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…

A series of remarkable photographs from the library’s Geographic File (PR20) documents the construction of the Central Park Reservoir,  located between 86th and 96th streets.  Built between 1858 and 1862, the 106-acre reservoir is 40 feet deep and holds over a billion gallons of water. Once a critical part of the city’s fresh water system, it received water from the Croton…

Before New York State took over all New York City bus, trolley, and subway operations on June 15, 1953, the subway was controlled by private companies. The Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT) was the first to roll out an underground subway line in Manhattan on October 27, 1904, operating rails between City Hall and 145th Street. Frank…

This post is by Anne Boissonnault, Archives Intern August 2nd marks a particularly lofty day in New York’s history of aeronautics. On that date in 1819, Louis Charles Guillé ascended in a balloon full of hydrogen gas over Vauxhall Gardens in Manhattan (a pleasure garden and theater near present day Astor Place) and descended using a parachute….

This blog post was written by Marybeth Kavanagh, Reference Archivist for Prints, Photographs and Architectural Collections. “A supply of pure and wholesome water is an object so essential to the health and prosperity of a city, that it should form one of the leading features of the public improvements which characterize its growth”- F.B. Tower, civil…

  Today there is nothing remarkable about the idea of New York as a large, diverse, cosmopolitan city. But to mid-19th century New Yorkers,  the rapid growth of New York  from a small, walkable city to a bustling, sprawling metropolis must have been a bit disorienting.  In 1800, there were 60,515 residents of New York City, and more than half the…

This post was written by Julia Lipkins, Reference Archivist, Manuscripts Department. Charles Gilbert Hine (1859-1931), an amateur photographer, captured this noir scene of Madison Square Theatre on 24th Street between Sixth Avenue and Broadway in 1905. His collection of photographs at N-YHS includes platinum, cyanotype, and albumen prints of Manhattan at the turn of the 20th century….

This post was written by Luis Rodriguez, Collections Management Specialist. If young students are feeling frustrated by the demands of the new school year, perhaps they can be grateful that they weren’t around a century ago when they might have been sent off to the New York Parental School in Flushing, Queens. The boys pictured…

This post was written by Julia Lipkins, Reference Archivist, Manuscript Department. Archival collections from the Revolutionary War period are thick with stories of soldiers and generals, their battles won and lost. Although less evident, collections of this era also contain documentation of what President Obama recently described as the “nation’s original sin,”[i] i.e. the institution of slavery….