At the start of 2018, the Municipal Archives began digitizing its vast and varied audiovisual collections, including lacquer discs, films and tapes from municipal broadcasters WNYC Radio and TV, surveillance films created by the New York Police Department (NYPD) and early cable television programming from the City’s Channel L Working Group. Now, almost six years later, the Archives has made thousands of hours of this visual material available online, with even more being added in the next few months.
These four collections, WNYC Radio (REC0078), WNYC-TV (REC0047), the NYPD Surveillance Films (REC0063) and Channel L (REC0072) together provide uniquely detailed and multifaceted perspectives on the City of New York during one of its most difficult eras since the Great Depression. These municipal entities often covered the same issues facing New Yorkers, but through different lenses and motivated by different public interests. While WNYC Radio and TV mostly showed the City through a lens of journalism and culture, the NYPD had its eye on the safety and security of its inhabitants. Meanwhile, Channel L gave cable subscribers a window into the minutia of City government with a variety of call-in talk show programs, many hosted by City officials trying to explain their legislative efforts and amplifying the voices of activists and average New Yorkers invited on the air.
Sydenham Hospital, ca. 1940. Tax Photo Collection, NYC Municipal Archives.
One issue that WNYC, the NYPD and Channel L all covered was the 1980 closure of Sydenham Hospital in Harlem. As discussed in a previous blog post, Sydenham Hospital was the first fully integrated hospital in the United States. It also served one of the most medically deprived areas of the country, with health outcomes for Harlem residents far below those of other New Yorkers. Still, the dire budgetary constraints of 1970s New York ultimately led Mayor Ed Koch to close the hospital.
WNYC-TV was on the scene documenting protests at the hospital over the years. The television journalists also covered official statements regarding the fate of the public hospital system from both Mayors Abe Beame and Ed Koch, as well as City Council President Carol Bellamy. This newly preserved and freely available footage shows the day-to-day news coverage from WNYC-TV that New Yorkers depended on to keep abreast of current events. Over the years, WNYC-TV employed journalists like Brian Lehrer, Maria Hinojosa, Bob Herbert, and Ti-Hua Chang to host talk shows like NY Hotline, and to critically investigate current events.
Like WNYC-TV, Channel L covered major metro-area developments, but rather than employing a cadre of journalists, Channel L gave hosting duties directly to the political figures that WNYC reporters often interviewed. City Council member Fred Samuels represented Harlem during the 1970s and 80s. He often hosted Channel L talk shows featuring doctors from Sydenham Hospital who expressed the importance of their healthcare facility to the people of Harlem. Samuels also featured other residents and professionals from Harlem on his repeat appearances, using the new format of cable television to highlight an array of issues confronting the community he represented, and his efforts to address the challenges of his constituents.
At the same time, the New York Police Department was also creating audiovisual records of social and political protest movements, including the ten-day occupation of Sydenham Hospital. Unlike Channel L and WNYC-TV, the NYPD never intended the footage to be released to the public. These films were created to further the efforts of the NYPD’s Bureau of Special Services (BOSS) to maintain the safety and security of New Yorkers during an increasingly tumultuous and physically dangerous time. Because of this different motive and method, the footage from this collection offers a totally different perspective on the same events covered by the journalists of WNYC-TV and the politicians of Channel L.
Through the work of archivists at the Municipal Archives, the perspectives of the City’s journalists, politicians, activists, police, and average New Yorkers come together to create a rich vision of one of the greatest cities in the world on the closure of Sydenham Hospital and countless other historical events and movements. The fight for LGBTQ+ rights, Caribbean migration, the rise of modern environmentalism, the Civil Rights movement, the Cold War, second wave feminism, the birth of hip-hop, the space race and so many other developments in the second half of the twentieth century are revealed in new ways through the sounds and visions of these never-before available collections. With holdings that dwarf every other city in the United States, the NYC Municipal Archives and its audiovisual collections serve a vital function of providing a communal memory of American culture, identity, and history, reminding us of our values as a society and the lessons our predecessors learned for our benefit.
This is the last blog post by archivist Chris Nicols. After more than five-years of work dedicated to preserving the visual resources of the Municipal Archives, Chris is moving on to new challenges. We will miss both his technical know-how and the always intelligent perspective he provided on the content he worked so hard to preserve.