Rose Yndigoyen
Managing the Records of New York City
Nicole Rivas
The “49 Little Ladies” of the French Gratitude ...
Andy Lanset
Poetry On the Air: WNYC and the Sound of Verse ...
Andy Lanset
Poetry On the Air: WNYC and the Sound of Verse ...

During the seven decades of municipal ownership, both celebrated and obscure poets found their way to WNYC’s microphone. Some programs introduced listeners to canonical voices such as Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, and W.H. Auden. Others opened the airwaves to aspiring writers who might otherwise never have been heard beyond their own neighborhoods. Still others explored the relationship between poetry and radio itself, asking whether the medium might reshape how verse was written, performed, and experienced.

The result was an extraordinary range of programming: educational broadcasts from the station’s early Air College lectures; dedicated poetry series and readings; experimental verse drama; tributes to major poets; and discussions linking poetry to theater, politics, therapy, and everyday life. Together these broadcasts reveal how a municipal station—often overlooked in the larger history of American radio—played a meaningful role in sustaining the oral tradition of poetry.

Katie Ehrlich
Dr. Leona Baumgartner’s Health Commissioner ...

Dr. Leona Baumgartner was the first woman to serve as Commissioner of the Department of Health for New York City. She held that office from 1954 to 1962 under Mayor Robert F. Wagner, who was the first mayor to appoint women agency heads in nearly 40 years. Baumgartner worked her way up at the Department of Health, starting as a child hygiene instructor in 1937. By 1949 she was assistant commissioner, the position she served in, until being elevated to commissioner.

Municipal Workers

Eugene de Salignac’s Workers

For Labor Day, we thought For the Record would look back on Eugene de Salignac’s photographs of workers. His most famous photograph is, of course, of workers on the Brooklyn Bridge, but many of his photographs emphasize labor. Some of de Salignac’s most intriguing photographs are his portraits, limited in number, but often stunning. Most are of City workers engaged in (or just pausing from) their daily tasks, be that welding, chiseling stone, giving radio broadcasts or filing paperwork. There is often an ease to his subjects that suggests de Salignac’s rapport with them. He frequently caught them in unguarded moments, often in the distinctive settings of their work sites and with the tools that epitomize their labor. Some, like the portrait of the worker in the subway cut, transcend time to become iconic American types. This was the great age of industrialized labor and de Salignac would have known that the City’s transformation would not be possible without the sweat of the City’s vast and varied workforce.

De Salignac himself was also a City worker, who from 1906 to 1934 was the sole photographer for the Department of Bridges/Plant & Structures. Some of the images reproduced here are from his rarely seen photo albums, which were organized around specific projects or themes.

Form 51

Begun under Mayor William O’Dwyer, the Mayor’s Committee on Management Survey was a sprawling three-year labor that culminated in a hefty, two-volume final report with a slew of recommendations for sweeping changes to various agencies and offices of the government. The Committee ultimately presented eleven major findings, and twelve management recommendations, and many four-, five-, and six-point plans with their own numbered lists of justifying principles and inescapable underlying forces. Whether its primary purpose, “the securing of good management, which will bring in its wake those economies arising from the best use of men, materials, and time in getting the work of the City government done,” was in fact accomplished, is a topic for further research. What’s clear is that City government needed some kind of diagnostic.