“I have seen the future:” Norman Bel Geddes and the General Motors Futurama
Regular followers of this blog will recognize the button featured at the right from one of our earlier posts about the Museum’s New York World’s Fair collections. Visitors to the … Continue reading
Harry Harkness Flagler House Chandelier
Object conservation presents an opportunity to learn about aspects of an object’s history that cannot always be revealed by researching secondary sources. Conservation done for the re-installation of a chandelier … 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
Power, corruption, and Tammany Hall: sketches of lesser known New York City mayors, 1869-1913
Today the 109th mayor of New York City will be elected. In honor of this occasion, we delved into our portrait archive to find some of the most fascinating mayors … Continue reading
Romeo and Juliet, a love story in pictures
It has been called the greatest love story of all time. Even those who disagree can acknowledge that in the over 400 years since it was first performed, Romeo and … Continue reading
Diana, by Augustus Saint-Gaudens
The gilded statue of Diana, Goddess of the Hunt, adorned the tower of Madison Square Garden and held watch over New York City for over three decades. She is arguably … 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
It’s a Hard Knock Life: The City as Playground
The image of a group of kids shooting craps in the street has for decades been a quintessential scene of growing up in New York. The history of street games … Continue reading
Alfred E. Smith – the people’s politician?
This week, we have a guest post from one of the interns who worked with us over the summer, Karis Raeburn, who has since returned to Dayton, Ohio, where she … Continue reading
Thomas Nast takes down Tammany: A cartoonist’s crusade against a political boss
As the election cycle gets into full-swing, so do the pundits, journalists, and political cartoonists. While modern readers intrinsically link newspapers and political cartoons, the use of cartoons in the … Continue reading
What skating rink is that? Who lived in that house? Solving mysteries in the collection.
From time to time, the Collections Department receives inquiries from the public about the information associated with images we’ve cataloged online. The data in the catalog records is pulled from … Continue reading
The Central Park Casino
It’s 1929 in an Art Deco ballroom. Dancers glide around, dimly reflected in the black glass ceiling while outside on the terrace, the sound of champagne corks popping intersperses with … Continue reading
What lies beneath New York- the Minetta Brook
It is difficult to view this image of Manhattan from 1953 and imagine it as the idyllic island of Mannahatta that Henry Hudson first stepped onto in September 1609, but … Continue reading
MCNY Blog: New York Stories 