Complete Archive

Mayor Abraham D. Beame (1974-1977), 104th Mayor of the City of New York. This collection consists of a selection of materials produced by his mayoral administration.

Ardolph L. Kline served as Acting Mayor for the City of New York after the unexpected death of Mayor William J. Gaynor in September 1913.

Mayor David N. Dinkins served as mayor from 1990 through 1993. This collection consists of a selection of materials produced by his mayoral administration.

The series consists of photographs of day-to-day activities and appointments the mayor undertook. A number of photographers were assigned to Mayor Koch and took photos of his during his time as Mayor of New York City.

Fiorello H. La Guardia was the 99th Mayor of New York City for three terms from 1934 to 1945.

George B. McClellan, Jr. was the 93rd Mayor of New York City, serving from 1904-1909. This collection contains the material generated by the daily workings of the Office of the Mayor during his administration.

Mayor John V. Lindsay was the 103rd mayor of New York City from 1966-1973.

Robert Anderson Van Wyck (1849-1918) was the first Mayor to take office after the consolidation of the City of New York in 1898.

The photograph collection covers the years 1994 – 2001.

Seth Low served as the Mayor of New York from 1902-1903. This collection consists of a selection of materials produced by his mayoral administration.

William Jay Gaynor served as the 94th Mayor of the City of New York from 1910 to 1913. This collection contains the material generated by the daily workings of the Office of the Mayor during his mayoral administration.

William O’Dwyer was the 100th Mayor of New York City from 1946-1950. This collection consists of a selection of materials produced by his mayoral administration.

The collection contains the municipal records of the government of New Amsterdam during the seventeenth century, as well as manuscript translations made of the documents made during the nineteenth century. The materials include ordinances, court minutes, contracts, minutes of the orphan court, administrative minutes, records of the notary public, and manuscript translations.

This series was discovered in the Fire Department’s Forensic Unit office in the mid-1980s. It consists of 763 black and white photographs, the bulk in the form of negatives on glass and film supports as well as prints and glass lantern slides. Most of the images are of Fire Department activities and personnel.

This collection consists of bound volumes containing tally sheets of jury census returns for the city and county of New York. The tallies were taken to determine the eligibility of jurors and list persons and property by ward number for the years 1816, 1819, and 1821. Of particular demographic interest in these three censuses is the inclusion of women with identification by name, residence, age, and occupation or social status, during a time period when women were ineligible to serve as jurors.

The Aviation Unit of the NYPD is an advanced air-and-sea rescue and law enforcement unit that provides tactical support to police officers on the ground, fast rope deployments, fire suppression, maritime security operations, high-rise and roof-top insertions, and hoist operations, as well as serving as an air ambulance. The images include equipment, events, and staff of the Aviation Unit.

Criminal identification cards, complete with photos, fingerprints, age, height, weight, and Bertillon Measurements

Throughout the 20th century, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) conducted overt and covert surveillance on groups and individuals identified as potential security threats to the City. This collection comprises black and white 16mm silent surveillance films. They were shot by the NYPD Photo Unit for Manhattan (PUM) for the Bureau of Special Services and Investigations (BOSSI). The subjects include a broad range of political activist groups and events from 1960 to 1980. The films are generally 100 feet in length and up to three minutes in duration. Guide to the New York Police Department surveillance films, 1960-1980.

The Official Mayoral Photograph collection serves as an almost daily photographic record of the Impelliteri administration. The official staff photographer tradition continued through Robert F. Wagner’s three terms as mayor, until December 30, 1965, his last day in office.

Before the creation of Greater New York on January 1, 1898, the counties bordering New York County —Kings, Queens, Richmond, and Westchester Counties—were comprised of municipalities (villages, towns, cities), some of which date back to the early days of Dutch and English colonization of Lenapehoking (Lënapehòkink in Unami), the ancestral homeland of the Lenape. This collection includes records created and/or maintained by these municipalities before they were dissolved, annexed, or consolidated into what is now modern-day New York City. This vast collection, commonly known as the "Old Town records," contains administrative records, court records, financial records, land records, voting records, tax records, military records, records documenting enslaved people, and municipal infrastructure records, among other record types, circa 1630-1943.

The Office of the Borough President was created in 1898 to compensate the formerly independent communities in the four counties of New York, Kings, Queens and Richmond for the loss of governmental power to the consolidated Greater City of New York. They operated as “local mayors,” with substantial control over construction and maintenance of streets, sidewalks, highways, sewers and public buildings. The Queens series includes photographs of Rockaway and other beaches as well as an unusual collection of lantern slides depicting a Civil War Veterans’ reunion, parades, Spanish-American War troops, and sample markings to identify World War II-era aircraft.