The Grammy Awards are returning to New York this weekend, which got us thinking about all the places here that are important to the history of music. From the days when jazz musicians dubbed New York “the Big Apple,” the City has been the place to make it big. A lot of the most famous music venues have been lost over the years to development and changing tastes, but many more always pop up, seemingly weekly in Brooklyn and Queens.
A Conversation between Barbara Hibbert, Reference Room Director and Ken Cobb, Assistant Commissioner, January 17, 2018
KRC: Barbara, will we see you on Saturday morning?
BH: I’ll be here on the 20th, for our first Saturday—after that, once in a while. I think you’ll see some of our other archivists at the desk on Saturdays going forward.
KRC: How long have you been doing this?
BH: Former Commissioner Idilio Gracia-Pena hired me in February 1982, to design forms. I was finishing up at the New York School of Printing [a vocational high school]. I think they called it a work-study program—I would go to school until 1 p.m. and then head down to the Tweed Courthouse. When we moved to 31 Chambers, I also helped out in the darkroom printing pictures. I was hired full-time in 1984. One day around then I went into the reference room to help Carol with the genealogy work. And that was it. I never left.
Farewell to Tweed
As the Municipal Archives begins preparations for moving 200,000 cubic feet of records from our Brooklyn warehouse to a new modern facility we started to think about past moves. Moving an archive is a mammoth undertaking, but surprisingly, the NYC Municipal Archives, one of the largest repositories of historical records in North America, has led an unexpectedly transient life. In 1952, the then-new Municipal Archives and Records Center occupied space in a warehouse called the Rhinelander Building, at 238 William Street. When that building was demolished in the late 1960s to make way for the Police Headquarters, the Archives relocated to 23 Park Row. In the summer of 1979, the Archives had to move again—this time to the “Tweed” Courthouse in City Hall Park, as a temporary facility until renovations at the Surrogate’s Court were completed. And so began our four-year sojourn in a beautiful but imperfect building.
Mapping the Waterfront
Most people have seen surveyors at work—marking boundaries, determining distances, angles and positions. It’s the kind of essential data necessary for all types of construction projects, and is an ongoing endeavor for all cities. The Municipal Archives holds a variety of records from government agencies responsible for surveying what now are the five boroughs, ranging from Brooklyn maps documenting 19th century road placement to aerial photographic maps from the 20th century. One notable collection of maps and notebooks depicts waterfront development.