Before Google maps, smart watches, and telephone books were created to help people navigate the city, there were city directories. The New York City directories listed the names and addresses of residents, churches, businesses, police stations, organizations, etc. and ran from approximately 1786 to 1934. There were multiple printers of city directories, but for this…

Jessie Tarbox Beals was a woman of many firsts. A pioneer of photography, she was the first published female photojournalist in the United States, the first woman press photographer, and the first female night photographer. The Jessie Tarbox Beals photograph collection, ca. 1905-1940, PR-4, at the New-York Historical Society is available through our Shelby White…

John Anderson, Sr. (1733-1798) had barely published a year’s worth of his paper, The Constitutional Gazette, before he earned the title of “the rebel printer” —effectively opposing James Rivington’s loyalist paper, The Royal Gazette. His reputation was most likely supplemented by printing New York’s first edition of Common Sense by Thomas Paine. Anderson was a…

What comes to mind at the mention of astrology? Perhaps zodiac signs and horoscopes? Or maybe millennials, the full moon, and new-age ideas? Today astrology has the less than stellar reputation as the unempirical version of astronomy, and certainly nowhere near the academic realm of science or mathematics. Historically, astrology and science are not as…

Milton Halsey Thomas’ passion for bibliography and history began early. As a high school student in Troy, New York, he spent his free time working on projects for various libraries that included gravestone transcriptions and genealogical research. In 1920, he became “Chatham’s Local Historian” and eventually went on to study library science at Columbia University….

In 1896, construction began on the Williamsburg Bridge, the East River span that would terminate at South Fifth Street and Driggs Avenue in Brooklyn, and Delancey and Clinton Streets in Manhattan. To make way for construction, 26 ½ acres of land were used, evicting about 10,000 people from their homes on either side of the river. The…

The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., printed in New York by a C.S. Van Winkle at 101 Greenwich Street, was published in seven serialized installments from 1819 to 1820. The book was also an entirely pseudonymous affair by none other than Washington Irving, the father of American folklore. The Sketch Book, and in particular…

Will we ever get back to watching baseball at Yankee Stadium? It is a fair and frustrating question. Perhaps, as therapy, it helps to go back in time before Yankee Stadium (either the original or the newer one) was even there.  We get this view from the Subway Construction Photograph Collection, and some parts of…

George B. Post (1837-1913), an American architect trained in the Beaux-Arts tradition, is perhaps best known for his New York City landmark buildings, including the New York Stock Exchange, City College, and the Brooklyn Historical Society. After working as a draftsman for Richard Morris Hunt, Post opened his first architectural firm in New York City…