The Municipal Archives photograph collections are renowned and widely valued for their comprehensiveness. For example, the tax photograph series includes pictures of every house and building in all five Boroughs circa 1939 and 1985. As useful as they are, however, they depict only building exteriors. Pictures of building interiors are less well represented in the collections. There are interior views in New York Police Department crime scene and Housing Preservation and Development collections for example, but they are relatively few in number.

This week, For the Record takes a look at some remarkable pictures in an unprocessed collection, the “Condemnation Photograph Files.” They consist of excellent quality exterior and interior pictures of all types of buildings—apartments, stores, factories, restaurants, theatres, garages, tenements, taverns, warehouses, filling stations—in short, the entire urban landscape of mid-century New York. They even include the legendary Savoy Ballroom in Harlem.

In a legal context “condemnation” is the process by which a government takes private property for public use under the right of eminent domain. In New York, condemnation proceedings take place in the Supreme Court. The pictures were created as part of the appraisal process that determined how much to compensate the property owner.

The Division of Old Records of the New York County Clerk received and filed the photographs upon conclusion of each Supreme Court condemnation proceeding. They range in date from 1946 to the early 1960s and total 52 cubic feet. There is a box-level inventory. They were transferred to the Municipal Archives in 1998.

Recently, a researcher visited the Archives looking for historical photographs of the San Juan Hill neighborhood in Manhattan before it was razed in the 1960s to make way for the Lincoln Center complex. With help from City archivists and the Collection Guide the patron identified the 1998 accession as a potential resource.

The box-level inventory created when the collection was transferred to the Archives described the contents in very broad terms—essentially by the name of the proposed project, e.g. Harlem T. B. Hospital, Lincoln Tunnel, or by the general neighborhood depicted, e.g. Upper Westside, East Harlem, etc. The San Juan Hill researcher examined the boxes that contained pictures of “Lincoln Square,” and “Columbus Circle,” both in the general vicinity of San Juan Hill, which seemed promising. And indeed they were; several unique images were discovered for the research project.

Further examination of the collection revealed some rather noteworthy pictures. Given that property owners would be compensated not just for the building structure, but also for the value of equipment and fixtures inside the building, it makes sense that there are many interior scenes. In some instances, the pictures include people—shoppers in a store, patrons at the bar, and factory workers at desks and operating machinery.

Another feature of the pictures is their quality. They were taken by professional photographers and consist of well-composed large-format 8x10-inch black and white prints. Each image is captioned with a location and date. The Rutter Studio took almost all of the sample pictures in this article. The Rutter Studio is familiar to City archivists because the Borough President of Brooklyn contracted with them in the 1910s and '20s to document construction of the Coney Island Boardwalk and other public works in the Borough; many have been digitized and are available in the gallery.

Of particular interest in the Condemnation series are pictures of the legendary Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. There are not people in the pictures (apparently the photographer worked during closing hours) but they do include the ballroom, bar area, murals, cloakrooms, etc. It is also interesting that the pictures date from 1952 and the building was not demolished until 1958/59. Whether this speaks to the time frame of the condemnation proceeding, or to protests against demolition of the Harlem landmark, will require further research. The Ballroom made way for the Delano Housing Complex, renamed the Savoy Park Apartments in 2017.

Further research will also be necessary to answer other questions about the condemnation process; e.g. what entity commissioned the pictures? The Court, the City, or the law firms representing the owners?  Did the people in the pictures know the building was slated for demolition?  Further research in MA collections might reveal answers. In the meantime, here is a selection from the series.