During the seven decades of municipal ownership, both celebrated and obscure poets found their way to WNYC’s microphone. Some programs introduced listeners to canonical voices such as Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, and W.H. Auden. Others opened the airwaves to aspiring writers who might otherwise never have been heard beyond their own neighborhoods. Still others explored the relationship between poetry and radio itself, asking whether the medium might reshape how verse was written, performed, and experienced.

The result was an extraordinary range of programming: educational broadcasts from the station’s early Air College lectures; dedicated poetry series and readings; experimental verse drama; tributes to major poets; and discussions linking poetry to theater, politics, therapy, and everyday life. Together these broadcasts reveal how a municipal station—often overlooked in the larger history of American radio—played a meaningful role in sustaining the oral tradition of poetry.

The Air College Era & City Schools

In April 1930, Harriet Monroe—the formidable founder and editor of Poetry magazine—voiced a complaint about the still-new medium of radio. After a decade of broadcasting in the United States, she wrote, the American airwaves seemed curiously silent when it came to serious literary voices. In England, listeners regularly heard writers such as George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and John Masefield speaking over the BBC. In the United States, Monroe observed, comparable literary figures were largely absent.

Her criticism, published in Poetry, drew an immediate response from New York. Roland V. Weber, announcer and director of the Lecture Bureau at the city’s municipal station WNYC, wrote to challenge Monroe’s claim. Serious poetry, he insisted, had already found its way to radio audiences. Over the previous two and a half years he had introduced listeners—on several New York stations, including WNYC—to a substantial body of both classic and modern verse. Station managers, Weber argued, were more receptive than Monroe suggested, and audiences more responsive.

The exchange highlighted an important question about radio history: could poetry truly find an audience on American radio, where commercial interests dominated broadcasting, unlike the United Kingdom where public broadcasting took the lead? For many observers the answer seemed doubtful. Radio, they believed, was better suited to music, news, or popular entertainment than to the concentrated language of verse.

As a non-commercial municipal station, however, WNYC was uniquely positioned to elevate cultural standards without the constraints of sponsorship. Through its Air College programming—developed with the City University of New York and other institutions beginning in 1927—the station offered lectures and courses that regularly featured poetry. These broadcasts included a wide range of works from Emily Dickinson and Edwin Arlington Robinson to Carl Sandburg and Hart Crane. Newspaper listings are unclear about whether the future U.S. Poet Laureate Joseph Auslander’s May 27, 1927, studio appearance was part of the Air College series, though it is likely.

Another Air College presenter was Dr. Mary McGovern, whose regular program series—Masters of Poetry, Poetry as a Mental Investment, and Applied Psychology of Poetry—were praised in the press for their clarity and delivery.

WNYC’s Air College reflected a broader national movement beginning in the 1920s that viewed radio as a potential “university of the air.” Universities and college stations experimented with a broad range of educational lectures. Within this context, poetry became one of the many subjects introduced to listeners through the new medium. These educational institutions also exchanged ideas through the Association of College and University Broadcasting Stations, which by the 1930s became the National Association of Educational Broadcasters or NAEB. WNYC became an active member in 1938.

While few recordings from this era survive, one related Air College clip remains: Dr. Alan Marshall on teaching poetry to children in 1931.

In June 1934, Anita Browne launched Poetry with Anita Browne, a weekly program that ran for three years. Browne—founder of Poetry Week and director of the National Poetry Center at Rockefeller Center—helped solidify poetry’s presence on the municipal airwaves

Running concurrently with Browne’s program was Edward Leahy’s The Poet’s Friend, which aired into 1937. Little documentation survives beyond radio listings, leaving its format largely unknown. That year WNYC broadcast programs created by and for New York City public schools. One seven-week series—originating from a studio at Brooklyn Technical High School—featured adaptations of plays, poetry readings, and songs performed by students.

Listener Poetry and Popular Participation

1937 also saw announcer George Ward launching Melody and Rhyme, a program that would run for nearly a decade. The Sunday morning show—renamed The Star Gazer—combined poetry with recorded musical accompaniment. According to Milton Allen Kaplan’s 1949 study Radio and Poetry, Ward carefully structured the forty-five-minute program to alternate between poems and music, selecting works that were clear, accessible, and often sentimental. Edgar A. Guest— “the people’s poet”—was a frequent favorite, though Ward also included the work of Shakespeare, Keats, and Frost.

Ward expanded the program by actively soliciting poems from listeners through the recurring Are You a Poet? segment. Hundreds of submissions were broadcast each year, turning WNYC into an early platform for amateur literary culture. In 1946, Ward edited a volume drawn from these listener contributions.

The only surviving broadcast is the program’s last, a memorial to George Ward hosted by station director Seymour Siegel in 1947 with radio pioneer Ted Malone, heard nationally over NBC, reading some of Ward’s poetry.

Another 1937 program encouraging listener poetry submissions was, Whisperings and Musings. A press release described the thirty-minute Sunday morning slot as “especially conceived for the entertainment of shut-ins,” with poetry, music and “a word of cheer.” Surviving only is a fan mail folder of cards and letters including this one from Samuel Woodworth Bradley, a descendant of the poet Samuel Woodworth.

When Reader’s Almanac launched in 1938 (it continued through the mid-1980s) the program focused on all genres of literature. Poetry, however, was never neglected on the Peabody award-winning program. Over the decades many notable poets appeared, including W.H. Auden; Marianne Moore; Samuel Menashe; John Ashbery; William Packard; Robert Frost, May Sarton; Archibald MacLeish and others. Here listeners can hear the distinctive voice of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, whose dramatic reading style helped redefine how poetry came across on radio.

Experimental Radio Verse

In the spring of 1939, poet and Emily Dickinson biographer Genevieve Taggard hosted a series of alternate Sunday broadcasts devoted to reading and discussing modern poetry. Taggard viewed radio not merely as a venue for poetry but as a medium capable of reshaping the art itself.

In surviving scripts she suggested that poetry might eventually be written specifically for radio, imagining a time when poems would be heard in daily life rather than encountered primarily in books or classrooms. Radio, she argued, could return poetry to its older oral tradition.

Taggard described WNYC as a force that “holds the great city of New York together by a million vibrating lines,” adding that poets were entering radio studios to learn how to write for “the ears of millions.” In her view the medium offered a way to escape “the prison of the printed page” and revive the traditions of ballads and troubadours.

At the same time she acknowledged that poetry had not yet fully adapted to broadcasting. “Poetry has not yet tuned itself” to radio, she admitted. Some of her programs experimented with forms designed for the medium, including what she called a “mass-chant.” At a time when most poets still wrote primarily for print, Taggard’s broadcasts were strikingly forward-looking.

Wartime and Postwar Broadcasting

Poetic drama also found a home on radio in the mid-1930s. Archibald MacLeish’s The Fall of the City (1937) and Alfred Kreymborg’s The Planets (1938) helped establish the genre. WNYC contributed to the pioneering effort by airing the original poetic radio plays of Sidney Alexander: The Hawk and the Flesh (1939), about the struggle against fascism in Spain, and Where Jonathan Came (1940), based on the Salem witchcraft trials.

However, the undisputed master of the radio play in verse was Norman Corwin. After early success at WQXR, Corwin moved to CBS, where his poetic radio dramas became national sensations. WNYC responded in 1942 by producing The Corwin Cycle, a revival of his works originally broadcast on CBS’s 26 By Corwin. Directed by Corwin collaborator Joel O’Brien with assistance from WNYC drama director Mitchell Grayson, the series marked the first time a station devoted a sustained revival to a single radio writer. The production received honorable mention from Ohio State’s Institute for Education by Radio. Of the surviving broadcasts, Radio Primer is perhaps the most poetry rich.

Sadly, Archibald MacLeish would lament to Reader’s Almanac host Warren Bower seventeen years after Fall of the City, that American radio had largely abandoned verse drama. His most recent script, Trojan Horse, was totally ignored in the states while being produced and rerun by the BBC. The former Librarian of Congress seemed almost bitter saying, “radio with its free imagination, needing little production, mostly words, was God’s gift to the poets.”

During World War II the Brooklyn Public Library had a biweekly program on WNYC. On December 18, 1944, borough-born Pulitzer Prize-winning poet William Rose Benét appeared in Studio C to read from several of his works, including The Dust Which Is God, The Golden Fleece, and Day of Deliverance: A Book of Wartime Poems.

After World War II, poetry remained a steady presence on WNYC. In October 1945 playwright Tennessee Williams joined theater historian and critic George Freedley to discuss the role of poetry in modern theater. Another WNYC platform for literary figures was The New York Herald Tribune Book and Author Luncheon series where listeners largely heard from fiction and non-fiction writers with an occasional poet like Ogden Nash. Here, he demonstrates a wit and conversational tone that made his verse a favorite with audiences.

The Queens College Forum began in 1947 with an attempt to make some sense of poetry in post-war America. Three English professors debated the merits of experimentation and departures from tradition in a scripted roundtable discussion.

Beginning in July 1948, poet, broadcaster, editor, and businessman A.M. Sullivan hosted The Poet Speaks. Sullivan had earlier been heard on The New Poetry Hour on WOR and the Mutual Network from 1932 to 1940. The WNYC program followed a similar format, combining poetry readings with discussion. In one surviving broadcast from December 17, 1948, Sullivan explored what he considered the perfect “mood poem,” Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach, before introducing poet and critic Shaemas O’Sheel.

Meanwhile another WNYC series, Remembered Words, hosted by David Allen from 1949 to 1952, offered thoughtful readings of major poets. In October 1950, following the death of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Allen devoted a broadcast to her work, reading Renascence, Dirge Without Music, and other poems with musical accompaniment. Variety praised the program as “a fine tribute,” noting Allen’s restrained style and careful attention to the meaning of each line.

By the end of the 1940s, poetry had become a familiar presence on WNYC. What began in the late 1920s as academic lectures and holiday recitations had expanded into a diverse range of broadcasts: readings by major poets, panel discussions, listener-submitted verse, and even experiments in poetic drama.

The station’s noncommercial mission allowed it to cultivate voices that might otherwise have been absent from American radio. Programs such as The Star Gazer, Reader’s Almanac, and Remembered Words brought poetry directly into listeners’ homes, while Genevieve Taggard and the celebration of Norman Corwin’s work explored the creative possibilities radio offered.

By mid-century, WNYC had already demonstrated that poetry could thrive on the airwaves. Yet the decades ahead would introduce new literary movements, new technologies, and new audiences that would continue to reshape how poetry was presented on the station.

Next week the story of poetry on New York City’s municipal station begins in the 1950s, as postwar literary culture—and radio itself—entered a period of expansion and change with the growth of FM.

She was born in 1902 in Chicago, but grew up in Lawrence, Kansas. Her studies at Yale, where she earned both a Ph.D. and M.D., brought her to the northeast. She spent the next several decades of her career in New York City.

Her records in the Health Commissioners Papers (REC0050) at the Municipal Archives cover a rich array of issues facing the city from polio vaccination and revision of the city’s sanitary code to health issues abroad and contraception at home. She also oversaw the removal of the race or color field from birth certificates, and the fluoridation of city drinking water, both controversial decisions at the time. There is unique focus on child health and education as well, given Baumgartner’s history at the department.

In 1954, Baumgartner successfully lobbied for New York City to be part of nationwide testing of a new polio vaccine. After the Salk vaccine passed the testing phase, the Department of Health administered it to millions of New York City residents, effectively eliminating the public health threat the disease had posed for decades. The Department turned the campaign into a systematic vaccination program for school-age children, even soliciting Elvis Presley to help in the campaign. These events are well chronicled in sub-subgroup 8 of the collection.

Also documented in these records are Baumgartner’s travels to India, the USSR and a number of other countries in 1958 to meet with health officials and scientists. Her nearly 10-week long trip during the height of the Cold War included consulting on child and maternal health.

Baumgartner’s tenure also stood out in her employment of television and radio in communicating public health issues. She was the first health commissioner to appear on television. She appeared on WNYC radio as well as local network affiliates and national television.  

Baumgartner left the Department of Health in 1962 to become Assistant Administrator of the Agency for International Development, a new agency created by President John F. Kennedy. In 1967 she accepted a teaching position at Harvard Medical School, where she worked until retiring in 1972.

Taking a dive into the rich collections of the Municipal Archives and Municipal Library revealed a long history of failed development at this location. This week, For the Record peels back the layers of history that have made this such a problematic site.

In the early 1600s, Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam called Maiden Lane Maagde Paetje, a meandering path along a stream in Smit’s Vly. In the Dutch language, a Vly, or Vlaie, refers to a low-lying often marshy area next a stream. Later, English colonial settlers Anglicized the name to Smith’s Fly. Maagde Paetje or Maiden Lane (its meaning the same in Dutch as in English) may have come from the Dutch girls who washed their family’s clothes in the stream. In the Dutch colonial days Maagde Paetje would have ended at what we now call Pearl Street, which was then the river’s edge. Cornelius Clopper the Blacksmith had his forge there, the smith of Smith’s Fly. By the late 1600s English colonists had used landfill to extend the shoreline to Dock Street, now known as Water Street. Around this time the Common Council approved the construction of the Fly Market on Maiden Lane from Pearl Street (then called Queen Street) to Dock (Water) Street.

The 1754 Maerschalck Plan shows a further extension in the Maiden Lane area to Burnets Key, a boat slip and dock. Burnets Key would become Front Street, built out with fill on either side to become the new eastern edge of downtown.

By 1810, the City had expanded even further to South Street, which became the main seaport of 19th Century New York. In 1822, the first Fulton Market was constructed further north, and the Fly Market was demolished. A few years later, the Great Fire of 1835 destroyed several blocks below Wall Street, but spared Maiden Lane.

The first buildings at Pearl Street and Maiden Lane may have been wooden. Although there was legislation requiring brick construction as early as 1766, until the Great Fire of 1835 buildings built on landfill were exempt because it was unknown if the new land could support them. But by the mid-1800s the area would have been four- or five-story brick buildings used as shops, counting houses, warehouses and sailor’s lodgings.

In 1916, five brick buildings were torn down at the corner of Maiden Lane and South Street to make way for a six-story concrete warehouse designed by architects Jonathan B. Snook & Sons. According to the Certificate of Occupancy from 1918, the first floor of 161 Maiden Lane was occupied as a “store,” the second as a “factory, printing,” the third for “storage,” fourth floor, “office and storage,” and the sixth floor, “sales.” A solid industrial loft building, typical of the era, as it appears in the Tax Photograph from 1939.

By the 1930s the East River waterfront was on a downward trajectory although Piers 14 and 15 at the end of Maiden Lane were still in use at least until the 1960s. The piers handled small cargo ships, and the Fulton Fish Market still received fishing trawlers, but the larger ships coming into New York needed a deep-water port and favored the westside piers on the Hudson. A trend that began in the latter half of the 1800s. New ports in New Jersey and containerization pushed the area into further decline in the 20th Century.

In the 1950s, new glass skyscrapers started to replace the old sailmaker lofts and push out the artists who had taken them over. Urban planners floated various schemes to revitalize the area. In 1960, the Downtown Lower Manhattan Association proposed a World Trade Center for the area. It would have stretched from Water Street to South Street from Fulton to Old Slip. If built, 161 Maiden Lane would have been razed. Eventually the World Trade Center site was moved to the west side, destroying the neighborhoods known as Little Syria and Radio Row.

In 1965 and 1966, the New York City Planning Commission developed new plans to expand Lower Manhattan once again in two “opportunity areas.” The West Side opportunity area became the World Trade Center and Battery Park City. The East Side development would have largely eliminated South Street with massive residential and commercial complexes stretching from the Battery Maritime Building up to the Brooklyn Bridge, from Water Street to a new bulkhead further into the East River. Park land would cover the shoreline encompassing the Manhattan tower of the Brooklyn Bridge. In January 1967, Mayor John V. Lindsay created the Office of Lower Manhattan Development “to coordinate and integrate projects in the Lower Manhattan area, including the World Trade Center and the Civic Center, into the general framework of the Lower Manhattan plan.”

Preservationists started to push back against the massive developments, and in 1967 the founders of the South Street Seaport Museum convinced the City to spare many of the remaining 19th-Century buildings from the wrecking ball. In 1968, the lightship Ambrose was donated to the Museum, its first historic ship. In 1970, the tall ship Wavertree arrived to begin its long restoration.

In 1976, the Office of Lower Manhattan Development was consolidated along with three other offices to form the Mayor's Office of Development. In 1977 the Landmarks Preservation Commission formally designated the South Street Seaport Historic District, preserving a stretch of buildings along South Street below the Brooklyn Bridge. It stopped just short of Fletcher Street, the rear of 161 Maiden Lane. Piers 15, 16 and 17 were redeveloped as part of the South Street Seaport, but all the piers below them, with the exceptions of Pier 11 and the heliport, languished and were demolished. In 1980 the Seaport Museum and the Public Development Corporation (a predecessor agency to the NYC Economic Development Corporation) commissioned Beyer Blinder and Belle to create a master development plan for the Seaport Historic District as a dining and tourist destination.

In 1999 yet another proposal was floated to develop the area. Fresh off of the success of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation proposed another Frank Gehry designed curvilinear museum that would sit in the East River along South Street from Wall Street to Maiden Lane, replacing Piers 9, 13, and 14. Heated public debate ensued, but following the attacks of 9/11 in 2001 priorities shifted to rebuilding the World Trade Center and in 2002 the plans were scrapped.

Sometime around 2007, demolition began on 161-169 Maiden Lane according to permits issued by the Department of Buildings. The reasons for the demolition are unclear. Nothing new was built and the property became a parking lot.

On October 22, 2012, Hurricane Sandy hit the east coast. The resulting storm surge reached a high-water mark along Pearl Street and pushed up Maiden Lane as far as William Street, reminding New Yorkers where the true natural boundaries of their city are located. Despite this, a year later in 2013, the Fortis Property Group paid sixty-four million dollars for the parking lot at the corner of Maiden Lane and South Street. Their ambitious plan was to build a 60-story residential tower on a narrow lot that had still been the East River in the 1700s and had been under water just a year prior.

Sources:

The lower Manhattan plan; capital project ES-1. Wallace, McHarg, Roberts and Todd; Whittlesey, Conklin and Rossant; and Alan M. Voorhees & Associates, Inc. Prepared for the New York City Planning Commission.

Collection Guides: New York (N.Y.). Office of Lower Manhattan Development.

Collection Guides: Color slides by Holly Wemple from 1973 to 1976.

Collection Guides: Economic Development Corporation general files for 1947 to 1993.

https://southstreetseaportmuseum.org/history-of-the-seaport/

https://zola.planning.nyc.gov/l/lot/1/72/7502#19.18/40.7055025/-74.004437

https://newyorkyimby.com/2025/11/seaport-residences-remains-unfinished-and-leaning-at-161-maiden-lane-in-financial-district-manhattan.html

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/02/10/the-leaning-tower-of-new-york

Mayor Giuliani, Deputy Mayor Harding, box 02/02/002 folder 51. NYC Municipal Archives.

https://www.guggenheim.org/exhibition/project-for-a-new-guggenheim-museum-in-new-york-city

Born in Yonkers, N.Y. in 1901, Edith Alexander studied at the New York University School of Commerce earning a degree in business administration. The first fourteen years of her career, she served as a manager for the Philip Payton Company, a pioneering Harlem real estate business with progressive ideas that helped maintain Black home ownership.

With an established history of working professionally in Harlem, Alexander made her move to New York City service. From 1933-1944 she served as Director of the Division of Staff and Negro Community Relations at the Department of Welfare, precursor to the Human Resources Administration. In addition, she worked as the secretary of the Harlem Children’s Camp Fund and served on the Board of Directors of the Greater New York Urban League.

In 1944, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia established the Mayor’s Committee on Unity in response to growing concerns about race relations. City leaders recognized that concrete action was needed to address racial disparities. As in many cities across the country, New York, and Harlem in particular, experienced racial tension, police violence, with unrest flaring in 1935, and again in 1943. The Unity Committee was the first to be established in the country with a goal to “make New York City a place where people of all races and religions may work and live side by side in harmony and have mutual respect for each other, and where democracy is a living reality.”

Composed of seventeen diverse volunteer members, the privately-funded Unity Committee had a wide-ranging mission: to investigate racial and religious tensions, propose solutions for neighborhood disputes, push for anti-discrimination laws, and tackle the everyday issues stemming from discrimination. The leadership team of the new organization reflected key racial and religious groups in New York City at the time. Among its first leaders were Executive Director Dan Dodson, a white Protestant man, and three associate directors—Edith Alexander, a Black woman, Bernard Lander, a white Jewish man, and Schuyler Warren, a white Catholic man. From this group Edith Alexander emerged as the Committee’s most influential figure.

Alexander’s role was far-reaching. By 1949, she was named executive director and became the face of the organization. With no formal legal power, the group established subcommittees that researched all aspects of discrimination and made recommendations on how to alleviate tensions within the city. Alexander worked with outside groups, gave talks and lectures, organized national conferences, and conducted on-site visits to understand conditions in the City.

During the ten years of its existence, the Committee addressed citizen complaints and created reports regarding discrimination in higher education, housing, shopping and market pricing, police hiring practices, press treatment of Black citizens, and insurance coverage, to name a few. In a final project, the Committee published a directory on intergroup relations which helped other urban areas establish local and federal commissions against discrimination.

By 1954, it was clear that the committee needed required legal authority to address issues rather than just suggesting ways to alleviate discrimination. It was at this point that the committee transitioned into the Commission on Intergroup Relations, empowered to take legal action against discrimination. It also marked the end of Edith Alexander’s tenure with the committee.

In addition to her Committee work, in 1948, Raymond Jones, the Deputy Commissioner of Housing, designated Alexander as a presidential elector from the Twenty-second Congressional district. Jones said that the selection of a Black woman by the Democratic party for this honor was “possibly without precedent in the entire country.” After she left the Mayor’s Community on Unity, Alexander took on the role of Associate Executive Director of the Mayor’s Advisory Council until her retirement in 1959. In 1961 she received a citation from then Mayor Robert Wagner for her “distinguished and exceptional service to all New York.”

The story doesn’t end there. While her work ended, her son, Clifford Alexander, Jr. followed closely in her footsteps. He served as chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under President Lyndon Johnson and became the nation’s first Black Secretary of the Army under President Jimmy Carter. Edith McAllister Alexander died on June 27, 1965, at Harlem Hospital.

Federal support for Documenting Democracy was provided by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission of the National Archives.

“The rhythms protected us...”

“The rhythms gave us... faces”

—Willie Colón in Low Rent: A Decade of Prose and Photographs From the Portable Lower East Side, Kurt Hollander, 1994, p. 90.

Willie Colón, the King of Salsa, was born on 139th Street in the South Bronx on April 28th, 1950. Born William Anthony Colón Román, he was later known as El Malo Del Bronx (based on his debut album title) and referred to as El Maestro. Colón always recalled his Abuela (Grandmother), Antonia Pintorette, originally from Manatí, Puerto Rico, as being his primary caregiver.

Inspired by the street rhythms emanating from congas, bottles, and tin cans that he described as lullabies, Colón picked up the trumpet at age twelve. Two years later, he switched to trombone, which became his instrument of choice. Colón released his first album, El Malo, at age 17 in 1967 on Fania Records newly formed by Johnny Pacheco and Jerry Masucci. From there, he went on to help define the genre of salsa that took New York City and the world by storm. He collaborated with icons like Celia Cruz, Rubén Blades, Héctor Lavoe, and many others. He played in the Fania All Stars Band, became director of the Latin Jazz All Stars, and won multiple awards and accolades for his music.

The 1973 Fania All Stars concert at Yankee Stadium, recorded August 23rd, brought 40,000 salsa fans to see Celia Cruz, Héctor Lavoe, and Willie Colón.

Along with an abundance of Latin American artistic talent arising from the South Bronx, Colón helped compose the soundtrack of the area in the late 20th century—decades that saw political, economic, and social turmoil and change. Confronted with a “burning Bronx,” massive recession, redlining policies and diversifying neighborhoods, Latin American musicians from Puerto Rico, Colombia, Cuba, Panama, and more expressed stories, experiences, joy, and struggles through music, like salsa. Later, Colón wrote,

“We easily turned 139th Street into a tropical barriada. All the stores in the area had Spanish signs in front. In the mornings you could hear the radios blaring those Latin rhythms in an eerie but reassuring echoey unison—and the smell of hundreds of pots of Cafe Bustelo filling the air.”

Salsa music and the South Bronx go hand in hand. With an influx of migrants from Latin America and Puerto Rico to New York City in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, many neighborhoods turned into hubs for Latin and Nuyorican culture. The sounds of the islands, mixtures of Afro-Caribbean, Taíno Indigenous, Latin Jazz, merged with cutting edge beats and vocals of R&B and Hip-Hop. Bronx legends like Tito Puente, Ray Barretto, Rubén Blades, Joe Bataan, and La India took the area by storm. One could not travel far down The Hub or Southern Boulevard without hearing congas, claves, and chants thundering from cars, windows, and boomboxes.

Tito Puente, contemporary of Colón, performing at City Hall, from WNYC, New York Hotline: Episode 401 - El Fieston de Nueva York, a Latin cultural festival, May 13, 1992.

Willie Colón distinguished his music from other salsa at the time with songs that brought to the forefront issues around identity, discrimination, and Colonization particular to Latin American experiences. Songs like Todo Tiene Su Finale (written by Héctor Lavoe in 1973), Pedro Navaja (written by Rubén Blades in 1978), and El Gran Varón (written by Omar Alfanno in 1986), told complex stories of love, life, and death.

Willie Colón featuring Héctor Lavoe & Yomo Toro - Aires de Navidad - Live/En Vivo, Fania Records, circa 1971. 

Throughout his career, Colón studied composition, orchestration, and arrangement, constantly revising his writing and performance practices. Many describe his songs as helping to connect Nuyoricans back to the island, as they inspired affection, celebration, and pride in Puerto Rican identity. Following news of Colón’s passing, his manager Pietro Carlos wrote:

“Willie didn’t just change salsa; he expanded it, politicized it, clothed it in urban chronicles, and took it to stages where it hadn’t been heard before. His trombone was the voice of the people, an echo of the Caribbean in New York, a bridge between cultures.” (FB)

Héctor Lavoe y Willie Colón - Presentación en los PBS Studios, NYC (1972).

Eventually, Willie Colón’s political interests influenced other aspects of his life. He advocated for social justice, most notably HIV/AIDS, Hispanic and Latin American representation in the U.S., and local political institutions. He was part of the Hispanic Arts Association, the Latino Commission on AIDS, the Arturo Schomburg Coalition for a Better New York, and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute. In 1995, Colón became the first person of color to serve on the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers’ (ASCAP) national board.

In the early 1990s, Colón served as a special advisor to Democratic Mayor David Dinkins, appearing with him in numerous events, parades, and press conferences.

A New York Times article in June of 1994 describes Willie’s transition into full-time politics owing to his observance of “disturbing trends.” He identified “a regression in race relations, misplaced government priorities like cutting back schools and social programs while spending billions in foreign aid” (NY Times, 1994). As result, Colón tried his own hand at electoral politics. In 1994 he unsuccessfully ran as a Democratic candidate for New York Congress. He tried and lost again in the 2001 election for New York Public Advocate. In 2014, Colón graduated from Westchester County Police Academy and was sworn in as a Deputy Sheriff for the Department of Public Safety.

Later in his life, Colón switched from endorsing Democratic candidates like Hillary Clinton to voting for Donald Trump in 2016. He remained a vocal Republican until his passing in Bronxville, New York, on February 21, 2026. He was 75 years old.

Willie Colón was a New Yorker through and through. This blog illuminates the numerous examples of his legacy found in the NYC Municipal Archives; one can only assume that there is far more to discover about the ways he influenced New York City and the world.

Willie Colón & Hector Lavoe – “Che Che Cole” Live/En Vivo, Fania Records, circa 1971.

“Salsa is not a rhythm. Salsa is a concept. It’s an inclusion and a reconciliation of all the things that we are, here in the Bronx and the music that we make together.”

—Willie Colón

The records of Mayor David Dinkins’ Administration show Jackson’s notable influence on politics and his relationship with the mayor. Jackson was a close friend of Mayor Dinkins, and the two supported each other’s political campaigns. Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition organization mobilized thousands of voters, helping Dinkins become New York City’s first Black mayor in 1990. In turn, Dinkins served as a co-chair of New Yorkers for Jesse Jackson during Jackson’s 1988 presidential run.

Jesse Jackson appears alongside Mayor Dinkins in numerous photographs taken at mayoral events. These include Dinkins’ inauguration, the ceremony where the Mayor received the Brotherhood Award from One Hundred Black Men, and a reception held by the New York State Council of Black Elected Democrats. Mr. Jackson is referenced in conversations the Mayor had about issues affecting Black NYC residents, including housing initiatives, issues related to drug convictions and use, and the need for more economic relief in Black neighborhoods. 

Jesse Jackson’s relationship with Dinkins stood in stark contrast to his interactions with Dinkins’ predecessor, Mayor Ed Koch. Documents in the mayoral series indicate that Koch did not consider Jackson a viable presidential candidate. Koch endorsed Democrat Michael Dukakis and viewed some of Jackson’s remarks about Jews as inappropriate and polarizing. He also disapproved of Jackson’s association with Louis Farrakhan. In a letter from June 11, 1984, Koch wrote to his speechwriter Clark Whelton, “This is not a Jewish matter or whites against blacks but rather what is acceptable for someone who runs at the highest levels.” Despite their differences, Koch and Jackson met to discuss voter registration and strategies to increase turnout. Koch acknowledged Jackson’s considerable influence among Black voters and respect from other city officials. In fact, Jackson did have significant support in his campaign from many important people. On June 24, 1988, for example, Gloria Steinem and Shirley Chisholm hosted a reception attended by Bill Cosby and Helen Abbott.

Records from the New York Police Department Intelligence Division also shed light on Jackson’s civil rights activism, including his work with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the Poor People’s Campaign and his leadership as Director of Operation Breadbasket, an initiative of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. As head of Operation Breadbasket, Jackson successfully coordinated boycotts against companies like the A & P Supermarket chain and the Coca-Cola Bottling Company. The goal was to address economic disparities in Black communities by leveraging boycotts to secure better representation, employment, and fair business practices. Other records document Jackson’s founding of People United to Save Humanity (PUSH) in 1971, following his suspension from Operation Breadbasket. PUSH broadened Jackson’s mission to improve economic conditions for Black Americans nationwide.

Jackson’s leadership in the civil rights movement is most shockingly evident in a 1971 letter from the City of Chicago Police Department to Thomas Lyons, Director of the New York City Police Intelligence Division. The letter refers to an alleged plot to assassinate Jackson for potential economic advantages. Other correspondence also shows Jackson’s affiliation not only with political figures but also with other influential Black people. While opinions about Jackson vary, his activism, engagement with the New York City government, and presidential campaigns left a lasting impact on both the city and the nation.

The wartime decade placed WNYC firmly in the vanguard of American broadcasting where Black producers and Black-centered programming were concerned. This leadership emerged early in the decade with calypso music on Henrietta Yurchenco’s Adventures in Music. A notable example is the July 28 broadcast featuring Cecil Anderson—better known as The Duke of Iron—who paid tribute to the municipal station in song with “The Ballad of WNYC.” 

Station WNYC. Yes, WNYC, it is owned by the people of N.Y.C. 
My friends, I’m known as the Duke of Iron, 
And I sing to people throughout the land. 
I came from Trinidad, maybe you have heard 
Of the glorious land of the humming bird. 
I highly appreciate your loyalty 
And the grand privilege that’s offered me 
By the nice people of New York City 
And the station WNYC… 

In the song, Anderson also praised Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, crediting him as the station’s “godfather” and acknowledging his tireless efforts to ensure WNYC’s survival during its early years—although it’s worth noting that La Guardia originally ran for Mayor on a platform calling for the abolition of the station given its cost to the taxpayer.

Producer Yurchenco also brought Huddie Ledbetter—Lead Belly, the king of the twelve-string guitar—to WNYC’s air in 1940. This appearance marked the first of four regular series he would host during the decade, along with frequent guest spots on other programs, including the annual American Music Festival. In a 2001 interview with WNYC, Yurchenco recalled his professionalism, punctuality, and meticulous dress, as well as the collaborative way they shaped his broadcasts. She emphasized that Lead Belly’s commentary drew directly from his own life and described it as “colorful and magnificent,” noting that he remains one of the great blues singers of all time. Here is Lead Belly from his program, Folksongs of America, on February 27, 1941. 

Among the other programs on which Lead Belly appeared was Ralph Berton’s Metropolitan Review, radio’s first serious jazz music program, and its companion series, Jazz Institute on the Air. Together, these broadcasts introduced New York audiences to a wide range of African-American jazz, blues, boogie-woogie and swing artists in the early 1940s. In November 1941, Berton devoted a full week of programming to Louis Armstrong—whom he dubbed “the Beethoven of hot jazz”—in celebration of Armstrong’s twenty-fifth year in show business. Berton also hosted a segment of WNYC’s American Music Festival in February 1941 featuring Lead Belly, Albert Ammons, Sam Price, Meade Lux Lewis, and the Golden Gate Singers. 

Paul Robeson’s powerful baritone graced WNYC’s airwaves on at least two occasions during the 1940s. The first occurred on June 24, 1940, when he performed “Ballad for Americans” at Lewisohn Stadium with the Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra conducted by Artur Rodziński. Written by Earl Robinson and John Latouche, the cantata was conducted by Mark Warnow and featured a chorus of fifty voices drawn from the Schola Cantorum and the Wen Talbert Negro Choir, with African-American contralto Louise Burge joining the ensemble. The concert also included the premiere of William Grant Still’s And They Lynched Him on a Tree, based on a poem by Katherine Garrison Chapin. Robeson’s second live WNYC broadcast was a Central Park bandshell concert of contemporary Russian music on September 1, 1942, conducted by noted African-American conductor Dean Dixon.

From May through July 1941, WNYC aired the pioneering thirteen-week dramatic series Native Sons, which portrayed the lives of significant historical Black figures. The biographical sketches were groundbreaking not only in content but in authorship: they were written by African Americans Kirk Lord and Frank D. Griffin at a time when few Black writers worked in radio beyond menial roles. Writing for the Baltimore Afro-American in August 1941, Griffin charged that commercial radio would not hire Black writers, arguing that as radio became a big business, Jim Crow practices had become entrenched in both studios and control rooms. Two years later, The New York Age noted Griffin’s hiring by the  Congress of Industrial Organizations to write NBC’s Labor for Victory series, observing that he was “the only Negro at present writing for a network program.”  

Native Sons also broke new ground by presenting profiles of insurgent figures such as Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey—subjects rarely, if ever, discussed on the air. Alongside these were portraits of figures including Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Crispus Attucks, George Washington Carver, Benjamin Banneker, Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, Paul Robeson, Marian Anderson, Roland Hayes, Dorothy Maynor, Ira Aldridge, Robert Smalls, Toussaint L’Ouverture, and the Moroccan explorer Estevanico. The series featured an all-Black cast that included Canada Lee, Jessie Zackerey, P. J. Sidney, Jimmy Wright, Rose Poindexter, and Eric Boroughs, with musical segments provided by the Juanita Hall Choir. Author Richard Wright delivered commentary following the final broadcast.

May 1941 also marked the debut of Those Who Have Made Good, an interview program sponsored by the NAACP and designed to spotlight “the most outstanding race figures in contemporary life, from all fields of endeavor.” Hosted and produced weekly by Clifford Burdette for more than a year, the program fulfilled that mission, beginning with actor Canada Lee and continuing with guests such as Paul Robeson, W.C. Handy, Josh White, Noble Sissle, Mercedes Gilbert, Dean Dixon, Count Basie, the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Hazel Scott, Max Yergan, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and many others. The sole surviving recording of the series features Harlem poet Countee Cullen. 

Duke Ellington’s first Carnegie Hall concert on January 23, 1943 featured his expansive jazz composition Black, Brown and Beige, a work he described as “a parallel to the history of the Negro in America.” Recorded on location, the performance was broadcast over WNYC nine days later. Unfortunately, critics initially received the work poorly, and Ellington never revisited it in full. Half a century later, however, Scott DeVeaux of the University of Virginia described it as “an intriguing piece of music, well worth reexamining” and “a celebration of Black artistic achievement” that “confronted both the cultural snobbery that excluded jazz musicians from the musical establishment and the pervasive racism that excluded African Americans from their share of citizenship.” 

On March 18, 1943, Justice Jane M. Bolin—the first African-American judge in New York and the first Black woman to graduate from Yale Law School—came to the municipal radio studio to deliver the address Womenpower is Vital to Victory. Bolin was speaking as part of the Eleventh Vocational Opportunity Campaign of the National Urban League. She called for employment of African-American women and condemned discrimination as antithetical to the nation’s democratic war aims.

WNYC revisited the African-American docudrama with the Great Americans series May 19 through June 23, 1943. Sponsored by the City’s Juvenile Welfare Council, the program included profiles of inventor George Washington Carver, champion fighter Joe Louis, contralto Marian Anderson, sculptor Richmond Barthe, police officer Samuel Battle, activist James Weldon Johnson, and heard here, ship captain Hugh Mulzac.  

Compared to Native Sons, the series was more conventional and corny in tone. Variety commented that it “ducked the fundamental racial issues” and was “slanted for juves and strictly inspirational,” with episodes often concluding with exhortations about self-improvement. 

The year 1943 was marked by unrest tied to racial and ethnic tensions across the United States. Violent clashes erupted in Mobile, Alabama, Detroit, Los Angeles, and Beaumont, Texas, undermining morale on the home front as the nation fought a global war. Mayor La Guardia—also the national head of the Office of Civilian Defense—was deeply concerned that similar disturbances might erupt in New York, particularly given the reliance on minority soldiers in a segregated military. 

Seeking to defuse rising tensions, La Guardia pressed for a radio series titled Unity at Home – Victory Abroad and wrote poet, activist, and playwright Langston Hughes for assistance. Slated to air on WNYC and seven other New York stations in August and September, the series featured figures such as contralto Marian Anderson, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and former governor Al Smith. Tragically, the effort came too late to prevent the Harlem riot of August 1, although WNYC played a critical role in calming the situation through its broadcasts and sound trucks. 

According to Hughes biographer Arnold Rampersad, Hughes was also contacted by the Writers’ War Board, which sought radio programming to promote unity and prevent further racial violence. Hughes responded with some songs and two short plays, In the Service of My Country and Private Jim Crow. While the former was broadcast on WNYC and praised, the latter—more critical in its depiction of discrimination faced by Black soldiers—was never aired anywhere. Hughes himself acknowledged the difficulty of such material, noting radio’s persistent censorship of dramatic treatments of Black life. 

Hughes returned to WNYC in 1944 as a guest on mezzo-soprano Lola Hayes’s weekly program Tone Pictures of the Negro in Music, which highlighted African-American composers and their work. The November 29 broadcast focused on musical settings of Hughes’s poetry, and he read from his opera Troubled Island. Other guests during the program’s run included Abbie Mitchell, Will Marion Cook, Hall Johnson, and Clarence Cameron White. 

In February 1944, Billie Holiday made a late addition to WNYC’s annual American Music Festival, appearing in a swing session alongside Hot Lips Page and Coleman Hawkins. The following month, WNYC also began airing spots against bigotry as part of director Morris Novik’s vision of public radio to educate for democracy. 

On April 2, 1944, Mayor La Guardia welcomed composer and baritone Harry T. Burleigh to City Hall for a broadcast of Talk to the People, continuing the station’s engagement with African-American cultural leadership during the war years. 

The year 1944 saw the municipal station move away from biodramas toward short-lived serial dramas that aimed to portray African Americans as everyday Americans who happened to be Black. On Saturday evenings in June, an all-Black cast appeared in I’m Your Next Door Neighbor, which followed the business and home life of a “typical” New York family living in Harlem. Station director Morris Novik explained that “tolerance and prejudice were not the theme of the series, but during the course of normal events it brought home to the listener that there were certain evils that perhaps he was not aware of previously.” 

In an article about the “falling color bar” in radio, The Chicago Defender called the program “the most advanced program artistically.” The paper also quoted producer Barbara M. Watson, who said, “It is most important that young Negroes look to radio as the future. There are inroads to be made now. It will be tougher later.” Watson went on to have a distinguished career, becoming the first African American and the first woman appointed Assistant Secretary of State. 

The second serial drama was Henry Allen—American. Airing on Sundays from October into November 1944, the program was a takeoff on Henry Aldrich, the popular white protagonist of NBC’s The Aldrich Family. Like I’m Your Next Door Neighbor, the series sought to normalize Black domestic life. An announcement in The Brooklyn Eagle said the program would “try to give us an understanding glimpse into the homes and hearts of 14,000,000 fellow citizens.” 

Folksinger Josh White performed at the February 1945 American Music Festival. The announcer described his repertoire as “music that is rooted in the soil and the heart of the American people,” and quoted Langston Hughes, who called White “a fine singer of anybody’s songs—Southern Negro, Southern white, plantation work songs, modern union songs, English or Irish ballads—any songs that come from the heart of a people.” 

The following month, President Franklin D. Roosevelt died, and the NAACP mounted an extensive tribute over the municipal station. On April 15, listeners heard from attorney Herman Taylor, Roy Wilkins, NAACP president Arthur B. Spingarn, and Maude Turner of the New York City NAACP branch. Spingarn said, “The death of President Roosevelt is a tragic loss to mankind. But to minority peoples of the world—particularly the minority groups in this country—it is an irreparable calamity.” 

Returning from Army service, producer and host Clifford Burdette launched Freedom’s Ladder in July 1946. The weekly program blended music and civil rights advocacy and was described as “the only weekly program battling discrimination and prejudice.” Echoing the mission of his earlier WNYC series Those Who Have Made Good, Burdette told the Baltimore Afro-American, “Our show aims to entertain and to promote the idea that everyone has a chance to climb freedom’s ladder. You’ve got to be good, and you’ve got to work at it.” 

The program ran for a year and featured some nationally known performers, including Nat King Cole and Sarah Vaughan, but largely relied on entertainers from Harlem nightclubs and other local venues, along with frequent appearances by members of the New York State Commission Against Discrimination. Unlike Burdette’s earlier program, the high-powered roster of Harlem Renaissance celebrities was largely absent. New York Amsterdam News columnist and radio host Bill Chase was a regular presence and shared hosting duties.   

On April 16, 1946, municipal radio listeners heard NYU sociologist Dr. Dan Dodson moderate a panel discussion titled “How Can We Work for Interracial Understanding?” Panelists included pioneering African-American psychologist Dr. Kenneth B. Clark, Judge and civil-rights attorney Hubert Delany, and journalist and social historian Dr. Albert Deutsch. Later that spring, on June 3, listeners may also have caught a live broadcast of Billie Holiday performing at Jazz at the Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall. 

From January 10 to April 6, 1947, One More River was billed as “the only radio show in the country produced by a Negro–White team” dedicated to improving race relations. The Sunday broadcast was produced by New York Amsterdam News columnist Bill Chase and WNYC staff announcer Ken Joseph, who said the program was “dedicated to the equality and dignity of all men” and sought to expose prejudice in both the North and the South. The series combined dramatizations and music, with guests including Teddy Wilson, Kenneth Spencer, Jenny Powell, Mildred Bailey, Lillette Thomas, Melba Allen, the Ellis Larkins Trio, and the Al Casey Trio. The Nameless Choir appeared regularly under the direction of Charles King. This is the April 6, 1947 program from the Municipal Archives WNYC collection. 

African-American conductor Dean Dixon led the American Youth Symphony in February 1947 for the eleventh WNYC American Music Festival concert. The program featured contralto Carol Brice, with pianist Vivian Rivkin, and included works by William Schuman, Johan Franco, Norman Dello Joio, and Richard J. Newman. The concert concluded with Newman’s United Nations Cantata for Chorus and Orchestra, performed by the David Randolph Chamber Chorus. 

On June 29, 1947, WNYC carried President Harry S. Truman’s address to the NAACP at its thirty-eighth annual conference. The Lincoln Memorial speech was the first time a sitting U.S. president spoke to the organization’s annual meeting.

The Thelonius Monk Quartet performed at the ninth American Music Festival on February 16, 1948. Monk was joined on piano by trumpeter Idrees Sulieman, bassist Curly Russell, and drummer Art Blakey. Their set included the standard All the Things You Are. 

Jazz Classroom of the Air premiered on October 9, 1948. The thirty-minute broadcast accompanied an NYU jazz course taught by John Hammond of Mercury Records and George Avakian of Columbia Records. Designed as both public educational entertainment and a supplement to the university course, the program paired Saturday evening broadcasts with Monday classroom lectures. The inaugural episode traced the origins of jazz and featured several early recordings, including one by a young Louis Armstrong.

Civil rights leader Walter White spoke at the Cooper Union Forum on December 18, 1949. His address, “The Race Problem in the United States,” examined the relationship between race and foreign policy and was carried live from the Great Hall over WNYC. 

Conclusion 

Taken together, these early decades of New York’s municipal broadcasting reveal WNYC as an imperfect but often pioneering civic platform for Black cultural expression, political debate, and historical self-representation. At a time when commercial radio routinely excluded African-American voices—or confined them to caricatures—the city-owned station repeatedly created space for Black artists, intellectuals, activists, and institutions to speak in their own voices and on their own terms. These efforts unfolded unevenly, shaped by the limits of the era, wartime pressures, censorship, and persistent racial inequities. Yet they also reflected a sustained belief that public broadcasting could serve democratic ends by broadening who was heard and what was heard. 

From early policy decisions banning racial epithets, to landmark series such as Native Sons and Those Who Have Made Good, to wartime appeals for unity and postwar explorations of everyday Black life, WNYC’s programming documented—and at times anticipated—larger national conversations about race, citizenship, and cultural authority. The station’s airwaves carried music, drama, and debate that challenged prevailing stereotypes and introduced audiences to a fuller, more complex vision of African-American life in the United States. 

As WNYC moved beyond its first quarter-century, these broadcasts formed a foundation on which later generations would build. The preserved recordings remain vital historical evidence of how New York City’s municipal radio, at its best, functioned as a forum for inclusion, education, and civic responsibility—an aspiration that continues to resonate during Black History Month and beyond. 

Among the earliest African American speakers on WNYC—if not the first—was the Reverend Dr. Henry Hugh Proctor, an early civil-rights leader who addressed listeners on the evening of October 11, 1924. He opened the broadcast with a prayer, followed by the Nazarene Chorus, based at his Brooklyn church, the Nazarene Congregational Church. Proctor is recognized as a key figure in the Social-Gospel movement, a significant precursor to the modern civil-rights movement. 

The municipal station was only eight months old in March 1925—and radio itself was still very much a toddler—when WNYC banned the use of racial epithets on the air. The action came at a moment of peak Ku Klux Klan membership nationwide and three years before NBC would launch the enormously popular, and racially charged, Amos ’n’ Andy. The ban followed a broadcast in which a city official told “a harmless watermelon story,” unaware that he had caused offense by using  a slur related to skin color.” Department of Plant and Structures Commissioner William Wirt Mills, whose agency oversaw the station, issued an apology and ordered corrective action in response to a complaint from The Baltimore Afro-American newspaper.

Seen in this light, it is notable that by 1946—likely earlier—the station’s operations manual extended its prohibition on racial and ethnic epithets to Jews, Irish Americans, and other maligned groups. The guide also instructed staff that “there is no need, for example, in crime news to refer repeatedly to a man's color unless there is a specific news reason, such as a police description of a missing person.” It further cautioned against repeating derogatory remarks about any individual, even when accurately attributed, unless the quotation itself had specific news value, such as forming the basis of a lawsuit. 

Black participation on WNYC and other broadcast outlets during the 1920s remained limited, largely confined to occasional gospel performances and dance band appearances. That changed in 1929, when both the New York Urban League and the NAACP secured regular weekly time slots—among the earliest sustained programming by and for African Americans in the nation. These broadcasts featured prominent voices including scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois, labor leader A. Philip Randolph, writer and civil rights advocate James Weldon Johnson, and actress Rose McClendon. 

Between 1930 and 1933, the U.S. government sponsored trips to Europe for surviving mothers of deceased World War I soldiers and for widows who had not remarried, allowing them to visit the American cemeteries where their loved ones were buried. The program was initially praised in Black newspapers, which encouraged all eligible women to participate. That support shifted, however, when the War Department announced that the pilgrimages would be segregated. 

Mrs. Willie Rush, whose son died in France, spoke over WNYC on behalf of Gold Star mothers during a City Hall protest broadcast on July 11, 1930. An Atlanta native, she condemned the segregation of the Black and white delegations. She and other protesters were joined in the Aldermanic Chamber by Acting Mayor Joseph V. McKee and city officials. 

The NAACP attempted to persuade the federal government to integrate the excursions but was unsuccessful. The organization subsequently called for a boycott, prompting roughly two dozen mothers and widows to cancel their trips. Ultimately, however, 279 African-American women chose to make the journey. 

An unusual event celebrating legend, myth, and collective hope brought WNYC microphones to Harlem on November 4, 1934. The occasion was the replanting and dedication of the community’s “Wishing Tree” at 131st Street and Seventh Avenue, with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson presiding before public officials and a crowd of thousands. Also known as the “Tree of Hope,” the elm was believed to possess magical powers, according to reports in The Literary Digest.

Shortly thereafter, newly hired assistant program director Seymour Siegel moved quickly to bring government-subsidized musicians into the municipal studios through the Federal Music Project. Although the program remained segregated and Black musicians were paid less than their white counterparts, African-American performers were nonetheless employed under the WPA. The ensembles were broadcast nationally via 16-inch transcription discs mailed from Washington, D.C.—a pre-satellite distribution system. These groups included the Juanita Hall Choir, the Negro Melody Singers, the Negro Art Singers, the Los Angeles Colored Chorus, and the Los Angeles Negro Choir. 

The WNYC Archives compiled this mixtape of 26 performances selected from the Municipal Archives WNYC Collection of WPA music transcriptions. 

Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia’s second term in 1938 marked another turning point with the appointment of Morris Novik as station director and head of the Municipal Broadcasting System, a communications agency reporting directly to the Mayor rather than the Department of Plant and Structures. This reorganization ushered in a new era of inclusiveness at WNYC, beginning with an on-air discussion and debate over the federal Anti-Lynching Bill featuring NAACP executive secretary Walter White. The period also included a notable studio performance by actor Alvin Childress, who portrayed an enslaved person in a dramatic sketch titled Two Faces. 

In April of that year, author Richard Wright appeared on a Federal Writers’ Project roundtable broadcast and addressed the persistence of racial stereotyping and reflected on his work for The WPA Guide to New York City. “The most amazing thing about these stories, to my way of thinking, is that they were never done before… the average American's conception of Negro culture and life as it exists in New York is probably derived from not very accurate novels, or Hollywood representations of the urban Negro as either shabby and comical or exceedingly prosperous as the conductor of a popular swing orchestra.”

The following month, the National Urban League launched Negro News & Views, a new weekly program intended, in its words, “to awaken the general public to the realization of the importance of the Negro’s cultural contribution to American life.” Two weeks after the funeral of James Weldon Johnson in June, WNYC broadcast an on-air remembrance of the author of Lift Every Voice and Sing, often referred to as the Black national anthem. Listeners heard tributes from Mayor La Guardia and leaders of the NAACP, underscoring the station’s growing role as a civic platform for Black cultural and political life. 

In 1939, African-American actor Gordon Heath came to WNYC through the WPA’s National Youth Administration via its NYA Varieties radio program. He produced a biographical series titled Music and Youth, which he later recalled in his memoirs as a stream of “15-minute potted sketches from the lives of great musicians of the past.” One such vignette featured Beethoven in conversation with his landlord, declaring, “Ah, Herr Sturch—the wages of sin, they have not been paid.” 

Part Two of the blog will continue documenting WNYC’s role as a leading producer of programs focusing on Black civic and cultural leadership in the 1940s.

July 4th, 1940 - Detective Joseph J. Lynch of the NYPD Bomb & Forgery Squad was at his Bronx home with his family, but on call, when the phone rang. A suspicious bag had been found at the World’s Fair. An electrician noticed it the previous day in a ventilation room of the British Pavilion and assumed it belonged to another worker. When he saw it again on the 4th he picked it up and brought it to his supervisor’s office. Hearing a ticking noise coming from it they alerted police officers assigned to the Fair. The officers picked up the bag and brought it to an empty area behind the Polish Pavillion.

The lack of urgency is surprising, as an operator at the Pavilion had received a bomb threat earlier that week, but most bomb calls were hoaxes. Extra officers assigned to the Pavillion had done security sweeps but found nothing. Det. Lynch told his wife he would be back for dinner, borrowed his sister’s car and picked up his partner Det. Ferdinand A. Socha in Greenpoint on the way to Queens. The Bomb Squad attracted intelligent men, Lynch had graduated from Fordham University and had worked as a pharmacist but joined the NYPD for the job security. Freddie Socha had studied medicine before joining.

NYPD Emergency Service Unit 21 was first on the scene, and they had secured the area, a ring of officers standing at what they thought was a safe distance. Detectives Lynch and Socha approached the bag wearing nothing but their business suits, as protective clothing had not yet been invented. Kneeling on the ground Det. Socha cut a small opening into the case with a pen knife so Lynch could peer inside. What he saw would have been several sticks of dynamite attached to a clock. Lynch was heard to say, “It’s the business” and then the bomb detonated.

The blast carved a huge hole in the ground and blew Lynch and Socha several yards backward. They must have died instantly, the medical examiner’s report describes gruesome injuries, their bodies torn apart by the blast. Detectives William Federer and Joseph Gallagher, who had approached closer to relay information, were severely injured in the blast along with Detective Martin Schuchman. Patrolman Emil Vyskocil had turned to tell bystanders to keep back and suffered serious injuries to his back and legs. The investigation concluded that there were no projectiles in the device, but that dirt and rocks, along with metal from the clock, acted as shrapnel. Another eight officers were injured in the explosion.

The clouds of war were already hanging over the Fair. America had not yet entered World War II, as Pearl Harbor was still eighteen months away, but the US was sending Britain weapons for its fight against the Nazis. Timing the explosion for the 4th of July, in the British Pavillion, led investigators to immediately suspect a German sympathizer, possibly a member of the German-American Bund. The Bund had held a pro-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden a few months earlier. Communists, the Irish Republican Army and the extremist Christian Front were also possible suspects. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia rushed back from a holiday to visit the scene and reassure New Yorkers. He put 1,500 officers on the case, and the next day police raided the Bund’s offices and arrested former member Caesar Kroger. Despite some evidence that he was plotting attacks, police could not tie him to the case. Without solid leads, the City offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of a suspect, a tremendous amount of money in 1940, and the Detectives’ Endowment Association added another $1,000.

Mayor LaGuardia was deeply disturbed by the incident. He was already worried about the war reaching New York, and death and injury of so many officers was unprecedented. He summoned Lt. James A. Pyke, Commanding Officer of the Bomb Squad, to City Hall and said that such a thing could never happen again. They discussed ways to safely transport bombs away from civilian areas to where they could be detonated in controlled explosions. Pyke set to work designing a bomb transporter.

The first LaGuardia-Pyke Bomb Carrier (during testing the trucks were referred to as “Bomb Carriers” although later “Bomb Conveyors” was also used) was built by the Engineering Bureau of the Police Department from an old truck bed covered with a hut of blasting mats. Blasting mats had been in use in the mining industry and during the construction of the IRT subway—the NYPD wove theirs from steel elevator cable. It was like a wicker basket made of steel and an inner envelope of steel mats held the bombs. It was tested on September 30, 1940, in an ash dump near Avenue U and East 76th Street in Bergen Beach, Brooklyn. Three explosions of increasing size stress-tested it: 1) two half-pound sticks of dynamite, 2) ten half-pound sticks, and 3) twenty-five half-pound sticks. The blasts were contained to the NYPD’s satisfaction. Blast gases would dissipate out of gaps between the cables, but the full force of the blast and any shrapnel would be contained.

Proof of concept in hand, Pyke and the NYPD engineers with the Department of Public Works built the 2nd LaGuardia-Pyke Bomb Carrier. It used a steel framework and sat on a separate trailer. Pyke said it resembled “a ‘49 Pioneer covered wagon.” This model had a door in the rear and officers would place the bomb inside a smaller basket and suspend it inside the carrier. They dubbed this creation “Big Bertha” and on April 12, 1941, they tested it. Attending these tests were Mayor LaGuardia, and Police Commissioner Lewis J. Valentine, along with other NYPD and FDNY officials, representatives from the US Secret Service, the DOJ, US Naval and US Army Intelligence, Army Ordnance, US Coast Guard and a whole host of police departments. The tests: three sticks of dynamite, 6 sticks of dynamite, 12 sticks of dynamite in a case similar to the World’s Fair bomb, and finally a pipe bomb of 14 sticks of dynamite. The initial tests damaged the inner container, but the outer container held. However, shrapnel from the pipe bomb significantly damaged the outer shell. A final test of 24 sticks of dynamite split one of the welds on the frame but was deemed a success.

A conference was held at City Hall on May 13th to review the results of the tests and suggest improvements. The committee decided on the following changes:

• To eliminate the bomb cradle inside the carrier as its steel could act as shrapnel in a blast;

• To add another layer of cable mats as an “air cushion”;

• To add a winch system to carry the bomb so that detectives would not need to enter the blast chamber, (in the final design this was constructed of wooden gears to reduce steel shrapnel that might penetrate the shell);

• And to make a self-closing and locking outer door.

The final design plan for the third LaGuardia-Pyke Bomb Carrier was approved June 6, 1941, and three were ordered built. By 1942 they were in use, with “Big Bertha” held in reserve. Pyke submitted two reports to Mayor LaGuardia and in 1943 Pyke published the full results of the tests and the final design in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. The design was so successful that other municipalities around the world copied it. Big Bertha’s sister carriers were used by the NYPD until the 1990s (in NYPD parlance they were all called “Big Bertha”) when new technologies replaced them. One of them was preserved at the Central Motor Depot and in 2022 it was restored by DSNY and the FDNY and returned to the Emergency Service Unit as a museum piece. It is the oldest active-duty vehicle in the NYPD fleet. The 1940 bombing that inspired its creation was never solved and the NYPD still considers it an open case.

In 1943, Lt. Pyke took a leave of absence to report for duty in the Navy as a munitions expert. He formally retired from the NYPD in 1944 but rejoined after the war as a Captain. In April 1941, Lord Halifax, the British Ambassador, presented silver plates to the widows of Det. Lynch and Socha “in recognition of the gallantry” of their husbands. Easter Lynch, widowed with five young children, sent a dismissive telegram to the King and Queen of England. Reports of its content vary, but a family friend recalled it saying:

“Thank you for your dish. If I had a house where I could use this for calling cards, it would be greatly appreciated. A basket of fruit to feed my children would be much better.”

Sources:

Pyke, James A. “New Report: La Guardia-Pyke Bomb Carrier Truck.” Mayor LaGuardia Papers. Box XI.1: Series 11, Folders 13. https://a860-collectionguides.nyc.gov/repositories/2/archival_objects/40258

“Blueprints for La Guardia-Pyke Bomb Carrier Truck,” 1941. Mayor LaGuardia Papers. Box XI.1: Series 11, Folder 14. https://a860-collectionguides.nyc.gov/repositories/2/archival_objects/40259

Pyke, James A. “La Guardia-Pyke Bomb Carriers,” v.34 Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology 198 (1943-1944).

https://vault.fbi.gov/world-fair-bombing-on-july-4-1939/world-fair-bombing-on-july-4-1939.pdf

https://www.bjwhalen.com/PatrolmanEV.pdf

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/75-years-later-the-deadly-bombing-that-rocked-the-new-york-worlds-fair-is-still-unsolved

https://nycrecords.access.preservica.com/?s=pyke

http://www.policeny.com/bomb1.html

https://nycdetectives.org/honor-roll/lynch-joseph-j/

https://www.nytimes.com/1943/12/16/archives/head-of-bomb-squad-will-serve-the-navy-pyke-cited-4-times-by-police.html

https://www.nytimes.com/1944/01/14/archives/827-police-retired-in-a-single-day-force-3221-short-pension-board.html

This post discusses how the Department of Records & Information Services (DORIS) developed a reparative description guide and how it was applied to the CCHR project. The post also describes an interesting parallel within the CCHR records. 

Making of the DORIS Reparative and Inclusive Description Guide 

In 2023, DORIS began developing the Guidelines for Reparative and Inclusive Description, a reference manual to assist Municipal Archives and Library staff in their reparative description practices. City Service staff Israt Abedin and Arafua Reed, City Service Fellows, coordinated the project. Other components included the publication of the agency's Harmful Content statement, several community engagement campaigns including the In Her Own Name research-a-thon and the Records of Slavery transcription project. All fit within the agency's diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) initiative. The manual uses a question/answer format to address questions that may emerge in day-to-day work, such as how to acknowledge uncomfortable or brutal imagery and language that is outdated. Creation of the guide drew from the researcher input, guides developed by various other repositories, and a theoretical understanding of the archivist’s role. For the Record published an update on the project in June 2024. The document was completed in the spring of 2025 and first utilized by archivists processing the City Commission on Human Rights collection.

What is Reparative Description? 

Reparative description has existed within the library and archival fields for some time. Many cite Howard Zinn’s essay “Secrecy, Archives, and the Public Interest” as a starting point to understanding those efforts. Throughout, Zinn argues that the idea of a “neutral” archive is impossible, because the people creating and preserving the record carry their own biases. Archival integrity is maintained by acknowledging biases may exist and adjust practices accordingly. The core of this work lies in power: the power of the record in establishing what is a “historical truth” and the power of the archivist in deciding how that “truth” is told. It also hinges on access; by expanding the language for an archive, the documents within become easier for diverse populations to find and to use.

This often means acknowledging that the people who created the records simply did not see humanity in the subjects of certain records, or the creation of those records sought to erase the humanity of others. It also means recognizing the silence or absences that a lack of documentation causes. It’s important that the records archivists maintain are not altered, but rather supplemented with additional information that acknowledges the harmful language and/or bias within the initial statement. How does one implement that without causing more harm? This is an ongoing question that responsible archivists ask, as the answer is not fixed, but rather evolves with time.

Reparative Description in the City Commission on Human Rights Collection The City Commission on Human Rights collection proved to be a good selection for implementation of the reparative description guide due to the nature of the agency’s work and relationship to the communities they serve. An example of how archivists used the guide involved addressing pre-existing folder titles created by the Commission. During the processing phase, archivists determined that preservinge the original naming conventions provided historical context. As can be expected, language describing minority groups from the 1940’s-1970’s is outdated, making this older terminology a candidate for redescription. To balance historical accountability with contemporary access, original language was retained, and reparative description was added in brackets. Simply replacing outdated or harmful language entirely would erase evidence of past harm and introduce inconsistencies that ultimately hinder research and accountability.

Here are some real examples from the collection that used reparative description in the folder titles: 

• Meeting September 14, 1949: Department of Welfare Request Regarding Alleged Discrimination in Lodging Houses Against Negro [Black] Homeless [Unhoused] Men 

• 5452-J-PH Employment-Physical Handicap [Physical Disability]

The first example comes from records in the collection created by a predecessor to the CCHR, the Mayor’s Committee on Unity (1943-1955). The second folder title comes from case files created by the CCHR between 1969 and 1976. This series captures complaints of discrimination that individuals had raised against employers, landlords, schools, and places of public accommodation (bars, restaurants, stores, etc.). Each file includes descriptions of incidents, notes from investigations, correspondence, evidence, and records of resolutions along with the reasoning behind them. Each case file has a code with a purely numeric order number and an alphabetic code which indicates what type of situation brought about the discrimination being reported (Employment, Housing, Public Accommodation, Education) and, in some cases, the type of discrimination, as in the case above which indicates that the complainant was filing for physical disability discrimination in employment.

Reparative Description and the Subcommittee on Press Treatment of Minority Groups 

A particularly revealing parallel within the CCHR collection appears in the Commission’s earliest records. The Mayor’s Committee on Unity established a Subcommittee on Press Treatment of Minority Groups to engage directly with local newspapers to promote fair and non-discriminatory standards for news coverage.

The Mayor’s Committee on Unity recognized the powerful role local newspapers played in shaping public perception of minority communities and potentially fueling social tension. In response, the Subcommittee spent years systematically reviewing reporting patterns and inflammatory language in the city’s major newspapers. Members compiled data to identify coverage that contributed, often unconsciously, to the escalation of racial and ethnic tensions within the city’s communities.

REC0103, Box 27, Folder 6. CCHR Collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

Their reports detailed the language used and reporting patterns of local newspapers.

They engaged directly with editors of local newspapers whose reporting practices raised concerns, sharing findings and assisting in the development of protocols designed to address racial and religious bias in coverage. 

REC0103, Box 26, Folder 30. CCHR Collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

They also took part in conferences aimed at journalists, where they examined the broader implications of inflammatory language in news reports and its power to shape public perceptions of minority groups.

There is a clear parallel between the work of the Subcommittee on Press Treatment of Minority Groups and the contemporary archival work taking place in the CCHR project through reparative description. Both efforts engage institutions that are often treated as neutral or authoritative sources of truth: the news media and the archive. In each case, information is not passively recorded but actively shaped through processes of selection, description, and framing by individuals working within institutional systems. The language used to describe events, people, and histories, whether in newspaper headlines or archival folder titles, plays a significant role in how those subjects are located, understood and remembered. When prior descriptive practices go unquestioned, institutional authority can mask the biases embedded within, allowing harmful narratives to persist as accepted truth. By examining and intervening in these frameworks, both the Subcommittee and contemporary archivists challenge assumptions of neutrality and make visible how descriptions can either reproduce harm or allow accountability and repair.

Conclusion 

The City Commission on Human Rights collection offers a strong example of how institutional language shapes public understanding. The Subcommittee on Press Treatment of Minority Groups shows an awareness of the power of description and a willingness to intervene when those descriptions caused harm. When applying contemporary archival practices such as reparative description, the collection shows how questions of representation, accountability, and institutional responsibility have been negotiated over time.

Today’s post was written in collaborative effort between Arafua Reed, who contributed to the writing of the Reparative Description Guide and Neen Lamontagne, the project archivist managing the City Commission on Human Rights grant project.

This week, For the Record takes a journey through records in the Municipal Library and Archives that document Alice Austen (1866-1952), and her homestead in Staten Island. Located on bluffs overlooking New York Bay, the Gothic Revival cottage known as Clear Comfort is now in the portfolio of the New York City Historic House Trust. It has been fully restored and includes a museum dedicated to Austen’s work.

Researchers are often advised to begin their quest with the secondary sources available in the Municipal Library. And among them, the “vertical files” are particularly useful. Arranged by subject, they contain printed articles, unique ephemera and visual materials. Often cited in For the Record articles, the files did not fail to come through for information about Alice Austen, her house, and the history of its origins in the 17th century, near demolition in the 1960s, and full restoration in the 1980s.

Elizabeth Alice Austen was born on Staten Island in 1866. At age two, she and her family moved into the nearby home of her grandfather, John Austen, where she lived until shortly before her death in 1952. Austen’s aunt introduced Alice to photography in the 1880s. Over the next fifty years, Austen created more than 7,000 glass-plate negatives and prints. Her images chronicled Staten Island, New York City, and particularly focused on the life of her friends and social circle. In 1917, her life partner, Gertrude Tate, joined Austen in the house where they remained until financial losses resulting from the Great Depression led them to lose the property in a bank foreclosure proceeding. Shortly before her death in 1952, an Austen photograph appeared on the cover of Life magazine and led to wider recognition of her talent. Austen’s photographs are now considered among the finest produced in America in the late 19th and early-20th centuries.

Alice Austen’s grandfather John Austen purchased the family home in 1844. It had been originally constructed as a one-room farmhouse in the 17th century and went through many years of gradual additions and alterations. Austen transformed it to the Gothic Revival style recognizable today. The Library’s vertical file helps to tell the story. The New Yorker magazine printed a “Talk of the Town” article on September 30, 1967. The uncredited author described a visit to “a benefit punch-and-supper party being given by an organization called—with portmanteau clumsiness characteristic of so many ardent champions of good causes—Friends of the Alice Austen House and Esplanade.” At that time, according to the article, a real-estate syndicate owned the house along with two parcels of adjacent land that they intended to demolish to make way for a cluster of high-rise apartment buildings. The article described the house, “long, low-roofed, and engulfed in the leafy jungle of a long-abandoned Victorian garden,” surrounded by a “jumble of old barns and outbuildings in the shadow of an enormous horse-chestnut tree.”

As is often the case with vertical file contents, the “NYC Historic Homes - Alice Austen House and Esplanade” folder also included ephemera such as a copy of an illustrated pamphlet, Gateway to America: Alice Austen House and Esplanade, dated 1968, prepared by the Friends group, mentioned in the New Yorker article. It is interesting to note that the “Friends,” listed in the pamphlet turned out to be very prominent mid-century New Yorkers: photographers Berenice Abbott and Edward Steichen; architects Philip Johnson and Robert A.M. Stern; historic preservationists Margot Gayle and Henry Hope Reed, Jr., among others. VIPs who apparently saw the importance of preserving the Austen homestead also included Joseph Papp, Alfred Eisenstadt, and Cornelius Vanderbilt.

The Friends succeeded in having the Austen house designated as a Landmark in 1971. According to the Landmark Designation Report in the Library collection:

“On the basis of a careful consideration of the history, the architecture and other features of this building, the Landmarks Preservation Commission finds that the Alice Austen House has a special character, special historical and aesthetic interest and value as part of the development, heritage and cultural characteristics of New York City.... Accordingly,... the Landmarks Preservation Commission designates as a Landmark the Alice Austen House, 2 Hylan Boulevard.” [November 9, 1971]

Soon after, in 1976, the City took title to the property, and in 1984 restoration of the house began. This information is gleaned from another item in the vertical files. An article in the Staten Island Advance, dated January 11, 1988, quoted Parks Commissioner Henry Stern’s remarks at a ceremony marking commencement of the restoration in 1984: “If we were dedicating this park because of the fabulous view, that would be enough. If we were dedicating the restoration of the house because it is a 17th-Century home of historical importance, that would be enough. If we were dedicating this house because of the brilliance of Alice Austen, that would be enough. But to have all these three things come together makes this an enormous event for New York.”

The history of the Austen House in the “Friends” brochure and other published sources provide the necessary dates to pursue research in the Municipal Archives collections. For example, the “Old Town” collection, recently processed and partially digitized with support from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission is one source. The ledgers in the collection had been assembled by the Comptroller shortly after consolidation in 1898. They consist of administrative and financial records from all the towns and villages newly incorporated into the Greater City of New York. Among them are the records of assessed valuation of real estate. Given the importance of revenue from property taxes it should not be surprising that the Comptroller made sure those records were preserved.

Maps and atlases in the Archives locate the Austen homestead in the Town of Edgewater. In the 1873 Assessment Roll for the Town of Edgewater John Austin’s property on Pennsylvania Avenue is described as one house on one acre of land, valued at $3,000, with the tax bill $45.00; “Paid” carefully noted on the roll.

The Property Card series are another essential resource in the Archives for research about the built environment. As noted in many previous For the Record articles, the cards list ownership, conveyance, building classifications, and assessed valuation data, generally from the 1930s through the 1970s. Each card also includes a small photographic print (also known as the “tax photographs”). The card for the Austen confirms Austen’s loss of the property to the bank during the Great Depression.

The Landmarks Preservation Commission’s 1971 designation report focused on the architectural significance of the “picturesque and charming example of the Gothic Revival style of architecture.” Similarly, most news accounts about Alice Austen and her house failed to acknowledge Austen’s relationship with her life partner Gertrude Tate. More recently, works such as Yochelson’s book have painted a more complete picture of Austen’s life and her role in the LGBTQ community. Today, the Alice Austen House is a New York City and National Landmark, on the Register of Historic Places, a member of the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s distinctive group of Historic Artists’ Homes and Studios, and is a National site of LGBTQ+ History. The LGBT-NYC Sites Project provides a well-researched description of the house and the significance of Alice Austen.

The 1964-1965 World’s Fair began as an idea floated by lawyer Robert Kopple in 1958. In August, 1959 Mayor Robert F. Wagner declared that 1964 would mark the 300th Anniversary of the establishment of New York City to be commemorated by holding a World’s Fair. (This was before City government determined that the City’s actual origin date could be traced to the Dutch colonists who occupied the region and established government operations in 1624.)  

An exhibit in the lobby at 31 Chambers Street, showcases highlights of the 1964-65 World’s Fair. The display draws heavily on brochures, reports and maps from the Municipal Library’s vertical file collection. The “vertical files” contain new clippings, handouts, media releases, leaflets and other documents that librarians compiled and stored in vertical file cabinets. The files on the 1964-65 World’s Fair are extensive. File folders in alphabetical order ranging from Accommodations to Women document both the 1939 and 1964 Fairs. The exhibit also includes items from the Municipal Archives, including donated ephemera such as a Sinclair Oil dinosaur.

The Fair ran for two years, April 22 through October 18, 1964, and April 21 through October 17, 1965. Industrial and technological changes premiered at the Fair included color television, push button phones, and air conditioning. If you ask New Yorkers of a certain age what they recall about the 1964 World’s Fair, a flood of fond memories are disclosed. The 1964-65 fair conjures futuristic images, modern inventions and youthful excitement for those who attended. Some remember it as a monument to a less-troubled city and country. Others hold a less positive view of the Fair.

In The Power Broker, for example, author Robert Caro characterized it as Moses’ last grasp at immortality. It was a way to achieve a bigger goal:  “…a dream out of his youth that had remained bright in his old age—a dream of a great park, the greatest in New York City, the greatest within the limits of any city in the world, the ultimate urban park, rus in urbe supreme, a park worthy of being named “Robert Moses Park…. The Fair, he realized at once, might at last be the means to achieve it. For the site of the Fair, like the site of the dream, was the Flushing Meadows.”

According to Caro, ever since the 1920s, Robert Moses had envisioned turning the ash heap in Queens into a large park. In the mid -1930s he had a chance when the trio of federal, state and City governments funded park infrastructure to create the 1939 World’s Fair: The World of Tomorrow. Projected to reap a $4 million profit for the City that would fund a ribbon of parks throughout Queens, and managed by Grover Whelan, the Fair was a financial disaster. Most of the exhibits and buildings constructed for the event were bulldozed and debris littered the post-fair site which soon became overgrown and swampy. After World War II it was under consideration as the location for the United Nations, despite its deteriorated condition. The next evolution was the proposed 1964 World’s Fair with a theme, “Peace through Understanding.” Quite a lofty sentiment but one that did not suffuse the multi-year build or the Fair itself.  

In 1959, Mayor Robert Wagner petitioned the federal government for authorization to hold the Fair in Flushing Meadow Park, formerly the site of the 1939 World’s Fair. The federal government approved the proposal. The governing body for world’s fairs (nowadays called Expos), the Bureau Internationale des Expositions, rejected the proposal because it violated rules on timing and location. Moses didn’t help matters. As a result, European countries boycotted the Fair, except for Spain.  

This did not deter Robert Moses who had become the President of the World’s Fair Corporation, forcing Kopple out. Moses focused recruitment efforts on the rest of the world. Ultimately, the Fair’s 144 attractions included pavilions from 80 countries, 24 States and 350 companies, trade associations, organizations and religions.

Twenty-four African countries showcased various cultural traditions in the pavilion dedicated to that continent. France, Denmark, Sweden and Greece were represented by commercial associations showcasing their wares. Swiss engineering was well-represented by the Sky Ride. The government of Israel declined to participate; a coalition established the American-Israel Pavilion. Close by, the Kingdom of Jordan displayed the recently discovered Dead Sea Scrolls and a poem decrying the status of Palestinian refugees which triggered substantial outcry and protests.   

General Motors “New Futurama” show and the Vatican’s display of the Michelangelo sculpture Pieta were enormously popular. In Futurama, riders floated through various scenes imaging the ocean, desert, and city at a future point, showcasing new inventions. The “It’s a Small World” show produced by Pepsi Cola along with the Disney Corporation collected an entry fee, none of which actually went to UNICEF. Ford Motors debuted a new car: the Mustang. And Sinclair Oil’s dinosaur symbol was omnipresent. The beauty products manufacturer, Clairol, offered women older than 16 an opportunity to peer into a big plastic bubble for the purpose of receiving an analysis of the person’s best hair color.

Almost all of the pavilions were temporary structures, demolished at the end of the Fair in 1965. Remnants of the Fair still exist in Flushing Meadow Park. They include the Unisphere, the New York State Pavilion, the Hall of Science and Industry, the Terrace on the Park, and the Marina, which was constructed especially for the Fair. The NYC Pavilion is now the home of the Queens Museum.  

The Fair opened at the height of the Civil Rights movement. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had delivered his inspirational I Have A Dream speech at the March on Washington in 1963. A coalition of Americans, led by the Urban League, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) were organizing around the country for the right to vote, leading to the enactment of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. 

New York City was not immune from the battle for civil rights. The “Freedom Day” school boycott in February 1964, rent strikes, protests against employment discrimination, a six-day uprising after a detectives shot a young man in Harlem had all ratcheted up pressure for the City to address racial inequity. The Fair offered an opportunity to respond to demands for fair and equal employment, quality schools, substandard housing, discriminatory pricing, among other issues.    

In early April, the Brooklyn chapter of CORE announced a “stall in” at which drivers would run out of gas or otherwise have their automobiles incapacitated along the five roadways leading to the Fair. The protest was opposed by CORE national leader James Farmer, but the local activists persisted. On opening day, the City deployed more than 1,000 police officers along the highways. Despite the local organizing, and perhaps because of City government’s threats, very few drivers participated, and the “stall in” was unsuccessful. But protests continued throughout the duration of the fair, including pickets at the Florida exhibit at which four young women were arrested for holding illegal placards and trespassing. Regular protests occurred at the Schaeffer Brewery location, protesting employment discrimination.

Speaking at the opening of the Fair in 1964, President Lyndon Baines Johnson addressed the Fair’s theme:  Peace Through Understanding.

“This fair represents the most promising of our hopes. It gathers together, from 80 countries, the achievements of industry, the wealth of nations, the creations of man. This fair shows us what man at his most creative and constructive is capable of doing.

But unless we can achieve the theme of this fair--"peace through understanding"-unless we can use our skill and our wisdom to conquer conflict as we have conquered science--then our hopes of today--these proud achievements--will go under in the devastation of tomorrow.”

Student protestors drowned out portions of the President’s speech by shouting chants of “Freedom Now” and “Jim Crow Must Go” to the dismay of the leaders assembled for the event.

Even Dr. Ralph J. Bunche the Under-Secretary for Special Political Affairs at the United Nations had complaints. He wrote Governor Nelson Rockefeller about the limited representation of Black people in the film shown at the New York State Pavilion. The Governor defended the film, exhibiting a lack of awareness. For example, for the section depicting the City’s nightlife, he wrote “. . . in the section showing New York City at night, there are shots taken of chorus lines in two night clubs and the Rockettes . . .  there is at least one Negro girl included in the Rockettes shown in the film.”

Like its predecessor, the 1964-65 World’s Fair was not a money-maker. Moses and the Fair Corporation had projected a $53 million surplus in year one which would be used to repay the City, investors and to fund improvements to Flushing Meadow Park. Instead, the Fair ultimately operated at a loss. In July, 1964, a confidential letter to business and media executives called the Fair a fiasco. Only 27 million people visited the fair in its first year, far short of the 40 million promised by Moses.

The Department’s exhibit New York World’s Fair 1964-65 will be open to visitors through March 2026. The exhibit uses photos and ephemera from the Municipal Archives and Library collections to highlight key exhibits and features of the fair. 

Before 1938, many candidates, would have found it difficult to gain access to the City’s airwaves at all. WNYC’s director at the time, Christie Bohnsack, largely followed the lead of the Tammany Hall political machine, which tended to lump progressive movements together under a broad—and pejorative—“red” label.

Change began with Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia’s second term in 1938. La Guardia had run with the support of the relatively new American Labor Party (1936-1956), a nexus of labor leaders and former Socialist Party members who rebranded themselves as the Social Democratic Federation.

La Guardia appointed Morris S. Novik as director of WNYC. Novik arrived from WEVD, a station owned and operated by the progressive Jewish Forward and founded by the Socialist Party as a memorial to its late leader, Eugene Victor Debs. The connection was unambiguous—and not lost on La Guardia’s opponents.

Within weeks, critics seized on a WNYC travelogue that painted an unusually rosy picture of the Soviet Union while avoiding criticism of Joseph Stalin’s dictatorship. The broadcast touched off a political storm, complete with calls to shut down the station and a formal investigation. The controversy eventually collapsed when it was revealed that the program had been produced by a subsidiary of the American Express Company as a piece of travel promotion. Still, the episode appears to have had a chilling effect.

Left-leaning voices were not barred from WNYC after that, but Novik seems to have been cautious about offering airtime to overt socialists or communists. One notable exception came in August 1940, when the station aired a program featuring five young members of junior lodges affiliated with the Communist Party-influenced International Workers Organization (IWO). The Daily Worker reported the teenagers spoke out against a proposal for a military draft, responding to a group of youths who had endorsed a national call-up on Youth Builders a week earlier.

No recordings of explicitly socialist programming from this period survive in the Municipal Archives’ WNYC lacquer disc collection. Newspaper radio listings from late October 1944 and 1945, however, do note a couple of broadcasts titled “Socialist Labor Talk” and “Socialist Party.” These election-season talks include an appearance by Joseph G. Glass, the Socialist Party candidate for mayor.  

Running for Mayor In 1949, and in his earlier campaigns, Congressman Vito Marcantonio campaigned on the progressive American Labor Party line. As such he was included among equal time broadcasts. While such broadcasts were not uncommon because of the FCC provision and leased time, Socialist and Communist Party officials were also heard occasionally in 1930s and 1940s on the major national commercial networks CBS, NBC, and the Mutual Broadcasting System.

The earliest surviving WNYC recordings featuring socialist speakers date well after Novik’s tenure and continued to air under the FCC’s equal-time provision. In October 1952, Darlington Hoopes, the Socialist Party’s candidate for president, addressed issues of affordability and economic insecurity, criticizing both Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Harry Truman’s Fair Deal. Hoopes argued that the socialist model pursued by Britain’s Labor Party offered a path seriously worth considering.

That same year, WNYC listeners also heard from the leading socialist candidates running for U.S. Senate in New York. Socialist Party candidate Joseph Glass used one broadcast to distinguish his views from those of Nathan Karp of the Socialist Labor Party (SLP) and Michael Bartell of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). All three contenders appeared on Campus Press Conference, where newsmakers faced questions from a panel of local college newspaper editors and reporters.

In the November 5th program, moderated by a young Gabe Pressman, Glass argued for cost-of-living adjustments to Social Security and maintained—reluctantly—that communist aggression in Korea needed to be resisted.

Karp of the SLP appeared two days earlier, focusing primarily on party doctrine rather than specific policy proposals. While a bit strident here, he reportedly mellowed in later years and did stand-up comedy at SLP conventions and meetings.

Bartell of the SWP, the Trotskyist candidate, appeared on October 28, 1952. He began by laying out a basic definition of his party as a revolutionary socialist one achieving its goals through democratic means.  The balance of time was spent responding to questions about the Korean conflict, the Soviet Union, China and the Berlin blockade. In his last few minutes Bartell called for an end to an economy based on military armament, a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Korea, and the abolition of the Smith Act. This law imposed criminal penalties for advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government by force or violence and required all foreigners over the age of 14 to register with the federal government.  

In January 1953, prominent American Socialist Norman Thomas delivered the address “What Are We Voting For?” at the Cooper Union Forum. The talk was distributed nationwide through the National Association of Educational Broadcasters’ tape network—the first non-commercial radio syndication system, initiated by WNYC.

In this talk Thomas decried our vote for electors over the popular vote, and the role played by southern white supremacist Democrats blocking civil rights legislation. He argued that on average, there are not large differences between Republicans and Democrats. His answer, in part, is what he called a “democratic socialist party.” Thomas also called for international control over atomic weapons, campaign finance reform, and transparency over “the fog of words.”

Thomas,  a serial Socialist Party candidate for President (1928-1948), would be heard over the municipal station another six times as part of the Cooper Union’s Great Hall series of talks between 1953 and 1964. He also appeared on WNYC’s broadcast of The New York Herald Tribune Book and Author Luncheon in 1964, where he addressed civil rights, nuclear disarmament, and poverty, while warning progressive listeners against political fatalism.

In 1957 “Mrs.” Joyce Cowley, a rare woman candidate with the anti-Stalinist Socialist Workers Party, ran for New York City Mayor. A year earlier she had been a candidate for the New York State Senate. She echoed much of what had been said by Bartell but did emphasize the need for civil rights. She also demanded the removal of the SWP from the Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations. Cowley called for an end to nuclear weapons tests, production for peace, not war and charged that the Democratic Party had conspired to keep the SWP off the ballot.

Although the Democratic Socialists of America would not be founded until 1982, the phrase “democratic socialist” appeared sporadically in 1920s and ‘30s news reports, particularly in reference to Europe, but slowly came into more frequent use during the Cold War. In the 1960s and ‘70s, Norman Thomas and writer and activist Michael Harrington often self-identified as democratic socialists to signal a clear rejection of Soviet communism while maintaining a socialist critique of capitalism. Harrington’s usage of the phrase in the 1960s and ‘70s helped cement “democratic socialism” as a recognizable label in U.S. political discourse.

Michael Harrington, a member of the American Socialist Party and head of the League for Industrial Democracy, appeared on the city’s station in 1968. In an interview with Patricia Marx he discussed his influential book The Other America, which exposed the persistence of poverty and inequality in postwar America.

Many socialist ideas—variously labeled, constrained, and contested—have surfaced repeatedly in New York City’s political life and on its municipal airwaves, even during the Cold War period of intense suspicion and retrenchment. The evolution of those voices over WNYC reflects not only shifts in the political climate but also broader debates about democracy, economic justice, and legitimacy in public discourse. Mamdani’s victory suggests that many arguments on behalf of the poor, working class, and disenfranchised, once relegated to the margins, have reentered the civic mainstream, carrying with them a history that is longer, and more complex, than current headlines may suggest.

Andy Lanset (retired) was the Founding Director of the New York Public Radio Archives.

Known as the City’s “Official Greeter,” Whelan led the Mayor’s Office for Receptions to Distinguished Guests, a.k.a. the Mayor’s Reception Committee, from 1918 to 1953.  

On June 19, 1945, just six weeks after hostilities in Europe ceased, Whalen and Reception Committee staff organized a reception for General Dwight D. Eisenhower. According to news reports the following day, crowds estimated at a half million gave a rapturous thank you to “Ike” as his motorcade made its way from LaGuardia Airport in Queens, to Manhattan, traveling down Fifth Avenue and Broadway and up the Canyon of Heroes. After a brief ceremony at City Hall and a luncheon at Gracie Mansion, Eisenhower’s motorcade brought him to a baseball game at Yankee Stadium. His whirlwind day concluded with a banquet at the Waldorf-Astoria. News articles noted that New Yorkers mostly ignored instructions from City officials to hold off on showering the victorious leader with paper, then still needed for the war-effort.  

Two months later, on August 27, the Reception Committee let New Yorkers express their gratitude to the French leader Charles F. De Gaulle. Soon after, on September 13, the Committee organized a ticker-tape parade and welcome home ceremony for General Jonathan Wainwright. The Committee again used their considerable skill to stage welcome home events for Admiral Chester Nimitz on October 9, and Admiral William Halsey on December 14.

Reception Committee staff pasted pictures from the events on 30 large (18 by 24-inch) scrapbook pages; usually three or four to a sheet. They are not captioned. The paper has deteriorated but it may not be possible to remove the pictures without causing damage. For now, conservators will clean the photographs and re-house them in appropriate containers. Future digitization will provide public access.

For the Record readers are invited to review a selection of pictures from this unique artifact.

New Visions of Old New York features historical maps, drawings, sketches, and official documents from the New York City Municipal Archives alongside newly imagined, digitally-generated content from the New Amsterdam History Center’s Mapping Early New York project. The selections represent ways in which the lives of women, enslaved people, and Native Americans intersected with the settlement created by the Dutch West India Company.

A closing event on December 11th brought together the organizers and others in the community to reflect on the exhibit. Maria Iacullo-Bird of Pace University led a panel discussion with Michael Lorenzini (of the NYC Department of Records & Information Services), Drew Shuptar-Rayvis (an Algonkian Historical Consultant for The New Amsterdam History Center), and Kamau Ware (founder of the Black Gotham Experience, which tells the oft-forgotten stories of the early Black residents of New York City).

The successful collaboration also prompted the Met to mount an exhibition of seven important drawings from the collection in a joint special installation with their Education Department, which opened on December 8th. On view until February 22nd, the installation displays, for the first time since 1983, several of the large-scale presentation drawings created by John and Washington Roebling and Wilhelm Hildenbrand. The longest drawing in the collection, which depicts the full span of the bridge and measures more than 25 feet long, has never been exhibited before. Thus, the exhibition offers a rare opportunity to see these exquisite drawings in an equally exquisite setting.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the Met invited me to participate in an “Expert Talk” on December 9th along with Marco Leona, the David Koch Scientist in Charge at the Met, and Met Curator, Elena Carrara. Open to the public, the panel spoke about the history and preservation of the collection, the scientific work performed by the Met, and the exhibition process.

Given the size of the collection, not to mention the colossal size of many individual drawings, preserving and exhibiting the collection presented numerous challenges. The Met may in fact be one of few institutions in the world that could successfully mount an exhibition on such a scale. In addition to size, the condition issues the drawings presented posed challenges for conservation, framing, and transport.

Prior to their accession by the Municipal Archives, the drawings spent the better part of a century in a dusty carpenter’s workshop beneath the Williamsburg Bridge under the purview of the Department of Transportation and its various historical iterations, where they were often consulted by City engineers for bridge repairs and renovations. Subjected to water leaks, mold, exhaust fumes from surrounding traffic, and rough handling, the drawings took a great deal of abuse. The primary condition issues we encountered included deteriorated paper supports, discoloration, tears and abrasions, local staining, faded media, and damage from mold and degraded adhesives.

To help us better understand how the drawings were created and what specific materials and media we were dealing with, I reached out to the Met’s Scientific Research Department in July 2023 and proposed a collaboration. The Met’s scientists often collaborate with smaller institutions via their Scientific Research Partnerships program to share their extensive analytical capabilities. Their enthusiastic yes to the proposal led to several visits between our institutions and a very productive partnership.

The Met’s findings confirmed the presence of certain pigments, such as vermillion, Prussian blue, earth pigments, and smalt, which helped to direct the methods used in our treatment of the drawings. Awareness of the presence of specific pigments also supports guidelines for light exposure given their known light sensitivity. Other findings revealed potential agents of deterioration in the paper substrates of some of the drawings, including rosin and kaolin. Infrared imaging allowed us to read for the first time some of the many notations written by Washington Roebling on the drawings and give a clearer view of intricate details. The imaging and analysis conducted by the Met not only supported our recent treatment efforts and understanding of drawings but will continue to support preservation of the collection in the future.

The work of Archives’ conservators along with the generous support of the Met’s Scientific Research and Education Departments have yielded insights into the Brooklyn Bridge plans that would not have otherwise been possible. The collaboration has been a wonderful opportunity to support a more nuanced approach to the drawings’ treatment and to expand the Archives’ audience for this remarkable collection.

https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/the-brooklyn-bridge-up-close

Recent news reports have suggested that New York City has been misnumbering its Mayors since the 1600s. Not that they were numbering them at that time, but ever since the City started giving official numerical designations, the numbering has gone awry.

This past August, historian Paul Hortenstine noticed that the “Official” list of Mayors failed to include the second term of Mayor Matthias Nicolls (Nicoll). He had served two non-consecutive terms, the first from 1671-1672, and the second from 1674-1675. Hortenstine was not the first to notice this discrepancy. In 1989, the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society published an article by Peter Christoph revealing that every mayor after #7 had been misnumbered. As Christoph pointed out, if a Mayor had two non-consecutive terms the practice was to assign them two numbers, starting with Thomas Willett, who was Mayor #1 and #3. He noted four other early Mayors credited with two terms.

We thought the error might have been due to a little-known hiccup in mayoral history. In July 1673, the Dutch (who had established the colony of New Amsterdam in 1625 and lost it in 1664), invaded and took it back. For fifteen months the colony (renamed “New Orange”) was under a Dutch “Council of War,” that restored the Dutch-style government of a council of Burgomasters and Schepens. As a result, there was not a “Mayor of New York” between July 1673 and November 1674, when the English Governor, Edmund Andros, reappointed Nicolls. Moreover, Nicolls had not been Mayor when the Dutch invaded, his successor, John Lawrence, had assumed that role. So, by all rights, Nicolls served two non-consecutive terms with another Mayor in the middle, making him Mayor #6 and #8. Thereby moving everyone else one place down the line. Lawrence was appointed Deputy Mayor in 1674, but also served another non-consecutive term as Mayor, the 2nd time in 1691, making him both #7 and #20 (under the corrected numbering system).

Christoph, in a footnote, surmised the error arose from the compiler using the “Minutes of the Mayor’s Court” as a source, and noted that a volume for the period November 1674-September 1675 had been missing for some time. In 1982, historian Kenneth Scott located the volume at the New York County Clerk’s Division of Old Records. At that time, all the earlier Dutch and English Court minutes resided with the New York City Clerk. On December 30, 1985, outgoing City Clerk David N. Dinkins transferred the entire collection of colonial-era records held by the City Clerk to the Municipal Archives. The 1674-1675 volume still resides with the County Clerk in a later series of Mayor’s Court records covering the years 1674 to 1820. However, the Minutes of the Common Council, which are also with the Municipal Archives and were published in 1905, still have a gap from 1674-1675.

There is yet another missing volume from these records—the volume documenting activities from October 13, 1672 to August 11, 1673. The last entry in the preceding volume, dated October 12, 1672, lists “Capt. Matthius Nicolls, May[or]” at the top. The next book in Archives possession starts on August 12, 1673, in Dutch, titled “Proceedings of the War Council of New Orange.” Those Dutch records end on November 10, 1674. The next volume begins, in English again, with Matthius Nicolls as Mayor. So, the first term of John Lawrence is missing entirely from the historical record. Some compiler must have realized this and inserted him into the history but forgot to split Nicolls’ two terms.

The earliest printed list of Mayors (without numbers) that we located, appeared in the first Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York 1841-1842 edition, under the authority of Samuel J. Willis, Clerk of the Common Council. The list has large gaps in the colonial period and includes a note, “there are no records during the time of the first English possession in the Clerk’s office.” The Manual, as was explained in the preface, was created because it had, “been thought expedient to enlarge the substance of the City Hall Directory... by the introduction of additional matter interesting and useful to members of the Corporation....”

The first Manual listed “Mayors,” members of the City Council, and the Dutch colonial government officers of New Amsterdam. The Manuals became more widely associated with then Assistant Clerk and future Clerk, David Thomas Valentine. During D.T. Valentine’s tenure, from 1843 to 1867, the manuals became increasingly elaborate and lavishly illustrated with fold-out maps and historical information. He reprinted the 1841 list verbatim in the 1842-1843 edition. In the 1853 edition, Valentine included “Sketches of the Mayors of New York from 1665 to 1834.” This included all the colonial English Mayors but not the Dutch leaders. It does not mention Nicolls’ second term. This erroneous list was also published in the Civil List and Forms of Government of the Colony and State of New York beginning with the 1865 edition.

In the 1854, 1863, and 1866 editions of the Manual, Valentine printed an alphabetical “List of the Members of the City Government from its incorporation (1653) up to the present time...” This list included the Dutch but omits Mayor John Lawrence, an error repeated through the 1866 edition. In his 1861 Manual, Valentine also published a section called “Mayors of City,” which ignores the colonial period entirely. Instead, the list begins after the American Revolution with Mayor James Duane in 1783. The 1869 and 1870 editions contain something close to the current list of “Mayors of the City of New York” starting on 1665. However, they omitted two mayors.

In 1918 the Official Directory of the City of New York, a.k.a. the “Green Book,” began publication under the direction of the Supervisor of the City Record. In 1921 the Green Book included a list of Mayors. In it, and all subsequent editions, until it went completely online in 2021, they reprinted and updated the list of mayors, with number designations. Up through 1936 the list was consistent. It started with Thomas Willett at #1 and finished with #98—LaGuardia. Then, starting in 1937, they added a mayor, Charles Lodwik as #21 (1694 to 1695) and bumped everyone after him up one so that LaGuardia became #99. Lodwik had also been missing from the 1869 and 1870 lists in the Manual, most likely the source for the Green Book. However, Lodwik (sometimes spelled Lodewick) had been included in the list of Mayors Valentine published in 1853 as “Charles Lodowick, Mayor in 1694.”

The insertion of Lodwik to the list in 1937 may originate with the 1935 publication of Select Cases of the Mayor’s Court as it contains two mentions of Mayor Charles Lodwik. The book also contains the first mention in print of Nicolls’ 1674 term. It states “The records of the Mayor’s Court included in this volume begin more properly with the reoccupation of the English in 1674. The new mayor and deputy-mayor, Matthias Nicolls and John Lawrence, respectively, had both held the mayoralty under the first English rule.”

Additional confusion about the number of Mayors arises from the differing forms of government during the Dutch and English colonial periods. Until 1977, the City founding date was listed as 1664. In 1977, the founding date was set as “1625” to acknowledge the year the Dutch established a colony on Manhattan. Between 1625 to 1653 the colony was under the authority of the Dutch colonial governors. In 1653, New Amsterdam incorporated under a charter and established the Dutch system of Burgomasters and Schepens, and Schout, which could roughly translate to offices of mayors, aldermen, and sheriff. These bodies decided several different functions, including criminal and civil legal matters, and municipal governance.

On June 12, 1665, the English Governor Richard Nicolls (no relation) abolished the Dutch court and established the first Mayor’s Court, naming Thomas Willet as Mayor. Willet is traditionally listed as the first mayor.

However, even if the count begins in 1665, why does the list skip the new court of Burgomasters and Schepens appointed on August 17th, 1673? Part of the answer is that the Dutch system, with two or three Burgomasters (or Mayors) serving jointly is confusing. And as noted above, part of it is that the Dutch were largely written out of the history of New York City[i] until the 1970s. Given that the first English Mayors appointed by the Governor served functions similar to[ii] their Dutch predecessors, why not include the Burgomasters in the count? If the count included Burgomasters who served multiple, non-consecutive terms, 15 additional Mayors[iii] would be on the list.

The aforementioned hiccup in 1673 was not the only period in which the line of Mayors was broken. Just over a hundred years later, on June 22, 1776, the line was interrupted again when the Continental Army arrested Mayor David Matthews. He escaped from house arrest in December 1776 and returned to New York, then under British military control. Matthews retained the title of Mayor with greatly reduced power. He left the City on November 25th, 1783 (Evacuation Day). The next Mayor was appointed on February 10, 1784.

Another oddity is that when Mayor James J. Walker was forced to resign due to a corruption scandal an “Acting Mayor,” Joseph V. McKee—President of the New York City Board of Aldermen—was appointed on September 1, 1932. In the subsequent special election, McKee lost to John P. O’Brien who served for one full year, 1933. O’Brien is on the list as #96, but although McKee is noted, he is not given a number. When William O’Dwyer left office in September 1950, Vincent R. Impellitteri, President of the City Council, assumed the role of Mayor. He is counted because he won the special election in November 1950 and served a full four-year term. McKee is not the only Acting Mayor who is not counted—Ardolph Kline finished William Gaynor’s term, after the latter died on September 10, 1913 of complications from an assassination attempt three years prior.

The Green Book records two additional instances, “T. Coman” in 1868, and “S.B.H. Vance” in 1874. They are on the list but are not counted as Mayors. Thomas Coman was President of the Board of Aldermen from 1868 to 1871. When Mayor John Thompson Hoffman left office to become Governor, Coman was elevated to Acting Mayor, serving from December 1, 1868, to January 4, 1869. The next Tammany-backed Mayor appointed him to oversee construction of the New York County (Tweed) Courthouse, and he was indicted for corruption. Samuel B.H. Vance similarly ascended to Acting Mayor from the position of President of the Board of Aldermen on November 30, 1874, when Mayor William Havemeyer died. He served until January 1, 1875, when William Wickman was sworn in. Exactly four weeks. No scandals recorded.

The count of Mayors in New York City government seems not to be determined by a uniform set of rules. Four Mayors who assumed the role by Charter mandate, but who were not elected, are not counted. In the colonial era, Mayors appointed by the English are counted. But not Dutch ones. Or “Acting” ones. Who makes up these rules?

Hortenstine has identified two additional colonial-era “Acting Mayors,” William Beekman from 1681-1683, who had been a Burgomaster in 1674, and Gerardus Stuyvesant in 1744. Neither has been listed in the Green Book and their dates in office overlap with other listed Mayors. The Municipal Archives’ finding aid to the Records of the Early Mayors, also has a numbered list of Mayors. It does not have Nicolls’ second term, or the two Acting Mayors Hortenstine identified, but it has another, Thomas Hood. Hortenstine believes that to be a transcription error however, and that it was Phillip French who assumed the office after Thomas Noell died from smallpox in 1702. The Archives list does assign numbers to Acting Mayors, and when last updated it had Bill de Blasio at #114. Adding the three missing terms, but subtracting Hood, he would be #116, making Adams #117 and Mamdani #118.

The initial question was, should Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani be counted as the 111th or 112th? But the answer has proven far more complex. The numbering of New York City “Mayors” has been somewhat arbitrary and inconsistent. Maybe he should be number 118? If the Dutch Burgomasters were counted in the same way we count Mayors serving non-consecutive terms, another fifteen would be included so the Mayor-elect might be number 133. There may even be other missing Mayors. As far as employees at the Department of Records and Information Services can tell, no government agency has been tasked with “counting” Mayors. The numbers have been more a matter of convenience. One thing for certain is he is not Mayor 111. By our current Anglo-centric numbering practice (not including Acting Mayors) it does appear that on January 1, 2026, Mayor Mamdani should be Mayor number 112.

[i] Valentine complained, in an 1867 letter, that the Dutch records “were not very attentively cared for, having been without readers for probably a century and more. No attempt had been made to translate them; and... the history of New Amsterdam... was not supposed to lie hidden in these dusty, unbound and forbidding volumes.”

[ii] It was not until the Dongan Charter of 1683 that City government more closely resembled our own, with a “common council” that consisted of a mayor, recorder, six aldermen, and six assistant aldermen. Most importantly, the Dongan Charter separated the legislative functions of the council from the two judicial courts that were established. However, the Mayor was still appointed by various governmental bodies until 1834 when Cornelius W. Lawrence was democratically elected Mayor. With the exception of Peter Delanoy who was democratically elected in 1689, during Leisler’s rebellion, a short-lived colonial uprising against Catholic English rule.

[iii] The Burgomasters were the following: 1653: Arent van Hattem, Martin Cregier; 1654: Arent van Hattem (replaced by Allard Anthony), Martin Cregier; 1655-1656: Allard Anthony, Oloff Stevenson van Cortland; 1657: Allard Anthony, Paulus Leendertseen van der Grist; 1658: Paulus Leendertseen van der Grist, Oloff Stevenson van Cortland; 1659: Oloff Stevenson van Cortland, Martin Cregier; 1660: Martin Cregier, Allard Anthony, Oloff Stevenson van Cortland; 1661: Allard Anthony, Paulus Leendertseen van der Grist; 1662: Paulus Leendertseen van der Grist, Oloff Stevenson van Cortland; 1663: Oloff Stevenson van Cortland, Martin Cregier, Paulus Leendertseen van der Grist; 1664: Paulus Leendertseen van der Grist, Cornelis Steenwyck; 1673: Johannes van Brugh, Johannes de Peyster, Ægidius Luyck; 1674: Johannes van Brugh, William Beeckman.

Sources:

American Legal Records—Volume 2: Select Cases of the Mayor’s Court of New York City, 1674-1784. Pp. 40-62. The American Historical Association, 1935. https://www.familysearch.org/library/books/viewer/854396/?offset=569061#page=55&viewer=picture&o=download&n=0&q=%22john%20lawrence%22

Andrews, William Loring: “David T. Valentine” reprinted in Valentine’s Manuals: A General Index to the Manuals of the Corporation of the City of New York, 1841-1870. Harbor Hill Books, 1981 (originally published 1900).

Christoph, Peter R., “Mattias Nicolls: Sixth and Eighth Mayor of New York.” The New York Genealogical and Biographical Society Record, July 1989: Volume 120, issue 3, pages 26-27. https://www.newyorkfamilyhistory.org/online-records/nygb-record/566-602/26

Civil List and Forms of Government of the Colony and State of New York: containing notes on the various governmental organizations; lists of the principal colonial, state and county officers, and the congressional delegations and presidential electors, with the votes of the electoral colleges. The whole arranged in constitutional periods. Weed, Parsons and Co., 1870. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009014294

Hortenstine, Paul. “NY City Mayors and Slavery: Matthius Nicolls: 6th & 8th.” 2025. Northeast Slavery Records Index. https://nesri.commons.gc.cuny.edu/matthias-nicoll-6th-and-8th/

Guide to the records of the Early Mayors, 1826-1897. NYC Municipal Archives. https://dorisarchive.blob.core.windows.net/finding-aids/FindingAidsPDFs/OM-EMO_REC0002_FA-MASTER.pdf

Valentine, David. T., et. al. Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York by New York (N.Y.). Common Council; 1841, 1853, 1861, 1866, 1870. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000054276

This week, project staff discuss the historical background of the human rights movement and how the records in the CCHR collection tell the story. Several items identified during processing serve to illustrate this important historical trajectory.

In 1943 Mayor LaGuardia established The Mayor’s Committee on Unity, the first New York City municipal government entity created specifically to address racial and religious tensions and discrimination. The Committee investigated discrimination, mediated community disputes, and produced reports on issues such as inequities in education and city services. Its leadership and membership reflected the city’s diverse communities, and its research was widely circulated to government agencies, universities, and civil rights organizations.

Community members frequently brought neighborhood concerns directly to the Mayor’s Committee on Unity; especially complex or ongoing issues were assigned to subcommittees. For example, the Subcommittee on City Services in Congested Areas investigated inequities in sanitation services within densely-populated minority neighborhoods, while the Subcommittee on Press Treatment of Minority Groups worked with local newspapers to encourage adoption of fair and non-discriminatory news coverage protocols.

Long before Mayor LaGuardia established the Unity Committee, specifically dedicated to human and civil rights, several organizations laid the groundwork for addressing institutional discrimination and the need for change. A few organizations that influenced the debate and worked with the City government are shown below.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909, held its first meeting in New York City. They came into being after the 1908 Springfield Race Riot in Illinois. Accounts of mobs terrorizing the town, lynching Black citizens and burning homes and businesses shocked the nation. The first national organization formed to fight for the rights of Black Americans, the NAACP interracial membership included the Black writers and activists W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells-Barnett. They led national campaigns against lynching and segregation, advanced rights through strategic litigation (culminating in victories like Brown v. Board of Education), and built sustained public advocacy for racial equality in the United States.

in 1913, the B’nai B’rith, a Jewish fraternal organization, founded the Anti-Defamation League to combat antisemitism and fight for civil rights for all marginalized groups in the United States. Members monitored extremist groups like the KKK, fought against discriminatory hiring practices, and promoted civil rights legislation.

In 1942, a group of interracial students in Chicago organized the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). They were inspired by methods of non-violent protest and applied those tactics to help end segregation and discrimination in the United States through sit-ins, voter registration drives, and numerous de-segregation campaigns.

During WW II, Americans heavily promoted the idea that they were fighting for democracy, freedom, and the dignity of all people. There was a strong cultural understanding of the dichotomy “Democracy vs. Fascism.” This idea strengthened changing attitudes towards the necessity of human and civil rights, not just in the war effort, but in the U.S. as well. The 1940’s were still a deeply racially segregated era in the U.S., but northern urban centers, especially New York City, Chicago, and Detroit were some of the first to reach beyond the concept of individualized racism and start addressing structural racism within localized urban contexts.

The United Nations established Human Rights Day in 1950 to celebrate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Adopted on December 10, 1948, the Declaration is the first global statement of fundamental human rights. In recognition of this occasion, it is valuable to consider how national and international human rights discourse in the latter half of the twentieth century shaped the work of New York City government.

In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas, declared “. . . in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. The American Civil Rights Movement gained momentum after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. In 1957, the City’s Unity Committee evolved into a permanent city-funded agency, the Commission on Intergroup Relations.

Events around the country during this period, ranging from the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955, integration of the Little Rock Central High School, the March on Washington and passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, all contributed to a greater awareness of discrimination. While New York had made attempts to address school segregation prior to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, progress was slow and uneven. By 1964, frustration over these delays led to a series of massive school boycotts co-organized by the NAACP, the Harlem Parents Committee, CORE, PACE, and the Pan Hellenic Council. About 45% of all NYC students boycotted school on February 3, 1964. An estimated 464,361 students and teachers participated overall, the boycott being so large that it exceeded the number of people who took part in the March on Washington.

Established in 1957, the Commission on Intergroup Relations had a broad mandate, but it created fewer records than the earlier Committee on Unity, and its successor organization, the City Commission on Human Rights. It could be argued that the committee was struggling to keep pace with a rapidly shifting social landscape, resulting in record-keeping practices and organizational structures that were less robust than usual.

In 1962, the Commission on Human Rights took over this role and the administrative records reveal a complex engagement with civil rights issues, activist groups, and civil rights leaders of that time. The first executive director of the Commission on Human Rights, Madison Jones, was the point person for all civil rights issues relayed from the Mayor’s office, as evidenced in the records of their frequent correspondence. A large part of the administrative records also deals with the desegregation of NYC schools. Materials found in the series include reports, action plans, data, press releases, and boycott responses. The CCHR was definitely aware of, and in conversation with, civil rights activist groups and civil rights leaders—there are references and mentions of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X in the records.

The relationship between CCHR and the political discourse of the time seemed to shift in nature, to that of response, as opposed to the early Mayor’s Committee on Unity’s work, which was more preemptive and forward-looking. But the political discourse around human rights was also very different in the 1940’s compared to the 1960’s, which could partly account for the change in the Commission’s programmatic planning. The archival records suggest that it was the activist groups who pushed for the changes that the city government then responded to, and the city government was often targeted and criticized for its seeming indifference due to its slow bureaucratic processes in making the changes. It would certainly be an interesting research topic to study how the city government’s actions changed, how the political landscape changed, and how the public’s attitudes towards the city government changed when reflecting on civil rights issues from the 1940’s-1960’s.

Current City Organizations Dealing with Human Rights

Since the 1960’s there have been continual changes in the discourse on human rights and in the City’s response to these issues. Several commissions and offices addressing these intersectional concerns have been established, in addition to the CCHR. The City established the Equal Employment Practices Commission in 1989 through the Charter.

In 2022, voters passed an amendment to the City Charter establishing the Mayor’s Office of Equity and Racial Justice. It is comprised of several governmental offices and commissions that bring an intersectional approach to equity, including NYC Her Future (NHF), the NYC Commission on Gender Equity (CGE), the NYC Unity Project (UP), and the NYC Young Men’s Initiative (YMI) as well as multi-agency bodies like the NYC Pay Equity Cabinet (PEC) and the NYC Taskforce on Racial Inclusion & Equity (TRIE). Together, these offices and commissions aim to engage New York City’s diverse communities and constituencies, advance equity and promote racial justice within New York City.

The City Commission on Human Rights has continued operating under the same name from 1962 until today. The passage of the Human Rights Law of the City of New York in 1965 gave the CCHR authority to prosecute discrimination in private housing, employment, education, and public accommodations. These demanding and important aspects of the CCHR’s work, continues until today. Currently, the CCHR also promotes education on human rights issues through outreach programs and restorative justice practices at community service centers throughout the boroughs.

Conclusion

This dynamic evolution of the concept of human rights has left important evidence in the archival records of New York City’s government. The City Commission on Human Rights Collection offers a concrete, detailed look into the history of a municipal government’s engagement with the fight for human rights, its categorizations, communications, methodologies, applications of the law, and both its achievements and shortcomings confined to the practice of a single city’s governance, from the 1940’s until today.

Sources

• New York City Commission on Human Rights

• Mayor’s Office of Equity and Racial Justice

• New York City Equal Employment Practices Commission

• Timeline of the American Civil Rights Movement- Encyclopedia Britannica

• History of the NAACP

• History of the Anti-Defamation League

• World War II- Encyclopedia Britannica

• History of Human Rights-Wikipedia

• Human Rights Day-Wikipedia

• Stryker, S. (2017). Transgender history: The roots of today’s revolution. Seal Press.

Federal support for Documenting Democracy was provided by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission of the National Archives.

Have a happy and safe Thanksgiving!