Richard Yelle discusses NYEGW at Mulberry Street. Oral history interview with Richard Yelle by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, December 17, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:29.

Richard Yelle: Mulberry Street was a Godsend. It was concrete, so it was fireproof more or less; it had a loading ramp. [laughs] It was right on Mulberry Street in little Italy, so you couldn’t beat the food. One of the only problems was the San Gennaro people had their office immediately next to us. So if you can make the translation, the San Gennaro festival in little Italy—it’s the mafia. And so they actually tried to shake us down a little bit, once or twice. But Tina [Yelle] was just incredible. She just acted like a dumb blonde, and she just pretended she didn’t know what they were talking about. So [laughs] she did it on purpose. She knew exactly what was happening, and so they never bothered us. In fact, they were friendly towards us, and there was all—a steady stream of young people coming in and out of the place, at all hours. Everybody had a key. Joe [Upham] was very instrumental in getting everything up and running, but there are some other people that contributed a great deal. One was a fellow named Ray King, who is a very well-known architectural artist from Philadelphia. He literally built our first gallery on Mulberry street, and it was nice. It was a really nice gallery. One of the best stories though from Mulberry Street was about Toots Zynsky. She had this friend from Holland. And he worked on movie sets and he was sort of the prop guy. And so he literally built a little machine at Mulberry to pull threads. And it was just like a metal arm that would go to the right, and it would grab a little bit of hot glass and then slap to the left, pulling a piece of cane. And that’s how Toots’s work happened, because all of that cane that she uses—to pull that by hand was an insane amount of work. And so this little machine was, you know, that was really cool. I thought that was the best.