Remembering Rosalynn Carter

Mayor Edward I. Koch with First Lady Rosalynn Carter, 1979. Mayor Edward I. Koch collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

Following her death on November 19, 2023, many news stories, obituaries, and reminiscences about former first lady Rosalynn Carter remarked on her exceptional role as confidant and advisor to Jimmy Carter throughout their more than seven decades of married life. “Serving as an equal partner to her husband, the president,” wrote New York Times reporter Azadeh Moaveni, “. . . she frequently attended Mr. Carter’s cabinet meetings and traveled abroad to meet with heads of state in visits labeled substantive, not ceremonial. She often sat in on the daily National Security Council briefings held for the President and senior staff.” [“Before Hillary Clinton, There Was Rosalynn Carter.” November 21, 2023.] Given her important role it should not be a surprise that there are photographs of Rosalynn Carter in the Mayor Koch photograph collection in the Municipal Archives.   

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(L-R) First Lady Rosalynn Carter, New York State Governor Hugh Carey, President Jimmy Carter, Mayor Edward I. Koch, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, House Speaker Tip O’Neil, Treasury Secretary W. Michael Blumenthal, and Representative Mario Biaggi, August 8, 1978. Mayor Edward I. Koch photograph collection, NYC Municipal Archives. 

On a hot summer day, President Jimmy and First Lady Rosalynn Carter stood before a cheering crowd in front of City Hall after a bill-signing ceremony that gave New York City $1.65 billion in Federal loan guarantees as part of the effort to avoid bankruptcy. The Times story reporting on the event noted that “Mr. Carter signed the measure on a mahogany desk that had been used by George Washington when he was President, and as Mr. Carter pointed out, New York was the nation’s capital and Washington was a swamp.” [“Carter Signs Aid Bill for New York at Gala Celebration at City Hall,” August 9, 1978.] 

(Left to Right) Maureen Connelly (Press Secretary to Mayor Koch), President Jimmy Carter, First Lady Rosalynn Carter, and Mayor Edward I. Koch, Washington, D.C., June 1979. Mayor Edward I. Koch collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

Letter to Mayor Koch from Jack H. Watson, Jr., at the time, Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Affairs, but who would become White House Chief of Staff to President Carter, August 14, 1979. Mayor Edward I. Koch Collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

Joan Mondale, Vice President Walter Mondale, President Jimmy Carter, First Lady Rosalynn Carter, Amy Carter, and Senator Ted Kennedy, on the stage at the Democratic National Convention, Madison Square Garden, New York City, August 1980. Mayor Edward I. Koch photograph collection, NYC Municipal Archives. 

Smiling faces on the dais belie drama behind the scenes. Earlier that summer, Mayor Koch’s request for additional federal support from the Carter Administration had not achieved the desired result. The President’s attempt to rescue the fifty-two Americans held hostage in Iran had stalled, and Senator Ted Kennedy’s presidential-run threatened to upend the convention. In the end, Carter prevailed, won the nomination, but lost to Ronald Reagan in the general election.  

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Correspondence, Jimmy Carter to Mayor Edward I. Koch, May 16, 1984 on behalf of Habitat for Humanity, regarding a building at 742-44 East 6th Street. Mayor Edward I. Koch Collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

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Correspondence, Mayor Edward I. Koch to Jimmy Carter, June 18, 1984, regarding the building at 742-44 East 6th Street. Mayor Edward I. Koch Collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter continued their close collaboration during their post-White House years. The Habitat for Humanity organization was one of their most enduring endeavors. In 1984, they wrote to Mayor Koch and asked for his assistance with their work to rehabilitate a building on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

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President Jimmy Carter with Commissioner Anthony Gliedman of HPD, at a Habitat for Humanity project at 742 East 6th Street, Manhattan, July 1985. Photographer Leonard Boykin, HPD Photograph Collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

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Commissioner Anthony Gliedman of HPD, talking to Rosalynn Carter at a Habitat for Humanity project at 742 East 6th Street, Manhattan, July 1985. Photographer Leonard Boykin, HPD Photograph Collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

The Closing of Sydenham Hospital

At the start of 2018, the Municipal Archives began digitizing its vast and varied audiovisual collections, including lacquer discs, films and tapes from municipal broadcasters WNYC Radio and TV, surveillance films created by the New York Police Department (NYPD) and early cable television programming from the City’s Channel L Working Group. Now, almost six years later, the Archives has made thousands of hours of this visual material available online, with even more being added in the next few months.

These four collections, WNYC Radio (REC0078), WNYC-TV (REC0047), the NYPD Surveillance Films (REC0063) and Channel L (REC0072) together provide uniquely detailed and multifaceted perspectives on the City of New York during one of its most difficult eras since the Great Depression. These municipal entities often covered the same issues facing New Yorkers, but through different lenses and motivated by different public interests. While WNYC Radio and TV mostly showed the City through a lens of journalism and culture, the NYPD had its eye on the safety and security of its inhabitants. Meanwhile, Channel L gave cable subscribers a window into the minutia of City government with a variety of call-in talk show programs, many hosted by City officials trying to explain their legislative efforts and amplifying the voices of activists and average New Yorkers invited on the air.

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Sydenham Hospital, ca. 1940. Tax Photo Collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

One issue that WNYC, the NYPD and Channel L all covered was the 1980 closure of Sydenham Hospital in Harlem. As discussed in a previous blog post, Sydenham Hospital was the first fully integrated hospital in the United States. It also served one of the most medically deprived areas of the country, with health outcomes for Harlem residents far below those of other New Yorkers. Still, the dire budgetary constraints of 1970s New York ultimately led Mayor Ed Koch to close the hospital.

WNYC-TV was on the scene documenting protests at the hospital over the years. The television journalists also covered official statements regarding the fate of the public hospital system from both Mayors Abe Beame and Ed Koch, as well as City Council President Carol Bellamy. This newly preserved and freely available footage shows the day-to-day news coverage from WNYC-TV that New Yorkers depended on to keep abreast of current events. Over the years, WNYC-TV employed journalists like Brian Lehrer, Maria Hinojosa, Bob Herbert, and Ti-Hua Chang to host talk shows like NY Hotline, and to critically investigate current events.

Like WNYC-TV, Channel L covered major metro-area developments, but rather than employing a cadre of journalists, Channel L gave hosting duties directly to the political figures that WNYC reporters often interviewed. City Council member Fred Samuels represented Harlem during the 1970s and 80s. He often hosted Channel L talk shows featuring doctors from Sydenham Hospital who expressed the importance of their healthcare facility to the people of Harlem. Samuels also featured other residents and professionals from Harlem on his repeat appearances, using the new format of cable television to highlight an array of issues confronting the community he represented, and his efforts to address the challenges of his constituents.

At the same time, the New York Police Department was also creating audiovisual records of social and political protest movements, including the ten-day occupation of Sydenham Hospital. Unlike Channel L and WNYC-TV, the NYPD never intended the footage to be released to the public. These films were created to further the efforts of the NYPD’s Bureau of Special Services (BOSS) to maintain the safety and security of New Yorkers during an increasingly tumultuous and physically dangerous time. Because of this different motive and method, the footage from this collection offers a totally different perspective on the same events covered by the journalists of WNYC-TV and the politicians of Channel L.

Through the work of archivists at the Municipal Archives, the perspectives of the City’s journalists, politicians, activists, police, and average New Yorkers come together to create a rich vision of one of the greatest cities in the world on the closure of Sydenham Hospital and countless other historical events and movements. The fight for LGBTQ+ rights, Caribbean migration, the rise of modern environmentalism, the Civil Rights movement, the Cold War, second wave feminism, the birth of hip-hop, the space race and so many other developments in the second half of the twentieth century are revealed in new ways through the sounds and visions of these never-before available collections. With holdings that dwarf every other city in the United States, the NYC Municipal Archives and its audiovisual collections serve a vital function of providing a communal memory of American culture, identity, and history, reminding us of our values as a society and the lessons our predecessors learned for our benefit. 

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This is the last blog post by archivist Chris Nicols. After more than five-years of work dedicated to preserving the visual resources of the Municipal Archives, Chris is moving on to new challenges. We will miss both his technical know-how and the always intelligent perspective he provided on the content he worked so hard to preserve. 

WNYC-TV Archives: A Public Broadcaster for the Public Good

Over the last year, the Municipal Archives has successfully digitized hundreds of reels of film created from the 1940s through the 1980s by WNYC-TV, the city-owned television station. Although there are thousands more films to digitize, those that have already been preserved indicate the breadth and quality of subjects featured within this vast collection. From 1949 to 1981, WNYC-TV produced more than 4,000 films featuring news-worthy figures, events, developments and places, usually with sound and in full color. In addition to these films, WNYC-TV produced thousands of video tapes in the 1980s and 90s.

WNYC began as a radio broadcast station in 1924, one of the first municipal-owned stations in the country. During the early days of radio, regulatory bodies designated sections of the radio spectrum for broadcast and would lease or sell licenses to specific channels, such as WNYC or CBS. In the 1930s, like many municipalities, New York City anticipated the invention of television networks and created television broadcasting licenses to be leased in the future. Unlike most places, however, City leaders did not sell these licenses during the Great Depression, enabling them to set up municipal television stations like WNYC-TV and WNYE-TV, operated by the Board of Education, in the post-war era. Although WNYC produced several films in the 1940s and 50s, the film production expanded after WNYC-TV Channel 31 officially launched on November 5, 1961.

One of the earliest items in the WNYC-TV collection is City of Magic, a promotional film released in 1949. With a narrator speaking in the classic mid-Atlantic accent, the film celebrates New York City as the center of industry, trade, education and entertainment in the western world. There is a particular emphasis on the City’s prosperity compared with other world cities in Europe, still recovering from the Second World War.

City of Magic, 1949. WNYC-TV: Moving Images Collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

Although there are other productions like City of Magic, much of the WNYC-TV film collection consists of live recordings of public events, featuring local, national and international politicians and figures. President John F. Kennedy speaking at the 1962 dedication of the United States pavilion for the 1964 World’s Fair at Flushing Meadows, is one example. Introduced by Mayor Robert Wagner and Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, Kennedy echoed the sentiments found in City of Magic. In his words, visiting New York City and the 1964 World’s Fair were both opportunities for the world “to see what we have accomplished through a system of freedom.”

1964 New York’s World Fair: United States Pavilion groundbreaking ceremony with President John F. Kennedy, Mayor Robert Wagner and Robert Moses, December 14, 1962. WNYC-TV: Moving Images Collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

Ten years later in 1972, WNYC-TV recorded another historic public event when Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress, announced that she was running for president. In her speech, she rejected the “political expediency” of the Nixon administration, calling for national unity, electoral reform, environmental rehabilitation, an end to wars abroad and a greater focus on the potential of women and minorities. Our recent blog featured Chisholm’s presidential announcement captured by the WNYC-TV cameras:  Shirley Chisholm

By the 1970s, production at WNYC-TV had increased significantly, including comprehensive documentation of the administrations of Mayors John Lindsay and Abraham Beame. WNYC-TV also focused on interviewing local politicians about their policies, current events and the inner workings of City government. These interviews may have been especially needed by New Yorkers, as the 1970s saw a precipitous drop in the City’s ability to provide services that millions had come to depend on. The City’s fiscal crisis and Mayor Beame’s response are highlights of this collection.

WNYC Golden Anniversary: A. Labaton receiving the United Nations Award, speech by Lee Graham, proclamation and citations by Mayor Abraham D. Beame to Seymour Siegel, Herman Neuman and A. Labaton, July 8, 1974. WNYC-TV: Moving Images Collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

In 1974, Mayor Beame celebrated WNYC’s 50th anniversary with an official proclamation that July 8th would be known as WNYC Golden Anniversary Day. He remarked that New York City’s broadcast system remained “the only municipally owned and operated, non-commercial broadcasting complex in the United States.” This remained true until 1996, when Mayor Giuliani sold off the Municipal Broadcast System, turning WNYC radio into a private entity that is today owned and operated by New York Public Radio and the WNYC Foundation. For better or worse, WNYC’s time as an active part of City government had finally come to an end.

Now, almost a century after WNYC began providing high quality informational and cultural shows to New Yorkers, its original television productions will be made available again. With funding from the New York State Archives’ Local Government Records Management Improvement Fund, staff at the Municipal Archives began a carefully coordinated project to assess, clean, repair and create preservation-quality digital scans of the films in this unparalleled collection. In the next few months, the Municipal Archives will stream more videos from the WNYC-TV collection online. Higher resolution copies are available upon request. You can browse the online collection here and the WNYC-TV finding aid here.