Urban Archive's "My Archive"

From June 1 to June 30, New York's Urban Archive is collecting photos shot in New York City for their "My Archive" project, which documents scenes from all around the city.

As the website explains:

New York, dig into your family archives and join us in telling the story of our city! For the entire month of June, we are once again collecting personal histories and photographs of New Yorkers captured on city streets across the five boroughs. 

Submissions will be accepted between June 1 and June 28. All photographs that meet the selection criteria listed below will be added to our permanent, citywide archival collection. 

With the help of our esteemed panel of Quintessential New Yorkers, we will also pick 25 stories from the submission pool to highlight in Urban Archive and feature on LinkNYC kiosks in proximity to where the photographs were originally taken. Selected submissions will be announced on July 12, 2019.

That panel of "quintessential" New Yorkers includes actor Debi Mazar, Gothamist publisher Jake Dobkin, artists James and Karla Murray, artist/entrepreneur Dave Ortiz, and.... us! So if you have a photo taken in New York City before 2005 and have a story to tell, visit

https://www.urbanarchive.nyc/myarchive

to read the official rules and submit! We're looking forward to seeing your images.

James K. Polk and Early Presidential Portraits

On February 14, 1849 -- 170 years ago today -- President James K. Polk sat down in the photography studio of Mathew Brady in New York City to have his portrait taken. This photo is the earliest surviving photograph of a president taken while he was in office. Though there's a rumor that a daguerreotype of William Henry Harrison was shot during his one month in office in 1841, that photo has never been found.

Brady's studio at the time was at the corner of Broadway and Fulton streets in the Financial District and is now gone, as is Brady's famous uptown studio, where he took the photo of Abraham Lincoln (below). The only Brady studio building still standing is in Tribeca at 359 Broadway.

While Polk may have been the first president to be photographed while in office, he was not the first to sit for his portrait. That honor goes to John Quincy Adams, a daguerreotype of whom was shot in March 1843. At the time, Adams was serving in Congress; he was actually a representative from Massachusetts for nearly seventeen years after he left the presidency, overlapping briefly with Lincoln during that future president's one term in Congress.

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Read more about Mathew Brady and Abraham Lincoln in New York
in
Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers

 

and don't forget our first book

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City
>> NOW OUT AS AN AUDIOBOOK! <<

Postcard Thursday: Snow Day

In honor of the snowstorm hitting New York City today, here are some photos from the New York Public Library's digital collection of snowstorms past. The photo above shows a stretch of Fifth Avenue ca. 1905 (the year the photo was printed) after a storm; unfortunately, there aren't enough revealing details to determine exactly where on the avenue this is.

This second card, from the same storm, shows Broadway between 29th and 30th Streets. The photographer was clearly drawn to the irony of the "Sarnoff Straw Hats" sign peeking out of a snow drift, but if you look just to the right of that you'll see the sign for Shanley's, which was a popular restaurant in that era. In operation from the 1890s to 1925, Shanley's was known as a "lobster palace," and a quick perusal of the menu makes it easy to see why: lobster appears in just about every possible preparation, along with oysters, other shellfish, and various unidentifiable dishes such as "cold corn starch."

This final photo may be from the same storm, but doesn't have an easily readable date. These children are sledding -- or "coasting" in the language of the day -- on a hill in Central Park.

Enjoy the snow and be careful out there!

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Read more about NYC history in

 

Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City