Riding the Rails!
The Brooklyn Collection holds several collections of little-known transit-related photographs and we've just installed a new photography exhibit in the cases in our reading room, called Riding the Rails. This display of post cards, ephemera and photographs highlights the construction of trolley and subway tracks and tunnels and the machines used to assist in building them. It also features passenger cars not seen in over 100 years as well as the people who rode them. Many of the photographs chosen are from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and can be found in our…
Collier L. Duncan
The blog has fallen silent for a few days. Last Friday afternoon our colleague and friend, Collier Duncan left the library wishing us all a good weekend. Collier was not supposed to work on Fridays, but even so, he could usually be found at his desk down among the Brooklyn Daily Eagle files on a Friday afternoon. "I was coming to the library anyway, so I thought I'd swing by," he would say. It had been a week like any other. Our research assistant for the last five years, Collier had been busy, with an ever increasing load of requests for searches of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle…
Brooklyn and the Atomic Age
I was born in the late 1970s and cannot remember a time when the nuclear threat kept me awake at night. I've been exposed to tornado drills, not air raid drills; calls for nuclear disarmament formed a background hum that was soft and loud by turns. While I was digging through some of our Brooklyn Daily Eagle photographs, I found several images that represent Brooklyn life during the Cold War. They cover a wide range of subjects from atomic air raid drills and civil defense preparedness to exhibits on nuclear physics, at the same time providing a…
Cemetery of the Evergreens. A talk by John Rousmaniere just in time for Halloween, Wed. October 28t
Join us in the Brooklyn Collection on Wednesday October 28th for an illustrated talk by the author of Green Oasis in Brooklyn, featured previously in this blog. There will be a short reception at 6:30 with wine and cheese and possibly some black and orange things if we get inspired -- followed by the talk at 7 p.m.
Open House New York Weekend and Brooklyn's Central Library
On Saturday and Sunday October 10 and 11 at 3 p.m., free guided tours through areas of the Grand Army Plaza library that are not usually accessible to the public will be offered as part of the Open House New York weekend. Reservations are required for these tours and participants will learn about the history of the Central Library and will visit the Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspaper "morgue". A pictorial history of the 36-year effort to build the Central Library, prepared by Olivia of the Brooklyn Collection, will be on show in the Grand Lobby. Did you know…
Crown Heights in History--and an Important Announcement
Wilhelmena Kelly gave an illustrated talk last night to a standing-room only crowd on the history of Crown Heights, in the Brooklyn Collection's Reserve Room. Ms Kelly is an avid genealogist as well as the author of two books on the central Brooklyn communities of Crown Heights and Bedford Stuyvesant. Formerly an assistant vice president of communications at Citibank, Wilhelmena is now Regent of the Manhattan Chapter of Daughters of the American Revolution and sits on the boards of the African American Genealogy Society, Manhattan Soldiers and Sailors Memorial…
On Bookplates
A question from one of our longtime patrons got me thinking about bookplates. Brooklyn Public Library has used many bookplates through the course of its 110-year history. Mostly they celebrate the donor of a book, or of the funds that provided the book, but in the early years of the library bookplates were used simply to announce ownership. As any collector of bookplates will know, wonderful things can happen in the space of that little scrap of paper, usually no more than 3" x 4" and often smaller. As it happens, although the mission of the Brooklyn Collection is to collect…
Back to School
A new school year has begun and with it, one of the annual rites of Fall - shopping for new school clothes. How have clothes changed since the Eagle first started running back-to-school advertisements at the turn of the last century? How have the ads changed? From mid-July to September today's parents are inundated with TV ads, circulars, flyers, and catalogues. Children in Brooklyn today have a wider variety of styles and stores to choose from. Local stores and national and international brands offer choices that would have…
Brooklyn (Non New York)
There are a lot of serious and solid information sources in the Brooklyn Collection, but over the years we have certainly allowed great amounts of trivia to accumulate in our files. The pursuit of the trivial, it has been argued, can actually lead to profound insights; and you just never know whether a matter that seems trivial today might turn out to be of immense importance tomorrow. At least, that is my excuse for digging into one of our so-called "Brooklyn Archive Files" or "BAFs" labeled Brooklyn (Non-New York). Under this cryptic heading we find articles on towns…
Help Police!
In our collection there are quite a few books from the 19th century. These books are not only valuable for the information contained within their pages, but also for their historical perspective. One such book is "Brooklyn's Guardians" by William E. S. Fales. This book published in 1887 traces the "origin, growth and development of the Brooklyn police force", from the early colonial period to it's enrollment in 1887 of 972 policemen. …
W.F. Mangels and his "Amusing" Career
Summer is quickly coming to an end, and soon our favorite boardwalks and amusement parks will be closed for the season. As we roll, spin, slide and gallop our way into fall, few of us will notice that many of our favorite rides were designed by a Brooklynite. In 1882, a 16 year-old German by the name of William F. Mangels emigrated to New York City. The young amusement enthusiast found himself at the right place at the right time. Coney Island was the epicenter for the amusement industry. The latest and newest rides were being manufactured…
Geomapping on Flickr
Historic photographs are one of the highlights of the Brooklyn Collection, and thanks to digitization, are the most easily accessible of our treasures. Thousands of unique Brooklyn photos can be searched and found on the BPL web site. Recently, we've embarked on a project that will make some of these images even more visible, through the photo sharing web site Flickr. Along with other cultural institutions such as the Library of Congress, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Queens and New York Public Library, we've created a Flickr page with a sample of some of our photographic holdings. Because…
Transcribing a Difficult Past
It saddens me that our manuscript collection doesn't get more use. To be fair, it is a hodge podge of documents that are challenging to read and cover various parts of 19th century history. But amidst contracts and lists of construction materials, there are some real gems. I had known for some time that we had three documents that addressed slavery in Brooklyn, but I had never taken the time to read them carefully. This week, I settled down to transcribe them in preparation for class visits. What I found were three heartbreaking, but…
Brooklyn-Long Island Cat Club
I was having a very grumpy day. Looking back, I remember that the one thing that can almost always cheer me up--my cat Oscar--didn't seem to do the job before I left for work. Even a day of going through photograph folders, which is a calming, productive, and fun activity, couldn't erase my glum mood. The Brooklyn Collection has been conducting a photo inventory for the past few weeks. We've found lots of photographs, some that we look at in puzzlement -- ("Why would someone take four photos of someone pointing?") --many of checks and awards…
Mystery Building by Raoul Froger Doudemont
We are cataloguing the Raoul Froger Doudemont Collection, and this photograph has us stumped. Froger Doudemont photographed in New York City and Washington D.C. around the turn of the 20th century--but where is this? There are no prizes for the solution to this conundrum, just our eternal gratitude and smiles from the gods of metadata. Please use the Comments box to dazzle us with your scholarship and knowledge of the world.
Pioneering Children's Services
While students enjoy the final days of summer, we're preparing for another year of class visits and research projects. We get so excited about our plans that we often forget our efforts are based on century-old standards that originated right here in Brooklyn. In the early 20th century, both Brooklyn Public Library and the Brooklyn Children's Museum were pioneers in children's services. By creating spaces that uniquely catered to children, they dramatically changed the way young people interacted with cultural institutions. In 1899, the Brooklyn…
Panamanian Festival
There was a great deal of drumming and trumpeting behind the library this lunchtime. I grabbed the division's big old digital camera and followed the music through the back door to its source in Mount Prospect Park, right behind the library. The park was filled with the food and sounds of the the Panamanian Festival. Not one but several marching bands, some in splendid white regalia, were parading around the circular path. (Evidently the marching bands are quite active, because I soon found video footage of a similar group.)…
Of Strawberries
Strawberry shortcake is one of my favorite desserts. So I thought what better way to celebrate the end of the strawbery season than to search for, and create one of the strawberry shortcake recipes from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. It seems that Brooklynites were such fans of all things strawberry that there were hundreds of articles about this fruit -- ranging from strawberry festivals to recipes for strawberry custard, strawberry sponge, iced strawberries and strawberries and claret. But I was searching for strawberry shortcake, and the …
Serendipity in the Eagle Morgue
If the serendipitous nature of alphabetical order has ever struck you as one of life's inexpensive pleasures, then the Eagle morgue is for you. Why should nudity and nugatory nestle so close to one another on the dictionary page? And there among the s's sedition and seduction rub shoulders, one misdemeanor inciting its neighbor to worse and worse behavior. A file drawer full of photographs is much like a dictionary page in producing strange bedfellows. Leslie mentioned in her last post that we have been undertaking an inventory of some of our photograph…