Mission Statement
Photo by Martha Cooper
Video: Delivery on the C-Train
The City Lore Archive documents—and thereby preserves—the work of folk and community-based arts and artists to maintain a record for posterity of the quotidian of the times. Materials held in the City Lore Archive are those internally generated by City Lore Inc or those donated to the organization. The collection supports the ongoing work of City Lore staff and is accessible to outside researchers by appointment.
Called a “living archive,” the body of material that make up our collections grow out of and provides the underpinnings for all of our public programs including the Place Matters Awards and the People’s Hall of Fame. The City Lore Archive’s growth is driven by our continued interest in the development of public programs and engagement with New York City’s grassroots cultures. As such, our collections are increasingly reflective of the ephemeral media landscape today – born-digital media.
Composition of our Collections
Since its founding in 1985, City Lore has organized and preserved collections documenting New York City communities and neighborhoods through the eyes of photographers, writers, journalists, and folklorists. The collection dating back the farthest is the Katrina Thomas’ photograph series Ethnic USA Collection which consists of approximately 10,000 color slides and 15,000 B&W negatives that document ethnic celebrations, cultural traditions, and rituals of daily life in New York City from 1971 to 1983. Additionally, Martha Cooper’s collection of 12,685 slides documents New York from the 1970s to the present. Since 1985, our collections have always been growing.
Much of the material housed in the City Lore Archive has been generated through the work of City Lore staff, students, and community through fieldwork and other programmatic activity. This includes materials that document New York City folklore traditions, objects and images organized for use in gallery exhibitions, and recordings of street musicians, dance recitals, poetry readings, rap battles, and teachers that represent traditions from New York City and beyond.
The foundation of the collection is materials that City Lore and its staff have created as part of public and education programming. This includes video tours by Elena Martinez for City Lore’s Neighborhood Tours series, interviews with artists and locals by C0-Director Steve Zeitlin and associated Folklorists, recordings of City Lore event series’ such as the People’s Poetry Gathering, gallery receptions and interviews, and performances organized by City Lore and often featuring its staff. Also currently housed in the CLA are the sheet music and song charts of The 369th Regiment Harlem Hellfighters Marching Band and the digitizations of 345 songs made up of 941 items.
During spring 2020, as a result of the Coronavirus Pandemic, City Lore introduced publicly crowdsourced digital materials into the City Lore Archive, establishing the Corona Chronicles Digital Archive. Material donated this way represents the majority of CLA growth during the pandemic. This method of digital collections development has garnered submissions from 200 contributors from all over the United States and has been expanded to include documentation of the Black Lives Matter protests and the Naming The Lost Memorials project.
Physical Media
- 32,570 Photograph Slides
- 22,400 Photograph Negatives
- 3,430 Photograph Prints
- 1,140 Cassette Tapes
- 360 DAT Tapes
- 330 MiniDV Tapes
- 200 VHS Tapes
- 13 Linear Feet of Paper Materials
- Assorted artifacts
Digital Media
- 6,526 Digital Still Images
- 1,280 Digital Text Documents
- 1,807 Digital Moving Images
- 177 Digital Sound Recordings
Major Collections
The City Lore Archive is a repository for photographers and folklorists, storytellers and poets, and it is an invaluable resource for the development of City Lore’s programs and exhibitions. City Lore founded our archive to preserve physical materials created by and donated to City Lore – photographic slides and prints, audio and video tapes, and paper-based material – that document cultural traditions and traditional arts of New York City communities. To date, the content of many of these tangible items has been digitized for preservation and access.
As technology shifted in the 21st century, City Lore and its partners generated fewer materials in physical formats, and increasingly created resources directly as digital files. Due to this change, City Lore is in the process of reorganizing its existing archive and establishing updated cataloging and archiving methods to better reflect the trend towards digital media.
From 1970s to date
- The Katrina Thomas Ethnic USA Collection (1971-1983) — public and private community, ethnic, and religious events photographed by Katrina Thomas
- Photographs of the Brooklyn Rediscovery Folklife Study Project (1981-1983) — taken by Martha Cooper for the Brooklyn Rediscovery Program of the Brooklyn Educational & Cultural Alliance.
- Missing: Streetscape of a City in Mourning — September 11th memorials photographed by Martha Cooper
- People’s Hall of Fame
- New York Neighborhood & Ethnic Tours
- Place Matters
- City of Memory
- People’s City Report Card
- 369th Regiment Harlem Hellfighters Marching Band Sheet Music Collection— digiziations of music sheets & song charts of Harlem’s 369th Regimental Armory.
- Corona Chronicles Collection — includes “It Takes A Pandemic” crowd-sourced poem responce to COVID-19, documentation of New York City and surrounding areas during the early period of the pandemic, and documentation of outdoor dining sheds in New York, 2020, by Tom Pich.
- Naming the Lost Memorials Collection— includes documentation and project files of New York City-wide COVID-19 memorials from 2020-present. Also includes Kay Turner crowd-sourced memorial project “A Labor of Mourning”, September 2020.
- City Lore hosted Gallery and Virtual Exhibitions
- The POEMobile
Photograph Collections
City Lore is happy to open to the public two newly-catalogued photograph collections that are available for use in research, exhibits, and publications.
We are grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for the Local History Challenge Grant that made this resource possible.
The Missing: Streetscape of a City in Mourning Collection consists of nearly 1300 color slides taken by photographer Martha Cooper to document memorial activities following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The images represent a diverse portrait of New York’s response to the tragedy, including rescue and recovery workers, spontaneous memorials and shrines, tributes to police and firefighters, wall murals, parades, and public rituals in the five boroughs, with particular emphasis on Lower Manhattan, Ground Zero, and Union Square. We extend our thanks to Martha Cooper. The Documentary Heritage Program, New York State Archives, State Education Department, provided important grant support to catalogue this collection. You can view a few images from this collection in this Virtual Exhibition.
Department, provided important grant support to catalogue this collection. You can view a few images from this collection in this Virtual Exhibition.
The Ethnic USA Collection consists of approximately 10,000 color slides and 15,000 B&W negatives taken by photographer Katrina Thomas that document ethnic celebrations, cultural traditions, and rituals of daily life in New York City from 1971 to 1983. The collection includes ethnic groups from all parts of the world, as manifested primarily in communities in the New York metropolitan area. Much of the collection documents celebrations of religious feast days and national holidays, but parades, folk festivals and political protests are also well covered, as are smaller, intimate gatherings, such as weddings, prayer gatherings, and family celebrations. We extend our thanks to Katrina Thomas. The Archival Management Program in New York University’s Dept. of History–Director Peter Wosh, and students Laura Helton and Laura Thiessen; and volunteer Nancy Tongue provided invaluable help in preparing this collection for public use.
City Lore Collections Additional Locations
American Folklore Society
http://www.folklorecollections.org/index.php/Detail/Occurrence/Show/occurrence_id/9
Accessing the Collection
In person access to the City Lore Archive is by appointment.
For detailed descriptions of our archival holdings, email us at citylore@citylore.org or call (212) 529-1955 x14
