The Desk Set

Getting to Know the WNYC Archives

Dec 09

Haley & EmilyFrom Our Guest Bloggers 1 Comment

Good afternoon, Information Professionals! Welcome to the first dispatch from your December guest bloggers. My name is Haley; I’m an Assistant Archivist at New York Public Radio, better known to radio audiences as the home of WNYC, WQXR and The Jerome L. Greene Performance Space. For the past 15 months, my colleague Emily and I have been working on an NEH-funded project to transfer 660 hours of audio originally recorded on to lacquer transcription discs and open reel tape from the New York City Municipal Archives WNYC Collection. For the next four weeks, Emily and I will be bringing you stories from this collection, which beautifully documents the experiences of New York City and its citizens through some of the century’s most tumultuous decades (1938 – 1970).

The first broadcast, July 8, 1924, photo by Eugene de Salignac

The History of WNYC

WNYC began broadcasting on July 8, 1924, under the auspices of Grover A. Whalen, New York City’s Commissioner for Bridges, Plant and Structures (pictured above, left, on the day of the first broadcast in a photo by Eugene de Salignac). Until its sale to the WNYC Foundation in 1997, WNYC was a direct line to the City’s mayors, many of whom addressed constituents in weekly programs. The station became the citizens’ main source of information pertaining to city services, local politics and cultural events, as well as a provider of entertainment and educational programming.

In the 32 years of history represented by the segments of the collection we’re working with, WNYC recorded a wide array of voices, including such cultural and political notables as Eleanor Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Henry Kissinger, and Joseph Papp, and the performances of Miles Davis, Lester Young and Leadbelly and Alan Lomax.

“The Voice of New York City”

Perhaps even more significant, however, is the volume of audio that showcases the zeitgeist of America at mid-century. Recordings of public events like hospital cornerstone ceremonies, playground dedications, and sewage plant openings; informational programs designed for housewives and mothers struggling to feed their families during wartime food rationing; and interviews with notable politicians, artists, scientists, and social thinkers about the rapidly changing American landscape, all transport us directly to the center of debates and events as they were occurring.

These windows into daily life can be found in virtually every document in the collection. In one recording, a remote broadcast from the cornerstone laying ceremony for the Gravesend Health Center in 1949, Brooklyn Borough President John Cashmore abandons his prepared remarks to respond to attendees protesting the condition of city schools. “When you talk of schools, there was nothing done during the war years. We don’t blame anybody for that, because the most important thing was the winning of the war,” he says. “I can remember what the Mayor [O'Dwyer] said: ‘children won’t wait; they’ll grow up. They’re entitled under the American form of government to the best school that this great city of ours can give them.’”

In another remote broadcast, from December 1942, the City’s annual “Tree of Light” ceremony at Madison Square is disrupted by stringent wartime dimout regulations. The City’s decision to follow these regulations by extinguishing the holiday lights a half-hour after sunset was apparently used as fodder for German propaganda, an attempt at morale-busting WNYC reporter Joe Fischler railed against on air: “in spite of what you may have heard from our enemy propagandists in Germany … we here in America still have Christmas trees and will keep on having Christmas trees as long as there is a United States of America.”

These recordings of New Yorkers can fill in the gaps of our understanding of American history and create a more robust vision of the past. The collection is a rich record of mid-20th Century trends, ideas and advances that will add context, nuance and texture to future radio features and documentaries produced by New York Public Radio.

WNYC Archives and Preservation Department

While the Archives and Preservation Department is a relatively recent addition to WNYC (it was created in 2000), the station and the New York City Municipal Archives Department have been responsible for holding on to thousands of transcription discs and tape reels since they were originally recorded. With our project, these materials will finally be easily accessible, through a new portal (still under development) which will allow any interested listener a chance to browse through and search these primary sources. Working with these materials has given us the opportunity to become familiar with pockets of New York City history that were utterly unknown to us before.

In addition to this NEH-funded project, the Archives and Preservation Department is responsible for caring for the stations’ analog audio of all formats (except for cylinder and wire recordings), digital audio and video, photographs, program guides, blueprints, posters, vintage recording equipment, and unsold pledge premiums. We also blog (at History Notes and Annotations) and tweet! Oh, and we’re big fans of interns!

Throughout December, Emily and I will be highlighting our favorite recordings and stories in an effort to prove that WNYC really is “the voice of New York City.”

Want to know more about the history of WNYC? Check out this amazing slideshow of photos and audio from the collection.

Image and audio courtesy NYC Municipal Archives.