Maria Terrone Oral History

Collection

Identifier: QMP-0016

Staff Only

Scope and Contents

In this interview, Maria Terrone, a poet, writer, and former assistant vice president of communications at Queens College, talks about the COVID-19 pandemic in her neighborhood near Elmhurst Hospital, one of the epicenters of viral outbreak. A long-time resident of Jackson Heights and, in her words, “the ultimate New Yorker,” she gives a dramatic narration of the apocalyptic atmosphere in her beloved neighborhood in the early weeks of the pandemic when restaurants closed, her life changed, and the bustling and crowded streets became deserted except for the long lines to the supermarket. She ends the interview with a rousing belief in the capacity of New York and New Yorkers to survive and thrive after this crisis, with resiliency and perhaps a stronger sense of community.

Dates

2020-06-09

Creator

Terrone, Maria (Interviewee, Person)

Access

This oral history is open for research. Media files and transcript can be viewed and/or requested through the Queens Memory Project on Aviary: https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/943/collection_resources/28191. For help using the site, contact QC.Archives@qc.cuny.edu.

Conditions Governing Use

Interview shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). Users are free to share or adapt the material for non-commercial purposes, as long as they meet the terms of the license. See license details at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/.

Extent

1 Digital Files ; Duration: 00:46:21

Language of Materials

English

Additional Description

Immediate Source of Acquisition

Donated to Queens College and Queens Public Library by Maria Terrone and Jean McLaughlin in June, 2020.

Processing Information

Oral history conducted as part of the Queens Memory Project (http://queensmemory.org), a collaborative program of the Queens Public Library and Queens College to collect stories, images, and other evidence of life in the borough of Queens.

This interview was specifically collected for the COVID-19 Project, an effort to document life under pandemic in Queens and at the college.