Category Archives: Photographs
Remembering Antietam
This post was written by Alice Browne, N-YHS cataloguer September 17 marks the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the battle of Antietam, the bloodiest single day of fighting in the Civil War, which left almost four thousand dead. It was not a conclusive victory for either side, but did put an end to Lee’s invasion [...]
Before Rosa Parks: Taking on New York’s Segregated Street Car Companies
Post written by Eric Robinson So much has been written about the struggle against slavery and segregation in the American south that it is easy to forget that race relations in the north have been just as knotty. It is comparatively unknown that nineteenth-century New York City’s public transportation systems were racially segregated: African-Americans were [...]
“Undesirable edifices generally”: The 1916 Zoning Resolution
The built environment, especially in so eclectic a place as New York City, has a way of hiding history in plain sight. With that in mind, if you have never noticed how many of the profiles of early 20th century buildings in New York retreat incrementally from the sidewalk as the building grows taller, then [...]
Clarke and Rapuano, Landscape Architects
April — better known as the month of showers, Frederick Law Olmsted’s birthday, and Earth Day — has also been designated National Landscape Architect month. Aside from Olmsted, however, landscape architects continue to fly largely under the radar. A case in point: Clarke and Rapuano, a firm with enormous impact on New York City’s urban [...]
Happy Birthday Yellowstone!
Last Thursday (March 1), Yellowstone National Park marked its 140th year of existence. It’s also a perfect excuse to remind everyone that, despite our name, the New-York Historical Society’s collections document the history of the entire United States, not just of New York and its neighbors. In his 2008 television series documenting his tour of [...]
Blueprints, Then and Now
Written by Geraldine Granahan, Preservation Assistant for the McKim, Mead & White Architectural Record Collection. Recently the staff of the library and conservation department spent a fun afternoon in our conservation laboratory attending a workshop on the process of making cyanotypes, or as they are more commonly known — blueprints (so called because they contain [...]
A Castle on the Hudson: the Bannerman Island Story
Post written by Ashley Todd, a fall intern at N-YHS who processed the Bannerman Family Papers. The collection was generously donated by Virginia Betts in 2011. If you have ever taken the Metro-North Hudson Line train to Poughkeepsie then you are probably familiar with the haunting castle ruins that sit on a small island between [...]
African Americans and the World of Tomorrow
Post written by Kenneth Cleary, a summer intern at N-YHS who processed the Paul Gillespie Collection of New York World’s Fair Materials. A rich collection of photographs from the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair is newly available to researchers at the N-YHS library. Donated to N-YHS in May of this year, the Paul Gillespie Collection [...]
