On a recent tour of the Archival collections, a visitor asked to view the contents of a box from the collection of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. The collection is large, more than 720 cubic feet and includes records from his service as a member of Congress through his three terms as Mayor. This particular box had an intriguing label: “Greeting Cards.”
The Old Town Records Collection: A Frenchman’s Possessions
Records in the Municipal Archives sometimes offer a glimpse of what people owned in the past. An entry in the Town of Bushwick records gives us a rare glimpse into the belongings of a Brooklyn resident more than 350 years ago. The entry is titled “Inventory of the property which was found in the house of Jan Maljaart, a Frenchman, on April 29, 1664.”
Birds of America
The proposed sale generated controversy, much of which was spelled out in letters to The New York Times. The president of Lathrop C. Harper, an antiquarian book dealer, wrote that selling the folio was “poor stewardship.” Even more problematic was the plan to sell the prints separately, “The city has been extremely ill advised by Sotheby’s to embark on a course of destruction of historical and bibliographical evidence.”
New Utrecht: A Library Catalogue, circa 1796
New Netherlands. Long Island. Kings County. Brooklyn. New York City. New Utrecht can claim being part of all these jurisdictions during its long history. Established in 1652 as one of the original six towns in Kings County, New Utrecht is now better known as the Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst neighborhoods in the Borough of Brooklyn.
Recently, archivists processing the Old Town record collection discovered a document titled, “Catalogue of Lane District Library New Utrecht” that gives us unique insight into colonial-era libraries and schools.