One of those subject headings is New York City, spread across several folders, and organized by neighborhood, decade, and themes. You can sit and sift through this treasure trove to your heart's content. Totally unfussy, they let you take digital photos of as much as you want. It's a very hands-on, user-friendly experience.
With so many images from the lost city, you can really go crazy in this place.
Anything might suddenly appear. Here's just a few. Above, in the upper right, two East Village shots, plus a Nedick's, and more.
Below, a couple caught embracing, like dancers, on the corner of St. Mark's Place and Third Avenue. There's the vanished St. Mark's Pizza, and something called "Jack the Ribber."
East Villagers sucking on popsicles and playing guitar while--is that a corpse, or someone with dirty feet napping atop a car?
Commentary from the 1960s and 1980s on real-estate development east and west.
The original (?) Pink Pussycat.
The long-lost corner of 42nd Street and 8th Avenue, back when it was still the Deuce.
And then there's Edna Thayer, singing waitress at the Automat, 1972.
Known as "The Automat Gal," Edna got a brief write-up in Oregon's Eugene Register-Guard, in a 1973 story about aged vaudevillians. She sang for Automat customers every Monday morning. She'd been in show business for 64 years, starting at the age of 3. She said, "I've lived in the Times Square area for 37 years, but, oh, how it's changed."
If I could go back in time, I'd sit all morning in that Automat and listen to old Edna belt them out.
17 comments:
Wow...when you find that time machine, please take me along to the Automat.
When I was an art student, before images were "a google search away", I'd come here to find pictures of whatever odd subject I needed. The collection is amazing, and is worth digitizing, just so future generations can appreciate the uniqueness of it.
Closing a library for whatever reason is flat out wrong. And the NYPL's plans for the Main Branch are as sickening as the decision to tear down Penn Station's main building.
As an art student and illustrator I spent an enormous amount of time here. I used to leave messages for my fellow-illustrator boyfriend in particular folders, arranged in advance (look in praying mantis this afternoon). Who remembers the dapper white bearded Arthur Williams, who was always sitting at the inquiry desk, and whose classic line was "Can you be more specific?"
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=137488279594975&set=a.137488266261643.23509.124474627563007&type=3&theater
That 'Jack the Ribber' was only vaguely familiar so I searched and found this pretty wild tale by Jim 'The Hound' Marshall. Screamin' Jay Hawkins every Wednesday night (no cover!), and when Esquerita enters the picture...
http://thehoundblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/screamin-jay-hawkins.html
The Branch is closing/vanishing, but, The Picture Collection will become available at 42nd Street before the Main Branch renovation is completed. These photographs will continue to be available to everyone interested in accessing them.
What will happen to these treasures?
As a long-time employee of NYPL who is not a big fan of the proposed gutting of parts of the Carrère and Hastings masterpiece at 42nd and 5th I feel a bit awkward coming to their defense regarding their relocating the picture collection (one of the longstanding glories of the circulating, as opposed to "research", library). I am familiar with the physical layout of the building and I can assure you that there is plenty of room that is not currently being used by any library department, collection or division where the picture collection could comfortably reside. This is due to a combination of multiple waves of re-organization, elimination of divisions, downsizing, wholesale moving materials off-site and other factors. Though I am a person who is plenty skeptical about what I am told by any of my employers, past or present, but I have absolutely no sense that the library wants to eliminate the collection.
I have my differences with the library's stated aim of making the main building, traditionally the home for the bulk of the non-circulating research material, house more circulating material and also become a bigger tourist destination, I am sure that is the direction that they are committed to pursuing. The bigger issue is whether they feel the need to eliminate the staff that maintains the collection wherever it is located.
I would be happier if the Mid-Manhattan library, where the collection is now, were fixed up (having worked there for a few months more than a decade and a half ago,I can say it was falling apart even then), but the upper management has consistently denied that this is a valid alternative, though I remain unconvinced that they were ever seriously considering any options that were not in sync with the grand plan of renovating the main building.
A word of advice. The library does maintain circulation statistics, so the more you use it, the more likely it is to survive.
I too have put in many hours at that archive. What a great reminder. Thanks. Oh, vut how I hate these changes that disrupt the little pleasures of my elder years...the train station and the library, and all the rest,,,the glass towers locking the sun away, the constant construction, and the lack of easy access to travel. Well...so it goes.
Thanks, Anon, for the inside info on the NYPL. Glad to hear the Picture Collection will survive. I hope your, and your colleagues', jobs will, too.
I was another of the many art school kids who spent his off days here looking for reference images. Back in the day (only 15 years ago or so in my case) students in the city had to put a lot of footwork into research. Now, well, i guess the kids sit in one place and "google away."
I remember the best part about the picture collection was you could check out the images (a lot were just cut outs from old magazines), and you'd walk out with this enormous green barcoded velcro flap folder.
Don't forget folks, there is a group opposing mindless changes at the NYPL =
www.savenypl.org
Hi,
I'm searching for several photos of buildings in New York City. I live in California so going to this library is not gonna happen.Is there a chance you or someone you know could locate and scan them?
Were all these photos left in the library? That is a picture of my mother sucking the popsicle. My grandmother lived in the village and my mom was visiting from Virginia.
Heather, that's amazing. The photos are in the library, you can find it there, somewhere in the NYC folders, maybe the East Village one.
IMPORTANT: Note that more than 42,000 images from the Mid-Manhattan Picture Collection have already been digitized and are available, free of charge, to anyone at anytime anywhere in the world. Start here:
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/dgtitle_tree.cfm?level=1&title_id=569241
Digitization of out-of-copyright materials from the Picture Collection continues apace.
I saw Screamin' Jay Hawkins and Don Cherry at Jack the Ribber. Some great memories!
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