Brooklyn on film at the Library of Congress

A couple of months ago, a colleague at the Brooklyn Museum Library tweeted that she had found a film reel in their collection with nitrate film. Since nitrate film is highly flammable and needs to be stored in special conditions in order to prevent it from catching fire, the library needed to identify the film quickly in order to decide whether or not to keep such a dangerous item. All they knew was the film's title, "Brooklyn Progress," the date range, 1933-1937, and that the content included a kind of tour through prominent Brooklyn sites.

Photo courtesy J.E. Molly Seegers

I offered to use Brooklyn Collection resources to try and identify the film, and lo and behold, I was able to find it in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle by using Brooklyn Newsstand:

Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 7, 1937

The film was created for Borough President Raymond V. Ingersoll's re-election campaign in 1937. The film's voiceover, according to the Eagle article, has this to say by way of introduction:

"This talking picture...takes the form of an inspection tour of the achievements of the present administration of Borough President Ingersoll and Mayor LaGuardia. Our two actors, Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Citizen represent you in this film...Through their eyes you will see the accomplishments of the Fusion-Ingersoll administration in Brooklyn."

A few days later, the Eagle ran an op-ed called "Pictorializing a Campaign" by John A. Heffernan, which describes the film as "a new campaign method" and muses on the "political adaptation of the products of modern science to its purposes."

Photo courtesy J.E. Molly Seegers

Having identified the film, the Brooklyn Museum Library searched other collections to see if any other institutions held a copy, and found that only one seems to exist, at the Museum of Modern Art. So they decided to donate their copy to the Library of Congress's Packard Campus for Audiovisual Conservation. Read more on their tumblr here. Excitingly, the  experts at the Library of Congress identified the reel as the original camera negative. Due to its historical value, they plan to expedite the film's digitization, so hopefully it will be available for all of us to watch sometime soon.

Those of you who know a bit about BPL's history might recall that Ingersoll was instrumental in helping our Central Library finally get finished, but Ingersoll's "accomplishments" memorialized in the film would not yet have included a completed Central Library, as it was not finished until 1941. However, since Brooklyn Public Library is listed as one of the sites seen in the film, it's possible they visited the Central Library construction site, which could be very interesting to see. Or perhaps they visited some other library branches. Once the film is digitized, we'll be able to find out.

Borough President Raymond V. Ingersoll, center, signing construction contracts for Central Library on December 29, 1937. Also pictured are Philip P. Farley, consulting engineer to the borough president; Edwin L. Garnin, president of BPL's board of trustees; Francis Keally, architect, and Lauson H. Stone, BPL board of trustees member. Photo by Roy Pinney.