The Town Hall
“Voices of Town Hall” - 100th Centennial Celebration:
In partnership with the Bob Dylan Estate, John Cage Estate, Meredith Month Estate, T-Bone Burnett
Concept, Creative Ideation, Discovery, Preservation and Storytelling Production Strategy, Archival Research, Creative Partnership Development, Podcast Development, Brand Design, Web Page and Event Brochure Content
“The day of the show, I looked out at the audience, sitting in neat rows with no drinks in their hands, no cigarette girls walking up and down to distract them, and no out-of-tune piano to ruin my performance… I walked on like an Egyptian queen - slow, calm and serious. The reviews were the best I had ever had.”
The Ask
For over 100 years, The Town Hall has played an integral part in the electrifying cultural fabric of New York City, founded by a vibrant group of suffragists (The League for Political Education) whose fight for the 19th Amendment led them to build a meeting space to educate people on the important issues of the day. Today, The Town Hall is a 1,500-seat, 501C3 non-profit national historic landmark venue in the heart of the city, host to countless cultural and musical milestones. While the Hall has left an indelible century-long imprint on American cultural history, its multimedia archives were in a state of incongruity and required a cohesive strategy to create a pathway for access and storytelling to benefit the Town Hall mission and its future.
Our Deliverables
ARBO RADIKO embarked on an unprecedented mission to define the Town Hall’s legacy across its first comprehensive multimedia preservation and storytelling strategy.
In Phase One, we assessed the complete Town Hall Collection, analyzing the Hall’s full scope of archival content across virtually all touchpoints: audio, video, photography, artwork and text, as well as researching similar representative archival content at comparative venues and reigniting relationships with the estates of prominent Town Hall artists including Meredith Monk, Dick Gregory and John Cage and prominent archives holding Town Hall materials including the New York Public Library, NYU, and the New York Historical Society. After conducting oral history interviews with staff members and analyzing over 1,000 photographs, 500 live recorded shows, and 75 boxes of archival memorabilia, we identified core principles and key stories to inform the Town Hall’s legacy.
Our work resulted in an educational website page of amalgamated Town Hall repository collection links now available to researchers for the very first time, social media content, development of a Podcast and Video series strategy highlighting newly discovered archival treasures, and engaging marketing and fundraising print materials by designer Lisa Owens featuring select archival elements shared at the Centennial Celebration hosted by T. Bone Burnett and the Bob Dylan Estate.
In Phase Two, we will produce the Podcast and Video Series as a new marketing and fundraising vertical, aimed at engaging donors, artists, Town Hall community members, staff and patrons to support the future of the Hall.
