The New York City Municipal Archives at the Department of Records and Information Services (DORIS) holds New York City government’s historical records ranging from the 1654 deed for Gravesend granted to Lady Deborah Moody by the New Amsterdam government, to photos from the Bill de Blasio mayoralty, and everything in between. This week we announced that several non-archival artifacts are available for purchase at an auction of selected Gifts to the City. Proceeds of the auction will benefit the Municipal Archives Reference and Research Fund (MARRF) which supports the work of the Municipal Archives and Library.
Memorabilia and Ephemera Auction Announcement, Sotheby’s, November 3, 1983. NYC Municipal Archives
This won’t be the first sale of non-archival ephemera. That happened in 1981, according to a 1982 memo in the collection of former DORIS Commissioner Eugene Bockman, when the Archives held two trial auctions. One auction of 38 items brought in $4,500. The memo proposed an expanded auction that would raise more than $2,000,000 “based on our estimate that there are approximately 15,000 items which can be divested without impairing the integrity of the Archives.” Bockman’s files do not contain an inventory of the 15,000 items, and that sale never happened. But, in a handout referring to material eligible for sale, Bockman wrote, “The materials have been appraised as nonarchival, i.e., not created in the course of official business of government of the City of New York and/or minimally related to the property, affairs or government of the City of New York.”
Croton Water Pipe Bond (Cancelled), 1873. NYC Municipal Archives
Further correspondence proposed annual auctions to support the Archives. Although that did not happen, there were two notable auctions in the 1980s. One sold ephemera, the other a folio of Audubon drawings. More recently, DORIS has been selling cancelled bonds and stock certificates to collectors.
The existence of what are essentially non-archival materials in the collections derives from the process by which Archives acquires its holdings. The process begins with a document each government agency or office is required to develop: the Record Retention Schedule. The schedule lists and describes types of records such as invoices, correspondence, testimony, photos, email, etc. and stipulates the period of time that category of record must be kept. At the end of this retention period, records are eligible for disposal or transfer to the Municipal Archives. Archivists intake the records. At some point, the records will be processed—essentially each item will be appraised and described in an inventory. Duplicates and items with no historical or research value are discarded and sometimes sold.
Sometimes, when collections are accessioned, it becomes clear that much of the content is duplicative or extremely similar. In these instances, the collections can be sampled to retain a representative quantity of material and the remainder can be eliminated. One such collection, acquired in the early 1980s from the sub-basement of the Municipal Building, was 1,200 boxes of canceled municipal bonds, warrants, stock certificates, coupons and checks from the Office of the Comptroller dating from the early 1800s to the early 1980s. Many of the documents were bagged or strewn about on the floor.
The archivists recommended that the collections be sampled—either 2% or 5% would be retained in the Municipal Archives. The remainder was disposable. The question, wrote then-Commissioner Bockman, was whether “disposal by sale [was] the proper approach to take?”
Town of Morrisania, Seven Percent Bond (Cancelled), 1871. NYC Municipal Archives
In 1983, during the Koch Administration, Sotheby’s presided over an auction of items the then-Commissioner Bockman labeled “flotsam and jetsam that’s been floating around city agencies,” in a New York Times article reporting on the auction. “Archives are not paper museums. We’re a functional historic repository. We don’t collect things because they’re curious.”
Responsibility to manage the sale was delegated to the New York Archival Society the tax-exempt entity that supports the Archives. On November 3, 1983, the Society sponsored an Auction and Buffet dinner at Sotheby’s. A letter inviting participation described the Items for sale as “non-archival, but very collectible City memorabilia, ephemera and historic items—old bonds, with beautiful engravings and early mayoral signatures; Liquor and “Saloon” licenses from famous taverns and locations; checks made out to and endorsed by many of the famous financial institutions of the mid 1880s; City seals from the Westside Highway; early fire boxes with sculptured flames and many other interesting collectibles.”
Other ephemera included a 19th Century three-step library ladder with the top step missing, a desk and chair from the City Council Chambers and a Kings County Firemens Benevolent Fund Seal. Most items were financial instruments—bonds and checks.
Water Bond (Cancelled) purchased by John Jacob Astor, 1842. NYC Municipal Archives
Background information on the ephemera provided in the auction catalog included a short history of Tammany Hall, biographies of William Marcy Tweed, and fourteen mayors who served between 1837 and 1878, including three-termer William Frederic Havemeyer. The biographies would lead one to conclude that power see-sawed back and forth between Tammany Hall and reformers.
One of the seven liquor or saloon licenses issued by the Board of Excise that were included in the auction was valid from August 1895 to August 1896. It had been issued to the “old” Madison Square Garden located on Madison Avenue between 26 and 27 Streets. The auction catalog notes that the license “refers to the famous building of 1889, designed by Stanford White (who was murdered in its roof garden by Harry K. Thaw in 1906), which was demolished in 1925.”
New York City Express (Miller) Highway, Ornamental Seal, ca. 1926. NYC Municipal Archives
The 1983 ephemera auction also included heavy metal seals originally affixed to the West Side (Express) highway built during the administration of Mayor James J. Walker. There were five seals in the auction, “each representing the seal of the City of New York at a particular point in its history. They were one of the decorative elements appearing at regular intervals along each outer wall of the Highway, and were designed by the architectural firm of Sloan and Robertson. Each cartouche is 2 ¼” thick, 18” in diameter, and weighs sixty pounds. The cartouches are made of cast iron.” The first seal of the province of New Netherlands from 1623 had a beaver, a crown and wampum, surrounded by a wreath. Subsequent changes in 1654, 1669, 1784, and 1915 added or changed elements until we have the seal that remains today.
The New York Archival Society recruited guest auctioneers including Mayor Ed Koch and his rivals City Council President Carol Bellamy and Comptroller Harrison “Jay” Golden. Koch presided over the sale of one of approximately 2,000 seals that decorated the outer wall of the West Side Highway. David Dunlap reported in The New York Times that when bidding stalled at $350 for the modern City seal, Koch quipped, “Do I have four? Do I have four? You’ve got to give me four because I’ve got to do better than Jay.” And he did—selling the item for $425.
New York College of Pharmacy Commencement Invitation, 1890. NYC Municipal Archives
Several auction lots included invitations to various events. The catalog claimed they were “Charming examples of 19th century engraving and lithography. A 1890 invitation sent to Mayor Hugh J. Grant requested his presence at the commencement of the New York College of Pharmacy.”
Although Sotheby’s donated its services and space, other expenses ran to $18,000 and the Auction raised $34,433.
The auction story will be continued with the saga of the Audubon Folio—its origins, travels and sale at an auction that produced $2.3 million to support the Archives and Library.