In last week’s blog, conservators Virginia Buchan and Nora Ligorano described their work transcribing the original hand-written captions for the Brooklyn Grade Crossing Commission photograph collection into a searchable spreadsheet.  The transcription projects began when the Municipal Archives closed to the public on March 16, 2020, and all staff began to work remotely from home.  This week we will look at another transcription project, the Condemnation Proceeding Photograph Collection captions, one of the many lists and inventories previously inaccessible to patrons due to their analog format.  Archivist Sarah Capano and the team preparing to move a good portion of city government’s archival records to the new facility at Industry City—Abigail Wilson, Denise Roper, Enyonam Harlley, Francis Bross, Zachary Kautzman—tackled the Condemnation Proceeding caption list transcription project while working remotely. 

The Condemnation Proceeding collection totals approximately 20,000 images and date from 1935 to 1950.   They document buildings and structures demolished for construction of the Belt Parkway (originally called the Circumferential Parkway), North Beach Airport (now La Guardia), and the Interboro Parkway.

The photographers who created the pictures identified them using basic geographic location information.  After the Municipal Archives acquired the collection in 1988, the late Claire Rosenstein, long-time Archives photograph cataloger, transcribed the location information and added subject terms and notes.  During her quarter-century tenure, Ms. Rosenstein cataloged thousands of photographs.  Her specialty was identifying interesting scenes or details in what were otherwise pedestrian pictures of city infrastructure.

Sarah Capano and her team have been faithfully typing Rosenstein’s captions into the spreadsheet.  This information adds greatly to the basic place-identification data that came with the pictures.  For example, if a picture depicted a storefront, Rosenstein added the name and type of business, e.g. fruit market, bakery, butcher, grocery, delicatessen, or candy store, to the caption. Other commercial establishments such as coal factories, restaurants, service stations, undertakers, etc. were duly noted, as well as institutions like hospitals, schools, and churches.  Signs, movie posters, and other features of street life were indicated in the caption.  Most of the photographs depict building exteriors, but the collection does include interior scenes, particularly of commercial establishments, and in some cases, people at work.

The Condemnation Proceeding is the formal process by which a government takes possession of private property for a public purpose such as a highway, park, or housing development.  In New York City, the Law Department determines the value of the property to be taken and uses photography as a tool in the assessment procedure. The Law Department typically contracted with commercial photographers for this work.  Most of the pictures in the Condemnation series have the name “Somach” on the lower right corner.  Based on research in the digitized and searchable City Record newspaper, the “Somach Photographic Company” received more than 600 payments from City agencies, including the Law Department, between the mid-1930s and 1940s for their services.  Another commercial photographer, the Rutter Studio, is responsible for most of the pictures in the Brooklyn Borough President Photograph Collection (1910-1940) and the Savastano company took thousands of photographs for the Manhattan Borough President from the 1920s through the 1940s.   The good news for photo researchers is that the commercial studios typically used large-format cameras and the pictures are well-composed, properly exposed and carefully printed.  The Condemnation series provides many examples of their excellent work. 

The Condemnation photographs had been acquired by the Municipal Archives from St. Francis College in 1988.  Beginning in the 1940s, the Kings County Clerk had a long-standing agreement with the College to serve as a repository for Brooklyn-related historical materials originating in various government offices.  Condemnation proceedings are a court-action that take place in the Supreme Court of the relevant county.  It seems likely that the Kings County Clerk, who also serves as Clerk of the Supreme Court, received the pictures along with other documents related to the condemnation proceedings and transferred them to St. Francis College. 

Like much of 20th century New York City history, all roads eventually lead to Robert Moses, the City’s construction czar from the 1930s through the 1960s.  In this instance, literally.  Most of the condemnation photographs in the series depict buildings and structures demolished to make way for one of Moses’ many highway infrastructure projects.  The condemnation proceeding is a powerful tool, and not surprisingly, it is often contentious, controversial. and protracted.  Although property owners are compensated for their loss, people tend to not want to give up their homes and businesses.  Moses’s use of this process, without regard for the trauma he caused in neighborhoods throughout the city, is legendary, and has been the subject of historical debate for decades.  The value of the Condemnation photographs is that they provide a wealth of visual evidence to help historians better tell the story of how Moses transformed  the City. 

In the words of archivist Sarah Capano, the captions, “provide a great snapshot and insight into life in these long-vanished neighborhoods.”