Green Spaces and Moody Places
Worth 1,000 words and sometimes a smile
I always enjoy working with the photography collection, and finding an unusual or unexpected image tends to make my day. The sentiment of the majority of portraits from the late 19th and early 20th centuries could lead you to believe that very few people had fun in those days. With scant smiles and rigid posture, how could they? So, here are some examples from the BHS photo collection to prove that notion wrong. Take this portrait of an alumni association known as the Old First Class of Wilson Street School (now P.S. 16 in Williamsburg). At quick glance, it's just a group of middle-aged men…
Emma Toedteberg, Librarian Extraordinaire
Part of what I love about working as an archivist is getting to peek in at lives of the past, and getting to know the Brooklynites who walked the streets decades, and centuries, before us. What’s even better (and yes, even nerdier) is learning about a woman who helped build the collections at BHS that we use today. A few months ago, my teammate Patricia and I surveyed a collection from BHS’s third librarian, Emma Toedteberg. If you’re a regular patron of the archives, then you may have already heard of Emma—she’s the namesake of our catablog. Her collection is slim, but it gives us some…
School days of Brooklyn's past
The passing of Labor Day is always a sign that fall is near and school is back in session. All of the excited students—and the not-so-excited students—I’ve seen with backpacks and books this week got me thinking about school items the CLIR team has found during the survey of archival, manuscript, and photography collections. While you can browse yearbooks from Brooklyn schools in the Othmer Library, family papers and manuscript collections also have photographs, homework, and ephemera that give us an idea of what school was like in Brooklyn way-back-when. The James Atkins Noyes collection…