Home recording technology became available to the American consumer in the early 1950s with the manufacturing of portable reel to reel tape recorders. Charles L. Hurley, one of the founders of the Sea Cliff Village Museum, saw the opportunity in the technology and began recording long-time Sea Cliff residents in the 1950s and continued to record Sea Cliff residents into the 1970s and 1980s using audio cassettes. These recordings are housed at the Sea Cliff Village Museum along with additional oral histories made in the 1990s and early 2000s as part of the Sea Cliff Oral History Project.
Scope of Collection
This collection consists of taped interviews of Sea Cliff residents and events that took place in the community. The recordings date from 1958 to 2005. The people found on these recordings discuss growing up in Sea Cliff, their family histories, businesses, daily life, transportation, boating, and much more.
These recordings were digitized in 2021 by NYU’s Regional Media Legacies Project. These recordings were uploaded to New York Heritage through the Sea Cliff Village Museum’s partnership with LILRC’s Accessing Archives Program in 2023.
