SHPA Series: Space for Place

Worth a Thousand Words

New Yorkers Turn to the City's Archives to Guide Restorations

By Jodi Liss | Online Only | Jan. 11, 2010

WPA photo of 122 Delancey Street, next to Manhattan's Essex Street Market

Credit: New York City Municipal Archives New Yorkers have always known there is someone who cares about their homes at least as much as they do.

Yes, the tax man.

Which is why, in the late 1930s, city officials used Works Progress Administration funds to hire dozens of unemployed workers to photograph every single building in the city for the Department of Finance. By 1941, those photographers had taken more than 700,000 pictures.

Today the tax photographs, mainly housed in the city's Municipal Archives in Lower Manhattan, are a godsend to homeowners seeking to restore dilapidated or damaged properties.

One such homeowner was DK Holland, who bought property in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, in 1986, partly because it included a small residence and a store next door. Though Holland recognized that the tiny structure (once a tack house for livery stables, but a private residence since 1855) was unattractive and decrepit, she decided to live there in 1990. Ten years later she began to restore it. Because Fort Greene is a historic district, she had to find a tax photo to get the city's permission and guidelines for a renovation.

"The day I found my tax photo was one of the best days in my life," Holland says.

DK Holland's house

Although the photograph of Holland's house focused on the store around the corner she located her neighbor's tax photograph, too. In it, she saw her own house, a modest single-family house with period windows, framed by a wooden porch and a fence with a barn door. With the advice of neighbors and the New York City Landmarks Commission, she was able to restore the porch, fence and windows.

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Joseph Delgado used the city's tax photographs to guide the restoration of his Brooklyn home.

Credit: Steph Mantis By the early 1980s, the city's tax photos themselves were in need of preservation and repair. Originally shot on highly degradable (and toxic) 35-millimeter black-and-white nitrate film stock, they were disintegrating, even liquefying. Then-director Kenneth Cobb sought and received about $500,000 in grants from five groups, including the Andy Warhol Foundation, to preserve them. The photos were sent (as "Hazardous Material") to a Colorado company specializing in movie restoration, transferred to microfilm, and returned. Today, the one-inch film canisters are stored in a large freezer in the basement of the Department of Records, with microfilm copies available for researchers.

In the foreground of each photograph stands a black sign that denotes the block, lot number, and borough of the subject. Reel after reel, it's an extraordinary legacy, a literal snapshot of the Depression-era city, with its tenements, barber shops, dance halls, delicatessens, billboards, dime stores, faceless office buildings, and factories. Much of the city looks rougher, more working-class, less self-conscious and less image-driven than it has become. Bedding hangs out of windows on sweltering summer evenings, clotheslines connect apartment buildings, and children play on stoops. A few magnificent cars of the 1930s stand parked by curbs. A horse-drawn cart makes a delivery. Collapsing slums jostle more middle-class housing.

Yet there are no records of the names of the photographers. Occasionally, a worker stands in a photograph, holding a sign that identifies the location of the building. In the archives, there is only a single photograph that archivists suspect is a record of the group.

In the mid-1980s, the city decided to update its tax photographs, so once again the Department of Finance sent photographers to document the city—this time in color. In this new round, there were more than 800,000 buildings in the ever-expanding city.

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Joseph Delgado's Brooklyn house before restoration, which was guided by a city tax photograph taken in 1939.

Credit: Joseph Delgado Like Holland, the 1930s photographs proved invaluable to Joe Delgado, a former Wall Street trader turned licensed contractor who bought a four-story building in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, in 2007.

His building was a disaster. A previous owner had covered the building's facade with white Permastone, added pink awnings, installed an after-hours club and two bars in the basement, and rented the top floor to drug addicts. "Nothing original was left," Delgado says. "The lady at the Landmarks Commission looked at the building and told me it had been a carriage house."

Hoping to restore his new property, Delgado set out to learn about its history. After weeks of searching, he finally located a tax photograph that showed a little girl on the steps of a brick double townhouse built in the 1870s. Now, at least, he had the guidance he needed. Prompted by the photograph, Delgado removed a massive addition from the back (complete with the club's tiny stage and shag carpeting). He restored the facade and the original window lintels and sills, which had been hidden behind the Permastone. He also rebuilt the cornice and back wall. Last fall, he installed exterior doors, custom-built from antique wood, to replicate the doors in his tax photograph.

Delgado's neighbors have stopped to thank him for the improvements. His efforts paid off. "Finding the tax photograph made the restoration easier," he says, "but not less expensive."

Google This

New York City historians, researchers, preservationists, paralegals, and bureaucrats probably make the most use of the tax photographs, but film companies access them, too. People also give them as gifts, to celebrate birthdays or anniversaries—or use them to research their family history. According to Michael Lorenzini, the curator of photography for the Municipal Archives, one man found the photo of his ancestral home and, in it, his grandfather, as a boy, leans out a window. In another, the researcher's father is mowing the lawn.

Now the city is considering a deal with Google to digitize the collection, hoping to sell more of the tax photographs. In the meantime, they can be viewed on microfilm during business hours at the Department of Records and Information Services at 31 Chambers Street in Manhattan. Prints can be purchased for $35-60 each, and ordered online, by mail or in-person. For an additional $5, the Department will research the 1940s block and lot number.

Visit http://www.nyc.gov/html/records/html/taxphotos/home.shtml for more information.

Jodi Liss is a freelance writer based in New York City.