Untimely Deaths of Stage Performers
The Museum is digitizing 30,000 photographs of Broadway and off-Broadway productions dating from the 1860s up to the 2000s with a Museums for America grant funded by the Institute of … Continue reading
William Auerbach-Levy, Artist and Neighborhood Preservationist
William Auerbach-Levy was born in 1889 in Brest-Litovsk, then part of the Russian Empire. He immigrated with his parents to the United States around 1894 and grew up on the … Continue reading
Books and the City
New Yorkers love to read. Whether it’s just for a stolen moment at work… or enjoying (or hoping that whatever we’re reading will distract us from) our subway commute… or … Continue reading
The World’s Richest Boy – the Life of William B. Leeds
Let’s face it: we all have baby albums, those pictures documenting our progression from newborns into children that we pray our parents don’t show anyone. When I came across a … Continue reading
Happy 25th Birthday to the Internet
Last week the Internet turned a quarter of a century old. On March 12, 1989, a British computer scientist named Sir Tim Berners-Lee proposed what he called an “information management” … Continue reading
Highlights from the City Museum’s Graffiti Collection
When painter Martin Wong moved to New York City from San Francisco in 1978, he marveled at what many others considered a blight – graffiti scrawled on the surfaces of … Continue reading
Forgotten villages and neighborhoods of Manhattan
Hints about long vanished and forgotten aspects of New York surround us if we know where to look. The etymology of neighborhood names reveal long lost geographical quirks and the … Continue reading
The Croton and Catskill Systems: Meeting the Demand for Water in New York City
Our earlier blog post illustrated the attempts city and private officials made to supply Manhattan with water, culminating in the successful flow of water from Westchester County to the city … Continue reading
Prepping the girls for “As the Girls Go”
Since October the Theater department has been busy preparing 30,000 images of theatrical productions for digitization and cataloging. Images will eventually be made available on our Collections Portal thanks to … Continue reading
Morse Dry Dock and Repair Company
South Brooklyn isn’t the first place that comes to mind when you think of perq-filled employment in the early parts of the last century. If you happened to be working … Continue reading
John Stephenson Company Streetcars
New York would not be the city it is today without the comprehensive public transportation infrastructure developed during the 19th and 20th centuries. One of the major players of this … Continue reading
Notable City Residences
8,336,697 people lived in New York City as of July 2012 according to the United States Census Bureau, and a lucky few of them live in fascinating places. Here we … Continue reading
Street clocks – how New Yorkers kept time on the go.
Street clocks once dominated the sidewalks of New York City. First introduced in the 1860s, the clocks quickly became popular with businesses looking for novel ways to advertise and with … Continue reading
MCNY Blog: New York Stories 