Episode # 106: Building Bridges with Thaler Pekar

Written By Nathalie Kalbach

About This Episode

In this conversation with master storyteller Thaler Pekar, we explore how stories connect us to places, how buildings hold collective memories, and why asking "tell me about a time" might be the most powerful way to understand our communities.

Meet Thaler Pekar

Thaler Pekar is the founder of Thaler Pekar & Partners, a consultancy celebrating its 20th anniversary helping organizations build cultures of excellent communication. Her work spans executive coaching, institutional story collections, oral histories, and high-end content creation. As both a Hoboken resident of nearly four decades and a former Jersey City professional who worked in McGinley Square for 10 years, Thaler brings a unique perspective on how stories shape our connections to place.

Connect with Thaler Pekar:

Key Insights

  • Stories are containers for information that hold facts, values, and emotions simultaneously, allowing us to express things we couldn't say in other ways

  • Values like "integrity" or "community" are subjective - stories demonstrate what these values look like in action

  • People are drawn to solutions, not problems - showing stories of solutions in action is more effective than focusing on what's wrong

  • The "Narrative Garden®" approach examines which stories are being told, which are missing, and which need more room to grow

  • Stories at the borders and edges of organizations or communities often contain the most innovation and untapped potential

  • Universal across cultures: everyone has stories to tell, and everyone wants to be genuinely heard

  • Historic preservation isn't just about individual buildings, but about preserving streetscapes, neighborhood character, and the aesthetics of community

  • Buildings uniquely "bring the past into the present so we can hold both at the same time"

Visual Documentation

St. John's Episcopal Church, Jersey City - This historic church where Horizon Health Center began in the basement under Rev. Robert Castle's leadership

Erie Lackawanna Terminal, Hoboken - The historic ferry and train terminal that connects Hoboken's past to its present

Related Resources

Explore Further

In next week's Substack article, I'll be sharing my own story map of Jersey City, featuring paintings of the locations that have shaped my personal connection to this community. I'll explore how finding these meaningful places helps us build deeper relationships with the cities we call home.

Coming Up Next

Join us for the next episode when I'll be speaking with Colin Egan of the Friends of the Loew's Theater about saving and revitalizing one of Jersey City's most magnificent historic buildings.

Connect with Nat

Music: Our theme music is "How You Amaze Me," composed by Jim Kalbach and performed by Jim Kalbach, Bryan Beninghove, Charlie Siegler, and Pat Van Dyke.

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Nat's Sidewalk Stories explores the intersection of place, community, and storytelling through conversations with practitioners, community leaders, and local changemakers. New episodes release on the 2nd and 4th Thursdays of each month through August, with a break in September before Season 2 begins in October.

Full Transcript

Note: This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability while preserving the conversation's content and meaning.


Nat Kalbach: Welcome to Nat's Sidewalk Stories. I'm Nat Kalbach, an artist and storyteller exploring the places, people, and hidden histories that make our neighborhoods vibrant. Today I am excited to welcome Thaler Pekar, a master storyteller who helps organizations around the world build cultures of excellent communication through the power of narrative.

Thaler and I first connected at the New Jersey Historic Preservation Conference where her insights about storytelling immediately resonated with me. In our conversation, we'll explore how stories connect us to the place we live, how buildings hold our collective memories, and why asking "tell me more about a time" might be the most powerful way to understand our communities. Whether you're interested in organizational culture, historic preservation or simply collecting your family's stories, Thaler offers practical wisdom that will change how you listen and share.

From trolley tours in Cleveland to the basement of St. John's Episcopal Church in Jersey City, our conversation weaves through meaningful places that have shaped people's lives. So join us as we map the invisible stories that connect us to the streets beneath our feet. Today's episode includes discussion of reproductive healthcare services and their history in Jersey City.

Hey Thaler, thank you so much for joining me on Nat's Sidewalk Stories. We met at the New Jersey Historic Preservation Conference last year during a workshop about placemaking and storytelling. And we were in the same breakout group. And I have to say, I was immediately drawn to you and I was like, I want this person as my friend, like she is so cool. And I loved your perspective on storytelling and the way how you connect to people. So, welcome to the pod.

Thaler Pekar: Thank you for having me here. What I remember was really wanting to know you, and I don't remember the session, but I remember the reception afterwards and seeing you and immediately making a beeline for you and how absolutely delightful you were and what incredible conversation. I think we closed the place down. We talked for so long.

Nat Kalbach: That was amazing. So before we dive deeper, Thaler, could you share a little bit about yourself and your work with organizational storytelling, which I find super fascinating.

Thaler Pekar: Well, thank you. I lead a consultancy that's autonomous. It's Thaler Pekar and Partners. We're celebrating our 20th anniversary this year. And we work with smart leaders across sectors and around the globe on building cultures of excellent communication. And we do that through executive coaching on communication skills, through institutional story collections and oral histories, through high-end video and content creation, and we have four trademarked communication processes that we teach around the world.

Nat Kalbach: Wow. I wanna dive into that a little bit deeper in a second. But before we do that, I love how you approach storytelling as more than just a communication tool. So you recently wrote an essay which I will link in the show notes with the title, "The Good You Do," and in it you mentioned that sharing stories about your work and how your work aligns with your values is an act of integrity and leadership. So my question to you is, first, what drew you to the power of stories?

Thaler Pekar: Around the turn of this century, I was working with clients who weren't getting ahead as quickly as I wanted them to. These were mostly progressive advocacy organizations, and they weren't moving policy as fast. And the big thing at the time was talk about your values. If you believe in community, talk about community. If you believe in brotherhood, talk about brotherhood. And that's all well and good, but those are completely subjective terms. Values are completely subjective.

It became clear to me that we needed to make these values more tangible. At the same time, I was working with my brother Jim, who is a brain researcher at Johns Hopkins, and I was talking to him about my frustration in communication and people not moving ahead fast enough, and I started to discover together with him that we process information through story, that's the best way that people hear it. A story is a container for information. It contains facts and values and emotions all at the same time, and it enables you to say things you couldn't say in any other way. So if you're going to tell me that you believe in community, you need to show me how - much like you're doing with this podcast.

Nat Kalbach: Yeah, that's cool. I've never thought about that, that we process information through stories.

Thaler Pekar: I can give you an example of a client story. We worked with Novartis and they were rolling out a new compliance and integrity campaign and it was not getting pickup, and they had spent a significant amount of money putting this together and trying to roll it out.

So they brought me in with another partner and we helped top leaders throughout the world talk about what does compliance and integrity mean to them, but not talk about it. We helped leaders throughout the world find stories that showed that demonstrated what compliance and integrity were. I've worked with these leaders to refine those stories and worked with them on how to best deliver them in platforms that were large, big staff meetings in small one-on-one conversations, but to start a story sharing of stories about what does integrity mean? There was massive pickup and it was a huge success.

Nat Kalbach: That's interesting because that, as you said before, values can mean something different for everyone. So, just coming to the point where you're like, what does that mean for us as an organization is probably really hard if you do not share these insights.

Thaler Pekar: Does integrity mean speaking up and speaking to power, or does integrity mean holding a confidence close and not speaking to power even in the same place? It can mean different things in completely different context. So trying to make that clear can only be done through story.

Nat Kalbach: Yeah, that's a good point and especially something that resonates with me having seen some nonprofit organization work where you gather around certain missions, but then the reason why the volunteers joined and also read the mission might be still read in a different way for each person who joined, right? And that sharing these stories and having actually a conversation about it is probably a good idea, especially in nonprofit organizations as well.

Thaler Pekar: You're pinpointing something else that was very big again, at the turn of the century. This idea of state all of your messaging with problem, solution and action. But the truth is a lot of people like your solution, wanna be a part of your solution, wanna participate in the solution, and they might be coming at the problem from a very different place.

It doesn't matter as long as they have the interest and the buy-in to the same solution. I've already got 99 problems, I don't need another one. Don't come at me with your problem, which I might not define exactly the same way you do or even see the same way, but offer me a story about the solution in action somewhere, however small that I can see myself in that story, make it resonate with me. Give me a protagonist who I can relate to, and then I can see myself wanting to be like them and achieving what they're achieving. And now I'm bought into your solution.

Nat Kalbach: That really resonates with me because the solution, the strategy, how to get to the solution or what you, the problem to be solved, that might change and people understand that. But you need to have that goal. You need to have that. This is where we are going. This is the shiny sun in the horizon that comes up and we are marching towards that and not too broad, like "we are gonna save the world," and that means something different for everyone, right?

Thaler Pekar: The nonprofit or any institution doesn't exist because there's a problem in the world. They exist because they have a solution to a problem, right? Hospitals don't exist because people are sick. Hospitals exist because they can make people better.

Nat Kalbach: Thaler, my brain is kind of exploding in the first couple seconds. Amazing. So you were talking about some of the methodologies that you said you have trademarked some of them. What have you found most effective when helping organizations, communities to uncover their narratives? How do you do some of these methodologies and how could they maybe be applied to collecting community stories or oral histories outside of organizational storytelling?

Thaler Pekar: So I wanna take a minute to pause and define narrative and stories. So if you think of narratives sort of as the sky and stories as the stars, or you think of culture as the sky and you could think of constellations as narratives. There's stars that come together. So narratives are made up of stories.

So communities are made up of gazillions of stories of everybody in that community and all the different stories that people in that community have. So there's also something called ante narratives, A-N-T-E, and that's a narrative without an end. And I think that having lived in Hoboken for 38 years, I could see Hoboken now as a narrative that's an ante narrative. It's changing so much, and it's not set in stone. Right. Our cities change, our buildings get readapted, they get repurposed, they get torn down, they get rebuilt, they disappear. But these long narratives are changing as new people come in, they're contributing their stories as disasters happen. The story of Hoboken is very different post Sandy than it was pre Superstorm Sandy. So that's very exciting to see that.

On an institutional level, it's similar. People have lots of different stories. I work with organizations to find those stories. One of our trademarks is called The Narrative Garden, and so we will look at all the stories that are being told, the stories that aren't being told, and that you want to have told, what do you wanna plant? What do you want to tamp down on? What do you wanna weed out? What do you wanna move? Some plants away, some stories away so that these other stories can grow stronger. And a large part is paying attention to the stories at the edges and at the borders. Because in ecosystems, that's the most generative place, and that's where innovation happens inside of companies. So to those edges. Also, helping leaders listen around corners to make sure they're hearing everything and not just the voices they're most used to hearing.

Nat Kalbach: That can be applied to community stories, as well. You have worked with organizations in more than 30 countries, I think 35. Have you noticed cultural differences in how stories are shared and valued? And if there are, what are universal elements though that transcend those differences?

Thaler Pekar: Universality that everybody has stories and some cultures might say, oh, we are humble people and we don't tell stories. They're telling stories. Let me ask you, did you hear stories every place that you've taught?

Nat Kalbach: Oh yeah, absolutely. Usually when I taught, especially when I was traveling, I would spend two or four days with almost the same group of people. And when you are in a room full of different people that are sharing the same interest, in this case, art, people start to talk with each other and share stories that they might not share easily with other people.

There's something about it when you do something that is fun, but also that they are people that are listening, that are interested in your story just because you are sharing the same interest, something that you love, seems to really bond people so that they're more open because they're seeing themselves in the person that's there in the room with them. Hey, you can't be a bad person. You love art as much as I do. You're spending this weekend with me, right? That's how I felt. I don't know but that's how I perceived it.

Thaler Pekar: So universally people like to be heard and people like to, they like the respect of being heard and wherever you are, if you are willing to listen and say to someone, tell me about your experience. You are sitting back and you're elevating the other person, and you're leaning in and you're listening.

You're giving that person the stage, and I mean, genuinely asking. Tell me about your experience, not tell me about your experiences, let me tell you about mine. Not that. Genuine listen to people. It gets back to an earlier question. You asked me about how do you get stories in communities? How do you hear them? Trust and listening, so respecting people, understanding that everybody's got a story to be told.

They might not be versed in telling it because unfortunately people aren't used to being listened to, and that's the biggest thing I've discovered in my work. Not that people don't have stories to tell, but people haven't been heard. People haven't had the deep listening to their own selves, that they're used to expressing something with the beginning and a middle and an end. They're not given the space and the time. And so I work with leaders to create cultures of excellent communication, and that means creating a spaciousness, both physically and emotionally, and time-wise cognitively, that people can be heard and that stories can be shared.

I had an incredible compliment the other day that made me so happy. Here's a story. I'd worked with an organization in the South Bronx 15 years ago or so, and one of the things I did after I taught the entire staff what story is and why it matters, and how to find stories and pull them out of each other and how to build on them at the close we went through their agendas for their regular recurring meetings. And we built in story sharing to every one of those meetings. And I happened to speak to the executive director who wasn't the executive director at the time, and he said, I wanna thank you. We are still doing that all these years later, every manager's meeting and every director's meeting that we have opens with a story.

Nat Kalbach: Wow.

Thaler Pekar: That's how knowledge is shared and values are shared. Passion is shared, and pride and morale is maintained and strengthened in organizations.

Nat Kalbach: I love that. And we know on a level, especially now that nowadays where we do a lot on screens, where it's also harder for people to actually learn how to share their stories. But we also know how it is when you're in an organization or in a group where basically you're just doing, you're doing your thing.

Thaler Pekar: Here's a little tip, right? There's a difference between "how was your weekend" when you walk in the door on Monday morning, and "tell me about your weekend." Huge difference there between, I'm just asking this to get a yes or no answer, or a good or bad, or flatness and, oh, tell me more.

Nat Kalbach: So, Thaler, you live in Hoboken, as you mentioned, and you're also serving on both the Historic Preservation Commission and the Hoboken Historical Museum Board. How do these two entities where you're serving influence how you think about community stories?

Thaler Pekar: It's very much what I do in my work, which is connecting the past, the present, and the future, or in more business terms, the impact, the strategy and the vision, and that's completely applicable to the community as well. So I like that through line. And again, that through line changes. It's a growing DNA coil. I don't know, I'm picturing a line with all these, some sort of conga line with people joining it, I'll work on that metaphor.

Really, I love where I live. I fell madly in love with Hoboken on Easter Sunday, 39 years ago. I took the path to meet a friend who said, meet me on the corner of third in Washington on the park bench. And back then the city was - and there were families strolling down Washington Street in their Easter clothes in the middle of the street. And I just felt like when I came out of the path train, I was living in Manhattan at the time. I could just take a breath. There was an ease and the most beautiful views of Manhattan as well, and I fell madly in love with my little city, which is what my nieces called it when they were little, they said, are we going to the little city compared to New York?

There's a scale that I appreciate, there's a sense of community and borders on it. And again, those borders are changing. Getting back to talking about border's changing. My God, the west side of Hoboken is completely different. There's a wonderful show right now that will still be up when this podcast comes out at the Hoboken Historical Museum on the Meadows of Hoboken, which is about the West side, and it's an incredible narrative featured in this exhibit about how Hoboken was an island and how it got filled in and who was living there, and then who came in and the different people that were inhabiting the West side versus what it is now. And then Superstorm Sandy changing the entire community. And then the resiliency parks, which are changing the community on the west side again. And it's just beautiful. I highly recommend it. But it's that liveliness, that understanding that there's a story to be told everywhere. The city isn't as perfectly diverse as I would like it to be, and it's certainly not my experience in Jersey City where I worked for 10 years in McGinley Square that I welcome talking about. But it's a fascinating place.

Nat Kalbach: I love that. Of course, being in Jersey City, I have to point out lovingly that we are the sixth borough and you're just the seventh.

Thaler Pekar: Uh.

Nat Kalbach: An insider joke between us and Jersey City. I know.

Thaler Pekar: When I worked in Jersey City in McGinley Square at Horizon Health Center, I met teenagers who had never been to New York City. I remember one day there was a huge storm in the summer and I was working with the teens and I said, oh, let's look for rainbows. And one teen said, we don't have rainbows in Jersey City. And sure enough, there was a huge rainbow in the sky, which is really beautiful.

You asked me about my time in Jersey City and in preparation for coming on your podcast today, a couple of stories stuck out to me. And one bizarrely, in addition to that Rainbow story. I lobbied at the Jersey City Council meetings and lobbied for funding that we were getting for Horizon Health Center, which for your listeners at the time, was an enormous social service center with a teen center. We had an after school program, we had a maternity clinic that delivered 2000 babies a year. We saw 6,000 women in our family planning center. We had an abortion clinic that performed 1200 abortions a year. I wrote the grant we became a federally qualified health center while I was there, so we added dental chairs and we added mental health services.

It was an incredible place. Everything important that I learned in life I've learned in the 10 years that I worked in this beautiful community with people from all over the world. And it was a really exciting time to be there. It was a difficult time. It was the height of the AIDS and the crack epidemic. But I digressed. I was lobbying at the Jersey City City Hall and it was a contentious meeting and I came outside and two guys were standing and having an argument on the steps of city hall going at each other.

And it was during the Hale-Bopp Comet and I stopped them and I said, do you see that up there? That's the comet. And these guys stopped and said, that's the one that all those people wearing the sneakers killed themselves. And I said, yeah, that's it. And it deescalated their conflict. And we all stood there and looked at the comet for a while, and then I went on my way. I don't know if that story makes any sense to include.

Nat Kalbach: Funny, it's in a nutshell.

Thaler Pekar: Horizon Health Center, also, we ran a program in the county jail that we called an anger management program. It was really a sex ed and a safe sex program, but you couldn't call it that. We met so many people in the county jail that when they got out, they felt safe coming to our waiting room and they would sit in our waiting room all day not seeing a provider, but because they felt safe. So we bought the Alps restaurant across the street and we started a restaurant and a catering program, and this was before the term social entrepreneurship came up. And we had a southern restaurant because the executive director was from Texas called Magnolia. And we created this and I understand that the Alps is now a hipster bar in the heights, I believe.

Nat Kalbach: Yeah, and the building, the Alps, that is now a new building on that corner. Where your company was, Horizon, that is gutted out right now and looks like they're adding some stories on top. That is so interesting.

Thaler Pekar: So I really wanna share the story of the origin of Horizon Health Center. So this massive social service center started in the basement of St. John's Episcopal Church on Summit Avenue under the incredible Reverend Robert Castle and Robert Castle had the Black Panthers and the SDS meeting there. At the time, Jersey City Medical Center, which was then the Hague Hospital, even though it was a public hospital, was being run as a Catholic hospital and women were giving birth to their 11th child, and they were crying on the table, please, can you help me? I don't wanna have any more children. And they were getting nothing. So they started a reproductive health clinic and pregnancy prevention, in the basement of St. John's Church.

Nat Kalbach: Wow. I have never heard that. That is so incredibly amazing and totally checks out when hearing Robert Castle. It doesn't surprise me. And it's such a shame that this incredible church that was not only architecturally such a beautiful church, but also in terms of civil rights movement. What you just told all these things that happened in this church, is now almost only a shell of itself. And I have no idea really where we are standing in terms of saving any of it. So it's really, really sad.

Thaler Pekar: It does have municipal landmark status.

Nat Kalbach: Yeah. But something to dig into and say, Hey, what's happening with it? Maybe some of the organizations that are preservation organizations out there will take it on or find out what's going on with it. But it is, I know it's just really sad. You just mentioned actual places. In your experience, how do these physical places shape stories that we tell, like architecture or streets or shared spaces? How do they become characters in our collective narratives?

Thaler Pekar: I think they become characters through your work in one way. They've become characters from people telling stories about buildings. I had an incredible experience a couple of summers ago making a celebratory video in Cleveland, Ohio, about two incredibly generous people, the Glicks, who gave money to an essential hospital in that city, and they didn't give money to the Cleveland Clinic or to the opera or the orchestra, they gave it to this hospital because community means so much to them.

And knowing that I wanted to get a sense of their interaction and history of the city. So I rented an old trolley that they used to have in Cleveland and outfitted it with cameras and had the Glicks on the trolley and we drove around Cleveland for a day and they shared stories about the first house that they lived in and where their children's rooms were and what it was like to put holiday decorations up there and who the neighbors were and where the kids walk to school from there, and why they chose that neighborhood.

And then we talked about where their second home was and we talked about, he ran Dots, clothing stores and where the different stores were. And we actually went to one of the stores and walked in and had an incredibly surprising and beautiful experience talking to the people who were now in that store that it's a different store. It's not a Dots anymore. But the physical space still remains to the point where he could say, I put those shelves in and I painted that wall.

But I saw firsthand that day how places can really matter and build your values. These people lived in a community and it cemented the values that they were going to give back to that community and I could really relate to that. My history in Hoboken, I became a political organizer, because of Hoboken, I was working in publishing, but started a reproductive justice group. Back in the days before there were internets, we had phone chains, and I put a table on the street and stood on Washington Street and got signatures from people, and we became a powerhouse organization that could mobilize 500 people overnight. And because of this town, I became a political organizer and believed that people's voices mattered, and it changed my life.

Nat Kalbach: Wow, that's powerful. I do believe that your community or cities can change you. I have always been interested in buildings and I've painted buildings before I moved to the states and have been interested in history, but I've not been interested really in historic preservation.

And that has come definitely through living here, learning about the stories and about places and seeing the changes that the city goes through and how some of the areas were vastly changed in how we lost some of these places, but then also the stories, and that made me more interested in being an advocate in terms of historic preservation and community stories. So that totally resonates with me, and what a wonderful thing that these two cities that are right next to each other and have such a rich history that carries through.

Thaler Pekar: And both cities have vibrant street scapes and vibrant - Jersey City has vibrant neighborhoods. And one of the things I'd love your listeners to understand is that historic preservation isn't about preserving this building and that building, but it's about preserving the street scapes and the sense of neighborhood and the overall aesthetics of a community and allowing people to continue to blossom and to use the past for personal and economic prosperity and growth.

Nat Kalbach: Yeah. And they're part of their, of our collective memories, which then trigger people like the Glicks in Cleveland to tell these stories. I wanna tell a very short story. I once was at a wedding where after the wedding, the couple in Germany, they rented a bus, an old double decker bus and the tour that we were doing were the places that were important to the couple and the people.

So we were driving around in this Hamburg double decker bus with a tour guide who was like, and here is the Lake Alster where you know, Betina and did this and that, and here's the bar where they first met and their first apartment. And it wasn't boring. It was amazing and it was so much fun and the whole bus was talking in between with stories that were related to the couple, but also the places. I will never forget, it's one of the most fun weddings I've ever attended. It's probably beside my own, the funnest one.

Thaler Pekar: Are they architects? What's their connection to place?

Nat Kalbach: Nope. They're legal people. They're just normal people but that reminded me that there different ways of connecting. Like the Glicks, having all these stores that you told being in the streetcar and then that reminded me of the little double decker bus. The building is like a little, like a mini universe, right? And what it holds are the people and their stories.

Thaler Pekar: We always wanna bring the past into the present so we can hold both at the same time. And that's what buildings do. That's so extraordinary in a way that nothing else does. It's there to carry people through.

Nat Kalbach: Thaler if someone who listens now, wants to become a better collector of stories, whether it be for their company or community project or even in their own family, what's one practice that they could start today in your opinion?

Thaler Pekar: Tell me about a time, those words, tell me about a time this happened. Tell me about a time you felt similarly. Tell me about a time you bought a new house. Tell me about the first day you moved in. Tell me about celebrating birthdays in this place. Tell me about, and just sitting back and listening. Asking for those stories, genuinely leaning into what you're going to hear and then saying, and then what happened, keep it going, and then what? And then what, and letting the person know that they're the king the queen, you're subservient, and you're leaning in to hear these.

There's a wonderful journalist named Katherine Lanpher who said the three most beautiful words in the English language are not "I love you," or even "you've lost weight," they're "tell me more."

Nat Kalbach: That's beautiful. Thank you. That is a wonderful, wonderful tip. And I cannot wait to use that. You tell me more. I have one last question for you, which is my signature question. If you could collect a story from anyone from either Hoboken, or Jersey City's past, who would it be? Which location would you choose to record it and what would you most want to know from them?

Thaler Pekar: I really want my dad, Walter to come back and see Hoboken. So my dad commuted from Passaic through Hoboken. He would take the train from Passaic to Hoboken and then get on the ferry to go to NYU, and this was in the late forties. In fact, I have a beautiful drawing of the ferry from that time that he bought at the Washington Square Art Show, which he loved so much because it reminded him of that commute.

I was that generation that moved to Hoboken when their parents had worked so hard to make sure that the last thing you did was move to Hoboken. And my first apartment which was on the west side of town and had a swamp in the basement and the walls were covered with dead mosquitoes. When my dad dropped me off at that apartment the day I moved in, I never knew this story, but he then was so upset by it that he drove around town trying to find another place for me to live. The building that he chose I never knew until many years later is the building that my husband and I bought, an apartment in right before we got married.

Nat Kalbach: What.

Thaler Pekar: And we told my dad we were buying this and he told me the story about driving around that September day in 1987 and saying, I saw that building. I chose this building of, this is where I wanted you to live, and I'd love to take him down to the Erie Lackawanna and talk about the plans for the restoration that they're doing there. I'd love to show him the resiliency parks. I'd love to hear his take on all the high rises that are built. I'd love him to see what's preserved. My dad was an architect and an engineer, and it would mean a lot for me to carry that story through and to carry the family story of Hoboken through.

Nat Kalbach: That is so beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing this with us. That was wow. What an amazing story. What a coincidence too. It's not a coincidence. He manifested it for you somehow. He did.

Thaler Pekar: Thank you for asking.

Nat Kalbach: Thank you so much, Thaler. That was a wonderful conversation. I really thank you for sharing your insights and your stories. Where can people learn more about your work?

Thaler Pekar: thalerpekar.com. T-H-A-L-E-R-P-E-K-A-R.com.

Nat Kalbach: I will definitely link that up in the show notes so that people can find more about you and your company. You do amazing work.

Thaler Pekar: It is fun to be on your sidewalk to pull up a chair and sit with you.

Nat Kalbach: Thank you Thaler, for sharing your insights about how stories build bridges between places, people, and time. I'm particularly struck by your advice to create space for storytelling by simply asking, "tell me about a time," and then sitting back to truly listen.

Our conversation has inspired me to think about my own story map of Jersey City, the places that have shaped my connection to this community. Next week on my Substack, I'll be sharing some of these meaningful locations along with paintings I've created of them exploring how personal geographies help us find belonging in the places we call home.

If you'd like to learn more about Thaler's work and connect with her, check out the show notes that will tell you more about her. Thank you for listening to Nat's Sidewalk Stories.

I'm your host, Nat Kalbach. Join me next time when I'll be speaking with Colin Egan, of the Friends of the Loew's Theater. Until then, I invite you to notice the stories hiding in plain sight on your own sidewalks.

Our theme music is How You Amaze Me, composed by Jim Kalbach and performed by Jim Kalbach, Bryan Beninghove, Charlie Siegler and Pat Van Dyke. Make sure to check out the show notes and subscribe to Nat's Sidewalk Stories on Substack.

Nathalie Kalbach
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Episode #105: Slow Down and Look with Tris McCall