There was a time when Thomas Cole, the celebrated landscape painter and Hudson River School artist, was an unknown portraitist travelling by foot across the northeast, determined to make a living for himself with nothing but a dollar in his pocket. Cole’s eventual success was due in part to that incredible drive, his passionate commitment…

Modern library conservation was born in the aftermath of a catastrophic flood in Florence, Italy on November 4, 1966. Water from the Arno River devastated the collections of the National Central Library of Florence. An international team of bookbinders and restorers was assembled to save what they could; however in many cases the damage was irreversible. Many lessons were…

This post is by Ted O’Reilly, Curator & Head of the Manuscript Department Nearly four hundred years ago, in the winter of 1648, a man named Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert drowned in the frigid Hudson River. Bogaert had fallen through the ice while pursued by soldiers from Albany’s Fort Orange. He had arrived in the New…

This post written by project cataloger Geraldine Granahan. Few commuters probably give much thought to the tunnels under the Hudson River, even as they travel through them every day, but they should.  The history of the tunnels is a fascinating example of early Gilded Age engineering technology, which predates the construction of the New York…

With the opening of the next section of the High Line this week we are reminded of the incredible transformation of the High Line from an abandoned relic of 20th Century transportation history to a restorative piece of the urban landscape. There are many sidebars to the story, but perhaps one of the more ironic…