The Last Knickerbocker in New York

(Volume II: Paris)
(Volume I: Berlin)

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I wanted to learn about my grandfather because his story was always told in bits and pieces growing up; it was a more sensitive topic, which made me shy away from asking too much about it, but the pieces of his story I knew were adventurous and daring and also really emotionally complex. I wanted to know who this man was that was so important to my father and grandmother, and also genetically held within me, and so I thought that by making it a project, I could create a space that allowed for this deeper inquiry, allow for me to really meditate on who he was, while also giving my father and grandmother the space to tell their stories in relation to him and to honor to those stories.

I began the project by conducting oral history interviews with my father and grandmother under the pretense of learning about my grandfather, Nick Knickerbocker. My dad took me to some of the places he spent time with his father as a kid, such as his old house in Albany, the Albany Armory, and the New York State Museum. At the same time, I went through my family’s old shoe boxes of photos, photo albums, and old court documents and other ephemera that had been stored away. I scanned hundreds of photos and ephemera and created a digital archive. I scanned the backs of images that had been dated or had notes handwritten on them, using these to organize the archive by time and place. Simultaneously, I transcribed the oral histories and pieced them together into a temporal narrative that highlighted the sameness and differences in perceptions and feelings toward Nick’s story that my father and grandmother portrayed. I wrote a narrative forward with a family tree, an introduction to the transcripts, and an afterword to contextualize the book.

I also wanted to consider the act of what I was doing in a more theoretical manner, asking myself how I could actually enliven and know a person I could never meet.

There is not a singular truth; rather, multiple simultaneous truths reflect my family’s individual perceptions. The memories of my father and grandmother tell a story about a son and a wife; they do not reveal why Nick’s behavior was so contradictory, why he was alternatively both charismatic and quiet, sometimes loving and others cold. My family’s stories portray their own truths, but not Nick’s. They are a smattering of learned myths from his childhood, a vivid portrait of him from nineteen to his thirties, and then a fadeout of brief interactions up until his death. So much is missing, and yet there is no one around to ask what about the rest? Here, I’ve collected the chapter of his life where he started a family, told from the perspective of the wife and son he’d eventually leave behind. How can that be a full depiction of a person? The deeper into this project I’ve ventured, the more I’ve realized I’m constructing multiple portraits; recorded here are the narratives of my father and grandmother, a son and wife with varying definitions of emotions, behaviors and words. Through the sequencing of this story, I have portrayed myself and my own perceptions and biases to a viewer too. Though he may be the subject, this portrait is not of Nick.

I designed the book on InDesign with consideration of image editing; how to use the photos to support the narrative. The book form allowed me to present the bulk of my research, featuring archival images, transcripts, and reflective text. Since through the book I was reconstructing a person, I hoped the physical experience of turning pages and holding transcripts of memories would allow a reader to feel tangibly connected to my grandfather’s personhood, as the materiality of a book functions as a physical experience. Further, Nick’s image was remembered most by my family as laying on a couch, reading. He was obsessed with books. I only half knew this when I had decided on the form, but learning this, as well as learning of his other passion for photography, which I also share, made me feel like I was serving his memory honorably through my presentation of his story.

But I wanted to challenge myself to present this project through a more expanded approach than only the book, a medium I was comfortable in. So the second presentation of The Last Knickerbocker in New York was an exhibition that I installed in Case Gallery on Skidmore’s campus. This form forced me to consider how to present narrative visually and multidimensionally. I wanted to bring the book into space, but also take advantage of another way to present content and what that could mean. I edited my writing for the book down as an introductory text and printed it on a fine art velvet paper that spoke to the feeling of a book page. I brought in a record player and set up Joni Mitchel’s Court and Spark album, whose song Help Me inspired my grandmother to tell Nick she loved him for the first time. Scattered around the record were sand dollars that she had collected at the various beaches they frequented. Hanging above are photograms, which are images made in the darkroom by placing an object on unexposed paper, then exposed to light and developed. The object acts as the negative, and a positive of the silhouette is what appears on your paper. So these are photograms of the sand dollars, which resemble clocks, but also the spinning record below, and this temporal forward spinning motion felt very symbolic to me of this project, which is a circling back in time. On the opposite wall I set up four pedestals with four of the only objects my father has left of Nick: a book, two military pins and a knife. Above are their photograms, these silhouettes floating in an empty space, the emptiness a reminder of how much is missing, how many objects have been lost over time, but also, how many memories.

Across the walls are a mix of large scale photos, both my own and archival, and original archival photos from my family's collection. Presenting the images on a wall allowed me to think about image pairing in a different way. For example, there is a photo I took at the New York State Museum in Albany, presented next to an old photo of my grandparents. Nick took my father to this museum often growing up, and in turn, my father regularly took me. It’s a favored place in my family. When you look at the photo quickly though, it appears to be a photo of two canines in a forest. But when you look closer, you realize that it is actually plastic nature, it isn’t real. The photo feels representative of Nick, who is remembered lovingly, but was ultimately arrested before the end of his life for committing fraudulent crimes and falsifying records. So this photo contrasts that feeling of warmth with the natural world with the reality of an inauthenticity. The nature isn’t truthful. Legally, Nick wasn’t always truthful. And further, my grandparents’ pose is mirrored by the coyotes.

This project was inspired by interdisciplinary approaches to disseminating oral histories, which are often, because they are oral histories, audiovisual media projects that incorporate audio clips from the interviews. But my project takes a more literary approach, transforming oral histories into a narrative structure, like an alternative biography. For my exhibition, I could have incorporated audio clips from the interviews, but I decided that it didn’t feel right for this project. My interviews were with my family members, who discussed a story that had always been private. A lot of emotions naturally came up because of the nature of the story, and as I learned more about Nick, I found space for nuance and complexity. I didn’t want to play only the more dramatic moments in the story to form a narrative for a visitor because that felt like making a spectacle out of a personal history. I decided that if a viewer wanted to know Nick’s story, they had to sit with it for a few hours and read it. They had to get to know the individuals involved in his story through a dedication of time and attention. I attended a panel at the Tang Museum where Evan Garza, a curator for Mass Moca, spoke about his work with archives, and he said that archive work is forming relationships with ghosts. And that resonated with me so profoundly because by spending months learning about and thinking about Nick, I have felt like I’ve formed a relationship with him. So this hesitancy I feel toward sharing his story in full is this sense of protection that I have formed over him, a care that is undeniably linked to my care for my father and grandmother, but also is separate and personal. That is perhaps my most unexpected discovery of this project, that I could be capable of forming a connection with someone that I can never meet.

This project was cathartic for my family, but I think it can also be brought into a larger conversation surrounding systems of power. Nick’s story centers on a tension; what appears idealistic in accordance to American patriotism: a military family with a dog and a home, is contradicted by a direct rejection of those same ideals: Nick’s tendency toward familial avoidance and his proclivity to crime. The military gave Nick a lot of confidence and sense of self, a sort of personal power, but this power also triggered within him a tendency toward danger. The military gave him a community, but it was that community that ultimately betrayed him in the court case that preceded his death because of his own betrayal toward the system he was protecting, falsifying records and committing fraud. His position of power led to an abuse of power, which led to the enforcement of a higher state power. I hope that through his story, we can think about these larger questions about what power means, in a family, in a country, and in oneself. And this brings me back to concepts of truth. If there are multiple truths, then who decides which truth gets documented? In the context of this project, is it me, as the editor, who controls how a viewer encounters Nick? Is it my family, as the memory keepers who reveal the sides of Nick that they knew to be true? Does death mean a loss of power over one’s own truth? If the question here is, how can we most truthfully present our ancestors in memory-related nonfiction media, I argue that we acknowledge the nuance of truth, its inherent multiplicity, its relationship to personal bias, and its subjectivity to change over time. Our personal truths are formed by our memories. And memory is fallible. So in this kind of work, we have to expand our definition of truth.

Finally, I want to share why I chose The Last Knickerbocker in New York as the title of this project. My father was an only child, as was Nick. And when my parents married, they both legally changed their names to Ravenstar, the Raven coming from my dad’s name Corwin, and Star from my mom’s name Astrea. But they had me before they married. So when I was born they made my last name Ravenstar instead of Knickerbocker. So effectively, I was the first Ravenstar to be born in my family line, and Nick was the last Knickerbocker to die. And Knickerbocker is a New York name, it comes from the colonial Dutch settlers, there are hundreds of families with the name here. So The Last Knickerbocker in New York is a poetic title. It is a metaphor for how expansive the absence of a loved one is. That Nick may as well have been the last Knickerbocker in the whole state of New York, because that is how it feels.

The Last Knickerbocker in New York (2025)

One of four selected winners of the Periclean Scholars Thesis Award for Skidmore College’s graduating class of 2025

Winner of Golden Acorns Award, John B. Moore Documentary Studies Collaborative, 2025

Installation in Case Gallery, Saratoga Springs, NY

Film Unsaid, Unseen screened at Picture Lock One in Troy, NY

The Last Knickerbocker in New York is an interdisciplinary oral history project that explores how to creatively communicate a portrait of a person posthumously, questioning the multiplicity of truth in memory work and the role of the editor in archive generation. I spent the semester learning about Nick Knickerbocker, my paternal grandfather, who took his own life to avoid incarceration for nonviolent crimes. The project takes the form of a 160 page book, an installation of archival photos and objects, audiovisual elements, and new photographic prints, as well as a reflective experimental film.

Scroll to bottom to view film Unsaid, Unseen