This is the image that we all conjure when thinking of New York City’s fire escapes. The omnipresent metal staircases hanging on buildings throughout the Boroughs. In 1860, after a terrible fire killed ten women and children, New York State authorized New York City (Manhattan only since this was pre-consolidation) to create laws that safeguarded residents of tenements housing more than eight families. Early fire escapes included tubes, something akin to those emergency devices on airplanes, for people to jump through. Some buildings had scuttles that allowed residents to scurry to the roof in case of a fire but getting from the roof proved challenging. In short order the basic metal stairway design still adorning many buildings emerged.
Mystery Ledgers
The New York City Municipal Archives is charged with preserving records deemed to have, “continuing and significant historical, research, cultural or other important value.” Sometimes it’s easy to see this value in our collections; in a mayor’s correspondence, an original drawing of Central Park or the Brooklyn Bridge, NYPD crime scene photographs or a great-grandmother’s birth certificate. There are other cases where this value is not so plainly evident, where it must be determined in more exacting fashion and weighed against the various costs associated with maintaining the records in question. And invariably archivists must draw the line somewhere. Not every record gets kept. Doing so would quickly become absurd.
For Lo, These Many Years: Forgotten Cemeteries of Queens
About a year and a half ago, I started learning Dutch through a smartphone app. While doing digitization for the Archives, I’ve had the chance to look at quite a few Dutch-language colonial records. I’m still only a beginner when it comes to Dutch, but knowing basic words and phrases has made working with these records very interesting. My current project is digitizing photos shot in the 1920s and 1930s by the Topographical Bureau in the Office of the Queens Borough President. While working through a box of 8x10 negatives, I came across numerous pictures of cemeteries. One photo in particular caught my eye.
Preserving WNYC-TV
From urban decay to economic revival, the City of New York has changed dramatically over the past forty years. Over that same period of time, New Yorkers gained an increasing ability to tell their stories through advances in video technology. Today, we take for granted a nearly universal ability to create and distribute videos all over the world, instantaneously. From 1961 to 1996, publicly owned WNYC-TV on Channel 31 fulfilled this role for average New Yorkers by enabling them to share their stories and discuss issues facing them in their daily lives.
The Manhattan Building Plans Project, 1977-2018
On Monday, July 2, 2018, the Municipal Archives began working on a project first envisioned more than 40 years ago—inventorying and re-housing architectural plans for buildings in lower Manhattan. Digitizing selected plans, not envisioned 40 years ago, will be part of the new project. Saved from near destruction in the 1970s, and containing materials spanning more than one hundred years, City archivists are looking forward to discovering long-hidden treasures and preserving this significant historical and cultural collection.
SUMMER IN THE CITY: RECREATION
As we approach the start of the summer, thoughts turn to fun at the beach, pool and in parks. The vertical files of the Municipal Library once again provide a trove of publications describing City government’ role in providing recreational opportunities between 1919 and 1979. A good portion of the contents are news clippings that track, decade by decade, City residents’ recreational choices. “Eel Season Ending For City Anglers” the New York Times reported in 1967; “People Pushing Horses Out Of Park” the Daily News decried as the Claremont Riding Academy was poised to close in 1970, and the perennial “New York on Next to Nothing” from the New York Post are just a few of the titles. Other items include reports and communications from City offices which is the focus of this blog.