A how-to guide for researching New York City buildings & architecture featuring books and digital resources available at the Mid-Manhattan Library.

• Reference Books: often the best place to start your research
• Research Guides: online guides like this one (each one has a different focus)
• NYC Government Resources: intro to agencies/ what information they provide
• Books, Articles and Pictures: finding materials at the Mid-Manhattan Library
• Pictures Online: free digital images of NYC buildings that you can’t find with Google
• Sample Questions: suggested resources for common questions

Need help? Consult an Art Librarian at the Mid-Manhattan Library or at the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Library at 42nd and 5th Avenue. The Mid-Manhattan Art Collection is at 455 Fifth Avenue, 3rd Floor (between 39th and 40th Streets), New York, NY 10016. (212) 340-0871.

Basic questions can usually be answered with the help of a reference book on architecture. These books are located in the Art Closed Shelf Reference section, in the Art stacks under call numbers 720.9747 and 917.471, elsewhere at Mid-Manhattan (such as General Reference on the 2nd floor and History on the 5th floor) and at other branches. Search the LEO catalog to see NYPL holdings for these titles.

Recent Guidebooks: Basic Information such as year of construction, architect and architectural style for architecturally notable buildings

Reference Books

• AIA Guide to New York City, 4th ed. by Norval White. New York: Crown, 2000.
  An indispensable resource in its fourth edition. Covers all five boroughs; arranged by borough/sector/precinct. Maps. Brief entries include years of construction and alteration, architect, architectural style, landmark status, description. Small pictures for most, but not all, entries. Indexes building names, addresses and architects.
• The architectural guidebook to New York City, rev. ed. by Francis Morrone.
  Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 2002.
  A nice complement to the AIA guide, with fewer buildings and longer descriptions. Note that New York City in this case means Manhattan. See Morrone’s The architectural guidebook to Brooklyn for coverage of, um, Brooklyn.
• New York Streetscapes: tales of Manhattan’s significant buildings and landmarks by Christopher Gray. New York: Abrams, 2003.
  From Gray’s New York Times Streetscapes column.
• 1000 New York buildings by Jorg Brockmann and Bill Harris. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2002.
  Recent black-and-white photographs of notable buildings in the five boroughs by Brockmann with brief descriptions by Harris.

Historical Guidebooks

• King’s Handbook of New York City, 1893, 2nd enl. ed. by Moses King, ed. New York: Blom, 1972.
• The WPA guide to New York City: the Federal Writers’ Project guide to 1930s New York. New York: Pantheon, 1982.

Landmark buildings and districts: If you happen to be researching a landmark building or district, you’re in luck.

• Guide to New York City Landmarks, 3rd ed. by Andrew Dolkart. New York: Wiley, 2004.
  Portable, official guide published by LPC. Landmark districts are at the head of chapters.
• The Landmarks of New York by Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel. New York: Monacelli, 2005.
  Entries include year of construction, architect, year of designation and description. Every building is pictured. Landmark districts are at back of book.

New York in 5 volumes: Robert A. M. Stern offers an in-depth look at the buildings, neighborhoods and transportation that defined five eras of New York history

• New York 1880: architecture and urbanism in the gilded age. New York: Monacelli, 1999.
• New York 1900: metropolitan architecture and urbanism, 1890-1915. New York: Rizzoli, 1983.
• New York 1930: architecture and urbanism between two world wars. New York: Rizzoli, 1987.
• New York 1960: architecture and urbanism between the Second World War and the Bicentennial. New York: Monacelli, 1995.
• New York 2000: architecture and urbanism from the Bicentennial to the Millennium. New York: Monacelli, 2006. [To be published in November 2006]
  In-depth treatment of city planning, transportation, civic buildings, workplaces, homes, places of amusements, neighborhoods and World’s Fairs of each era.

Just the facts ma’am

• The Encyclopedia of New York City, ed. by Kenneth T. Jackson. New Haven: Yale, 1995.
  Neighborhoods, parks, buildings, architects, planners, transportation, etc. Check under the entry for “architecture” for a bibliography.

Architects: find out more about your guy or gal

• Architects in Practice, New York City, 1840-1900, by Dennis Steadman Francis. New York: The Committee for the Preservation of Architectural Records.
  Good for verifying names, addresses and years of operation. Architects in Practice, New York City, 1900-1940 can be found in Room 300 at the Research Library.
• Biographical dictionary of American architects (deceased), by Henry F. Withey and Elise Rathburn Withey. Los Angeles: Hennessey & Ingalls, 1970.
• Contemporary Architects, 3rd ed., Muriel Emanuel, ed. New York: St. James Press, 1994.
• Macmillan Encyclopedia of Architects, by Adolf K. Placzek. New York: Free Press; Collier Macmillan, 1982.

Where Do You (Wish You) Live?: homes that characterize New York

• Bricks and Brownstone: the New York row house, 1783-1929, 2nd ed. by Charles Lockwood. New York: Rizzoli, 2003.
• New York’s fabulous luxury apartments: with original floor plans from the Dakota, River House, Olympic Tower, and other great buildings by Andrew Alpern. New York: Dover, 1987. (Originally published as Apartments for the Affluent.)

Didn’t this used to be…?: buildings that no longer exist

• Lost New York, exp and upd. by Nathan Silver. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.
• Lost Broadway Theaters, rev. ed. by Nicholas Van Hoogstraten. New York: Princeton, 1997.

Fancy Schmancy

• Elegant New York: the builders and the buildings, 1885-1910 by John Tauranac. New York: Abbeville, 1985.

I need a new place to eat my lunch

• Privately Owned Public Space: the New York City experience, by Jerold S. Kayden (Municipal Art Society of New York). New York: Wiley, 2000.

Turn-of-the-century photographs

• King’s Views of New York 1865-1915 & Brooklyn, 1905, by Moses King. New York: Blom, 1974.

RESEARCH GUIDES

Here are five excellent guides to researching New York City architecture. Each one has a different emphasis. Read the descriptions to determine which one is right for you.

1. How to Research a New York City Building
   Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University Libraries
   A thorough list of print, electronic and other resources for researching New York City architecture.
2. Hints on Researching New York City Buildings [MS Word]
   Word document by Andrew S. Dolkart on Avery’s online research guide.
   Detailed instructions on how to navigate New York City’s Byzantine city agencies with information on opening hours, procedures and fees, and an overview of resources available at Columbia University Libraries, NYPL and other institutions.
3. A Guide to Research Resources in New York City
   NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission
   Basic research tips and a comprehensive list of agencies and resources in all five boroughs. Includes contact information, holdings, services and procedures.
4. A Guide To Researching the History of a New York City Building
   New York Society Library
   How to spend a day doing research at city agencies – focuses on the social history of a building. Adapted from a July 2, 1995 New York Times article by NYC architectural guru Christopher Gray. A slightly updated version was published in the Times on December 5, 2004.
5. Investigating New York City Architecture: How to research a building
   Vincenzio Rutigliano, Art and Architecture Collection of The New York Public Library Humanities and Social Sciences Library
   Inquire at Room 300, at the Wallach Art and Architecture Division at the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Library. A bibliography of books and other resources available at the NYPL Humanities and Social Sciences Research Library, including their call numbers, and a list of institutions for architectural research.

NYC GOVERNMENT RESOURCES

New York City has several government agencies that deal with buildings.

• For instructions for how to do research in person, see Research Guides above.
• The next few pages deal with information on NYC.gov websites.

1. Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC)

The Landmarks Preservation Commission is responsible for identifying, designating and regulating the city's landmarks and the buildings in the city's historic districts. The Commission, which consists of eleven Commissioners and a full-time staff, was established in 1965. The Landmarks Law was enacted in response to New Yorkers' growing concern that important physical elements of the city's history were being lost despite the fact that these buildings could be reused. Events like the demolition of the architecturally distinguished Pennsylvania Station in 1963 increased public awareness of the need to protect the city's architectural, historical, and cultural heritage.

Designation Reports are published by the Commission and are extensive sources of information. Contents may include description of building, building history, construction details, architect backgrounds, drawings, plans and photographs. Recent reports are available from LPC’s website. Older reports are in print format and can be purchased from LPC. Mid-Manhattan Library has a few reports. Check the LEO catalog for holdings. The Humanities and Social Sciences Library is ordering the complete set. Check CATNYP for holdings.

All Historic District Maps are online. The designation process is interesting and is described in the introductory essay in Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel’s book The Landmarks of New York.

2. Department of Buildings (DOB)

The NYC Department of Buildings ensures the safe and lawful use of over 900,000 buildings and properties by enforcing the City's Building Code, Electrical Code, Zoning Resolution, New York State Labor Law and New York State Multiple Dwelling Law. Its main activities include performing plan examinations, issuing construction permits, inspecting properties, and licensing trades. It also issues Certificates of Occupancy and Place of Assembly permits.

Building owners must submit applications to DOB before commencing work on properties. These filings, which go back to 1866 for Manhattan and the 1870s for other boroughs, are called Actions and include: New Building (NB), Alteration (ALT), Building Notice (BN), Demolition (DP) and Certificate of Occupancy (CO). The most useful form is the NB, which describes building specifications, materials, and classification, date of construction; owner and architect; and cost.

To find a list of actions for an address or block and lot, use DOB’s online database, Buildings Information System (BIS).

1. Go to http://a810-bisweb.nyc.gov/bisweb/bispi00.jsp
2. Under “Search by Property”, enter (1) the borough and address or (2) borough and block and lot numbers. (The database accepts the addresses entered in a variety of formats: “455 Fifth Avenue” and “455 5th Ave.” are both acceptable.)
3. This will take you to the “Property Profile Overview,” which features the block and lot number for that property as well as other basic information. Note that there may be multiple buildings on the lot.
4. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on “Actions”.
5. Browse through the actions until you get to the NB. The number after the hyphen tells you the year the application was filed (an asterisk indicates the year is before 1900), and the first number tells you the chronological order of that application in that year.

To see the records for a specific block and lot, go to the appropriate DOB borough office. Records are in microfilm, Individual Property Folders (which contain new building and other applications and architectural drawings and plans) and Rolled Plans (the architectural plans, elevations, or engineering drawings that are too large to be kept in the folders). See the LPC guide and Andrew Dolkart’s guide for details.

If you only need basic information such as the architect, owner, cost of construction and description of the building, you can use Christopher Gray’s Office of Metropolitan History New Building Permits Database, 1900-1986.

1. Go to http://www.metrohistory.com/searchfront.htm
2. Enter two fields: the Year (the number after the NB hyphen) and DOB NB# (the number before the hyphen) to directly access a record.
   OR
3. Search within other fields such as Cost, Building Address, Owner, Owner Address, Architect, Architect Address, Description and Comments. There are search tips on the webpage. Note that searching by address can be tricky because of the various ways it can be stated.
4. You will be presented with a list of search results.

3. Municipal Archives (New York City Dept. of Records and Information Services)

Founded in 1950, the Municipal Archives preserves and makes available the historical records of New York City municipal government. Dating from the early seventeenth century to the present, the Municipal Archives holdings total approximately 160,000 cubic feet. Accessioned from more than one hundred city agencies, the collections comprise office records, manuscript material, still and moving images, ledger volumes, vital records, maps, blueprints, and sound recordings.

• Collection highlights include vital records, census, and city directories that are an essential resource for patrons conducting family history research, the number one hobby in America. There are more than one million photographic images in fifty collections including pictures of every house and building in the city, ca. 1940.
• Online Photo Gallery: The Municipal Archive’s most popular images are in the Photo Gallery. They have been arranged in sixteen thematic categories based on the subject matter of the image. The WPA category includes pictures taken or acquired by staff of the New York City Unit of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Writer’s Project, a Depression-era program that employed professional writers, journalists, and photographers.
• Tax Photographs: During the 1930's, local governments began to use photography as a tool for appraising real property for taxation purposes. New York City was the largest municipality to adopt this technology. The result was 720,000 35mm black and white images of every property in the five Boroughs.

4. Department of City Planning (DCP)

The Department of City Planning is responsible for the city's physical and socioeconomic planning, including land use and environmental review; preparation of plans and policies; and provision of technical assistance and planning information to government agencies, public officials, and community boards.

• Featured Projects, Studies and Proposals organized by borough.
• Projects, Studies and Proposals available for downloading or ordering from DCP. Information may include: a description of the area under review, proposed or adopted changes, an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), implementation description and timeline, public review guidelines, financing information and additional studies.
• Zoning Maps of proposed and adopted zoning sketches; city divided into 126 maps
• Zoning Resolution text defining general and specific regulations for residential, commercial and manufacturing zones

5. Department of Housing, Preservation & Development (HPD)

The New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) is the largest municipal developer of affordable housing in the nation.

• Current housing lotteries, descriptions and lists of affordable housing developments and application procedures online.
  Information for Architects/Engineers, Developers, Homebuyers, Homeowners, Residential Building Owners and Residential Tenants also available on website.

6. Art Commission

The Art Commission is NYC's design review agency. Established in 1898, the Commission reviews permanent works of art, architecture and landscape architecture proposed for City-owned property. Projects include construction, renovation or restoration of buildings, such as museums and libraries; creation or rehabilitation of parks and playgrounds; installation of lighting and other streetscape elements; and design, installation and conservation of artwork. The Commission is composed of 11 members, and includes an architect, landscape architect, painter and sculptor as well as representatives of the Brooklyn Museum, the Met and NYPL. The Commission holds monthly public hearings in its offices on the third floor of City Hall, where it has resided since 1914. The Commission also acts as caretaker and curator of the City's public art collection and maintains an extensive archive documenting the history of New York City's public works

• Archives and Photograph Collection: The Art Commission maintains an extensive archive of design proposals, drawings, photographs, plans and correspondence documenting the history of New York City's public works. Photographs of parks, streets, public and commercial buildings, historic houses, murals, portraits and sculptures, mostly from 1880 to 1920, can be found in the Photograph Collection. Collections open to researchers by appointment, on a limited basis.
• Research guidelines
• Examples of photographs online
• Awards: Archive of annual Art Commission Design Award Recipients from 1982

7. Department of Design and Construction (DDC)

The Department of Design and Construction, created in 1995, builds the sewers, water mains, roads, and public buildings in New York City.

• Projects Photo Gallery

BOOKS, ARTICLES and PICTURES

The Mid-Manhattan Art Collection has a strong collection of architecture books, many of which you can take home.

Architects’ monographs show plans, drawings, criticism and architects’ writings, and are mostly filed under call number 720.92. Important buildings sometimes have an entire book dedicated to them and are classified according to the building type (school, religious building, train station, etc.) Search LEO for the name of the architect or the name of the building to find the appropriate call number.

For general books on New York City architecture, browse the books in call numbers 720.9747 and 917.471.

Dover Publications publishes many books on New York architecture and interiors. Search LEO using the keywords Dover + New York + Architecture or Dover + New York + Interiors to find these books.

Articles

You can get professional quality articles from the following article databases to which the Library subscribes. These databases are only accessible from the Library, although you can get information about our databases here. Some of these databases give you the full text (entire) article, which you can print out. Some of them only give you an abstract (summary) and the date, title, source (publication) and page number of relevant articles, and you would seek out the publications at the Mid-Manhattan Library 4th floor or Room 108 at the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Library to read and copy the article.

• Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals
  This is the most complete and only index specializing in architecture, but it doesn’t have the actual articles. “The Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals offers a comprehensive listing of journal articles published worldwide on architecture and design, archaeology, city planning, interior design, and historic preservation. Avery indexes not only the international scholarly and popular periodical literature, but also the publications of professional associations, US state and regional periodicals, and the major serial publications on architecture and design of Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Australia. Expanded coverage includes obituary citations providing an excellent source of biographical data—often the only information available for less-published architects. Coverage is from the 1930s (with selective coverage dating back to the 1860s) to the present. The Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals is updated weekly.”
• Art Full Text and Art Index Retrospective
  Art Full Text doesn’t cover as many architecture journals as Avery Index, but it does have some actual articles that you can print out straight from the database. Note that it only has full text for the last ten years or so. Art Index Retrospective does not have the actual articles but it goes back quite far, to 1929.
• JSTOR
  JSTOR offers scholarly articles on many subjects, including architecture. It covers fewer publications than other more subject-specific databases like Avery Index and Art Full Text, but it has the huge advantage of offering full text coverage back to the very first issue for every publication in the database.
• New York Times and New York Times Retrospective Index
  The Times is a treasure trove of information about New York buildings, architecture, people, companies and events. Other New York City historical newspapers such as the Brooklyn Daily Eagle are also good for architectural research. The NYPL historical NYC newspapers research guide can be accessed online.
• American Periodical Series Online (APS Online)
  Available only at the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Library.“Over 1,100 periodicals that first began publishing between 1740 and 1900, including special interest and general magazines, literary and professional journals, children's and women's magazines, and many other historically-significant periodicals.”

Pictures

The Mid-Manhattan Library’s Picture Collection has thousands of high quality pictures, arranged by subject, that you can bring home. There are folders for:

• Specific buildings (Empire State Building, Chrysler Building)
• Building types (office buildings, theaters)
• Neighborhoods (Harlem, SoHo)
• Bridges
• Transportation (subways, taxis)
• Parks
• Infrastructure (water towers, manholes)
• Interiors
• Outdoor sculpture
• Rooftops
• Streets and Alleys
• Skylines

A description of the collection and a list of subject headings are online.

PICTURES ONLINE

This section outlines 3 free websites for digital architectural images.

• NYPL’s Digital Gallery has thousands of exterior shots of New York City buildings.
• The Library of Congress’ American Memory collections have images of American architecture, including Samuel Gottscho and William Schleisner’s Interior Design photographs.
• Propertyshark.com has current photographs of buildings in New York City.

1. NYPL Digital Gallery

The New York Public Library has scanned thousands of historical books and photographs in its collections, and made them available in a free database called The Digital Gallery. You can browse through the images by Collection or subject, or you can search the database for keywords. For the purposes of architectural research, you can browse the Collections in this list, or you can do a keyword search for a specific building or address. Each collection was catalogued a little bit differently, so try different spellings and abbreviations if nothing comes up.

• The Mid-Manhattan Library Picture Collection Online
  More than 30,000 digitized images from books, magazines, newspapers, photographs, prints and postcards, mostly created before 1923. Search by subject or keyword for images of New York City buildings, neighborhoods, streets and people. A sampling of subjects digitized:
  • New Netherland 1630-1659 (34 pictures)
  • New York City –Churches A-Z (60 pictures)
  • New York City –Crystal Palace (40 pictures)
  • New York City –Flatiron Building (16 pictures)
  • New York City houses (475 pictures)
  • New York City– inns & taverns –1800s (21 pictures)
  • New York City -- office buildings (54 pictures)
  • New York City – prisons (41 pictures)
  • New York City -- railroad stations -- Pennsylvania (7 pictures)
  • New York City—slums (11 pictures)
  • New York City – streets (39 pictures)
  • New York City – theatres (43 pictures)
  • New York City – Zoological parks (10 pictures)
  • In addition, the Picture Collection maintains a list of Internet Resources for Picture Research, which can help you find architectural images.
• Photographic Views of New York City, 1870s-1970s
• More than 54,000 New York City archival photographs (and their captioned versos) from the 1870s-1970s arranged by borough and street; the majority are exterior building views and neighborhood scenes from the 1910s-1940s.
• Streetscape and Townscape of Metropolitan New York City, 1860-1942
• Collection of photographs of New York City, 1931-1942.
• 300 photographs by Percy Loomis Sperr, 1890-1964. These are slightly better in quality than the ones in the Photographic Views of New York City, 1870s-1970s collection.
• Fifth Avenue, New York, from start to finish, 1911 (from Washington Square, north to East 93rd Street). Photographed by Burton Welles.
• Changing New York: Photographs by Berenice Abbott, 1935-1938
  • 343 black and white photographs by Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) from her Changing New York Works Progress Administration/ Federal Art Project. The Library's collection holds about 80% of the project's 302 images; this presentation includes variant and discarded images, plus other work Abbott produced as a project employee.
• "Classic 6:" New York City Apartment Building Living, 1880s-1910s
  • Apartment houses of the metropolis. Published by G.C. Hesselgren, 1908.
  • Supplement to Apartment houses of the metropolis. Published by G.C. Hesselgren, 1909.
  • The World's loose leaf album of apartment houses, containing views and ground plans of the principal high class apartment houses in New York City, together with a map showing the situation of these houses, transportation facilities, etc. Published by The New York World, 1910.
  • 1913 supplement to the World's loose leaf album of apartment houses... Published by The New York World, 1913.
  • Also in this collection: Kitchens, Bathrooms, Entrance Gates and Railings
• Staten Island in Vintage Postcards
  • 768 postcards depicting the buildings, scenery, and daily life of Staten Island from the late 19th-century until well into the 20th-century.
• "Drugstore Photographs, Or, A Trip Along the Yangtze River, 1999;" Lower Manhattan Block-by-Block by Dylan Stone
  • 2,000 color snapshot photographs taken in 1999, recording the streetscape, block by block, of Manhattan south of Canal Street, and arranged in an archive by neighborhood and block.

2. Library of Congress

The American Memory online collections by The Library of Congress is another historical image database. You can search the database or browse by topic such as “Architecture, Landscape” and “Cities, Towns”. Excellent collections include “Architecture and Interior Design for 20th Century America: Photographs by Samuel Gottscho and William Schleisner, 1935-1955.”

3. PropertyShark

This website, primarily for real estate professionals, features an overview, photos, toxic sites, maps, phone records, neighbors, property tax, zoning and building class, floor area ratio and air rights, building permits, ECB violations, income & expense, demographics and judgements & liens for properties in the five boroughs and in other cities.

PropertyShark also has maps showing all sorts of interesting information such as building classes, air rights, liquor license prohibited regions, subway ridership, single men availability (!) and years built.

SAMPLE QUESTIONS

Here are some sample questions with some suggested sources for research. The best sources will vary according to the building you are researching and the specific information you are searching for, but this list should help if you are stumped.