An active street life like this on Monroe Street in 1950 made way for the La Guardia Houses.

By Gary Schmidgall
February 6, 1934 must be counted among the handful of red-letter days in New York City’s social and architectural history that changed the face of the city forever, right up there with the day the Brooklyn Bridge opened or the day the Empire State Building topped out or the very recent day the winning proposal for the World Trade Center site was unveiled.

The signal event of that day seventy years ago was not nearly so dramatic (lawyers poring over legal prose), but its portent for the future was to prove enormous: the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) was formally established as a public corporation. It was the first such authority in the nation.

Its board, populated by social activists who had tired of waiting for private enterprise to put an end to the slums, met for the first time two weeks later. After a year the courts handed the Authority power to condemn slum properties, and by the end of 1935 the city’s first low-rent housing development opened on the Lower East Side.

	Out with the old in with the new, one of the Baruch Houses in mid-construction in 1955.

Mayor Fiorello La Guardia cheered when President Roosevelt’s New Deal Congress passed the national Housing Act (Wagner-Steagall) in 1937, and funds for public housing began pouring into the city. In 1949, funds further increased for Authority projects when President Truman signed the U.S. Housing Act.

No one in New York City is better poised to recount the history of the Housing Authority than Dr. Richard Lieberman, the founder and director of the La Guardia and Wagner Archives at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City. For the Archives is the repository of the NYCHA historical documents and other materials, as well as seven other major city history collections: papers of Mayors La Guardia, Wagner, Beame, and Koch; the Steinway & Sons piano makers; the New York City Council; and the local history of the Borough of Queens.

Arrayed here is a tiny sampling of vivid and illuminating images that tell the bittersweet story of the mid-century heyday of urban renewal. Bitter because so many distinctive neighborhoods and families’ lives were upset by “progress;” sweet because the time had clearly come for many crumbling disease- and crime-ridden tenements.
“We are in continual contact with the Housing Authority,” says Lieberman. “A few years ago, we received a call from its storage depot here in Long Island City. They had two filing cabinets full of stuff…was the Archives interested?” A silly question to any archivist worth his salt. Staff from the Archives went over and discovered these cabinets were packed with negatives from the period spanning July 1939 to about 1990. “We were interested,” Lieberman says, putting it mildly.

	Feb. 26 1948 was moving day for this family into the Jacob Riis Houses.

The negatives from the first several decades were large-format (4 inches by 5 inches). Starting in the 1950s, 35-millimeter cameras began to be used, replacing the bulky single-frame 4x5 camera and the unwieldy set-ups it entailed. “As we reviewed the negatives we realized it was a treasure trove visually documenting the physical transformation of major parts of New York City in the 20th century,” Lieberman recalls.

The archivist’s first instinct is to gather. The second is to share, and it did not take long for Lieberman and his staff to decide that a well-established La Guardia and Wagner Archives tradition would serve the purpose well: an historical calendar.

Since 1979, the Archives has produced an annual calendar that is not your usual Monet, polar bear cubs, or Salvador Dali. It is a history calendar designed to elucidate and educate while also showing off the unique resources of the Archives. Among past calendars have been “Patience and Fortitude: The Life and Times of Fiorello La Guardia,” “The Piano Makers: Working at Steinway,” “Caring for Others: A History of the New York City Settle-ment House,” and “A Human Tapestry:

	Here is a tap-dancing class at the Queens-bridge Houses in 1941

A History of Queens.” Last year’s calendar was “Man Behind the Scenes: Julius C.C. Edelstein,” a civic leader who figured prominently in CUNY history.
The calendars—which have been happily used by this Editor of CUNY Matters to keep track of his production schedule—have been generously supported by the Mayor’s Office and the city’s Depart-ment of Cultural Affairs, the City Council, the borough presidents of Queens, LaGuardia Community College Presidents, and Con Edison.

The year 2004, it was decided, would be devoted to the Housing Authority collection. “We chose about 1,000 of the most interesting negatives from the nearly 20,000 that were stored in those two cabinets,” Lieberman says. Then came the hard part: choosing the fifty or so images that are usually used in an Archives calendar. “Naturally, not all the staff favorites found their way into the calendar.”

Among Lieberman’s favorites that did make the cut is one of Monroe Street in 1950, showing the bustling neighborhood street life that was swept away to make room for the La Guardia Houses on the Lower East side. And who could fail to be charmed by the images of the photogenic Mayor La Guardia greeting a new tenant of the Kingsborough Houses, Vincent Aiosa, on September 9, 1941, the day of their dedication (see below). “Vincent’s brother Angelo e-mailed the Archives, recounting his happy memories of growing up in the projects, not just in Kingsborough but also in the Williams-burg Houses,” Lieberman says.

All too aware of how much more the Housing Authority’s negatives revealed, the Archives has decided, for the first time, to create a concomitant exhibition to the calendar on the Archives website. It should be unveiled later in the spring and accessible at laguardiawagnerarchive@ lagcc.cuny.edu. “We invited an historian of New York City housing, Joel Schwartz, author of The New York Approach: Robert Moses, Urban Liberals, and Redevelopment of the Inner City, to help us with the exhibit, as he did for the calendar,” Lieberman notes.

The photos in the virtual exhibit will illustrate a dozen themes pertinent to public housing similar to those that appeared in the calendar. “In addition, there is a Guided Tour of the exhibit that focuses not only on the images’ meaning but also on their aesthetics, comparing many favorably to the noted work of Berenice Abbott and the New York Photo League,” says Lieberman. “In fact, several images are virtual reprises of Abbott prints made years earlier.”

The La Guardia and Wagner Archives’ expertise at creating historical calendars has led to a project timed for the presidential election later this year. As part of a campaign planned to increase voter participation in the CUNY community, Vice Chancellor and Secretary to the Board of Trustees Jay Hershenson has asked the Archives to produce a calendar chronicling the history of voting rights in the U.S., with an emphasis on New York. The

calender, to appear this coming Septem-ber, will highlight major milestones in the struggle to expand suffrage from the Constitutional era to the present.

Employing photos and materials from the Archives and other sources, the calendar will recount how suffrage expanded from a relative few to include those historically excluded from participating in the democratic process. The Archives also plans to include in the calendar’s format personal thoughts on the meaning of the right to vote from all the CUNY campuses. “These responses,” Lieberman says, “will show the continuity of the efforts of all Americans to be included in the governance of our nation.”

Perhaps Lieberman’s staff will come upon photos of historic chads during their research.