the history we've learned through our work with our Historical Consultant, Joe Landsberger, and the staff of the Minnesota Historical Society Library. We were pleasantly surprised that almost everyone we talked to had their own archival material to share with us. Interviewees showed us family photographs, beautiful old maps of the neighborhood, and even Census records. At left is a photo of interviewee Joanna Craighead's mother and cousins standing in Little Italy on the Levee Flats where many Italian immigrants lived in the early part of the last century. If you look closely, you can see the High Bridge in the background. Below is a census record from 1920, which records the names, occupations and ages of residents of the flats including Joanna's grandparents.

As of last Saturday, we've wrapped production on NVP: West 7th and will spend the next few weeks putting all of this amazing oral history footage, photographs, maps, etc into our pieces. Our premiere screening is only a month away!