New Yorkers Love Books!

Book Sale in the Atrium at 31 Chambers Street, November 7, 2025.

Staff at the Municipal Archives and Library weeded surplus books from our collections for the purpose of holding a two-day book sale of items that might be of interest to the general public.

The sale was scheduled for two days, Friday, November 7, and Saturday, November 8.  Because of the overwhelming response by New Yorkers, almost everything was sold on Friday and the Saturday sale is cancelled.

The turnout was unprecedented. Our prior sale of similar deaccessioned books in 2016 had much lower participation. Today, by contrast, people were lined up by 9:00 a.m. to get in. Twice, admission had to be paused because the number of people in the lobby was close to the limit under the fire / safety rules.

New Yorkers love books and bargains! Both of which they got today.

If you missed the sale and are interested in an online auction of exceptional items, please check out our online auction https://on.nyc.gov/auction where twelve volumes are on the auction block until Friday November 14. In addition, we still have a limited number of original redeemed vintage bonds and stock certificates dating from the 1920s to the 1980s offered for sale on our support page: https://www.archives.nyc/support

Book Sale in the Atrium at 31 Chambers Street, November 7, 2025.

Mayor LaGuardia Reads the Comics

Chances are pretty good that if you randomly ask someone about New York Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia, they will mention him reading the comics over the radio. They may not know why, when or on which radio station, but people almost always seem to know about the readings. The original recordings, housed at the Municipal Archives, are what I call “aural icons”, unique moments in sound that frame the speaker for the ages. This is their back story.

LaGuardia reading the comics, 1945. NYPR Archive Collection.

In the summer of 1945, as World War II drew to a close, New York City faced an unexpected crisis: a newspaper delivery strike left millions of residents without their daily papers. For many New Yorkers, especially its children, this meant losing access to something they cherished nearly as much as the news itself—the funny papers. Enter Fiorello H. La Guardia, the city’s energetic and unconventional mayor, who responded with what would become the most iconic moments of his legendary tenure.

When the delivery drivers walked off the job in July 1945, New York’s newspapers continued to print, but they couldn’t reach readers’ doorsteps or local newsstands. The 17-day strike created a genuine hardship for the city’s residents, who relied on newspapers not just for information but for entertainment during the final months of the war. Children particularly missed a daily dose of adventure from strips like Dick Tracy, Little Orphan Annie, and other mainstays of the comic pages.

La Guardia, known affectionately as The Little Flower (a translation of his Italian first name), understood the public’s frustration. The mayor had built his reputation on connecting directly with ordinary New Yorkers, through his weekly Sunday radio broadcasts on the city-owned station WNYC. He decided to use this platform in an unprecedented way.

For his Talk to the People program broadcast over WNYC during the strike on July 1st, 8th, and 15th, LaGuardia arrived at his City Hall office with the comic sections from various newspapers. In his distinctive, high-pitched voice full of dramatic flair, the mayor read comics aloud to his radio audience. But this was no monotone recitation—La Guardia threw himself into the July 8th performance of Dick Tracy with enthusiasm.

July 8, 1945 recording of LaGuardia reading the comics. NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection

It can be said that at moments he was a bit too enthusiastic with the oversized bold word balloons of sound effects. The Mayor’s “ripping” and “crashing” challenged both the WNYC engineer and his equipment.

The following Sunday LaGuardia had just sworn in three new magistrates to City agencies. To underscore the point that he was bringing on men of integrity, the mayor read from Little Orphan Annie where judges were conspiring to frame the young heroine. The lesson from this story, he said, was that “sometimes prejudice and hatred get into the hearts of men who’ve sworn to almighty God to uphold the law… that’s why these judges I picked today, they come from homes like you and me. They come with experience. They entertain no prejudices. They’re just folks. Decent. Honest. Clean.”

July 15, 1945 recording of LaGuardia reading the comics. NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection

Families gathered around their radios on Sunday mornings, children sitting rapt as their mayor transformed into a one-man theater company. Five movie news reel cameras, invited to his office after the sensation of the first broadcast, taped the event.

Film footage from 1945 of Mayor LaGuardia reading the comics and families listening. NYPR Archive Collections

Rarely noted too is that before LaGuardia’s initial comic reading on his July 1 broadcast, the mayor requested WNYC Director Morris Novik to broadcast a daily comics program.

“And listen, Morris, every afternoon, I want you to pick the time, and do not tell me that you do not have the time on the program—put something out—because you know that all of your programs are not so hot, so you can always find some space. I want a program every day as long as the papers are not being delivered, of funnies for the children. You find someone who can read the funnies and who can describe them, and if you cannot find anyone, I will do it.”

Novik indeed found people. Among them, personalities like Harry Hershfield, Peter Donald, and Irving Fisher from NBC’s Can You Top This program who read for the WNYC program christened, The Comic Parade.

The comic reading sessions lasted only a few weeks until the strike ended, but their impact endured far longer. The broadcasts have become part of New York City folklore, frequently cited as an example of LaGuardia’s unique ability to connect with everyday residents. For many New Yorkers who heard them as children, the memory of the mayor’s voice dramatically reading their favorite strips remained vivid decades later.

The episode also demonstrated the power of radio as an intimate medium during this era. LaGuardia understood that the airwaves allowed him to enter people’s homes directly, creating a personal connection that transcended the formality of his office. His comic readings weren’t just a wartime stopgap—they were a masterclass in communications and outreach.

Yet the image of “The Little Flower” reading comics over the radio holds a special place in the city’s collective memory. It captured something essential about what made LaGuardia beloved: his understanding that government service meant serving all the people, in ways both grand and small. Whether he was taking on Tammany Hall corruption or ensuring kids didn’t miss “Little Orphan Annie,” LaGuardia approached his duties with the same passionate commitment.

Today, the original recordings and digital copies of LaGuardia reading the comics are preserved in the Municipal Archives WNYC Collection. Digital copies can also be found at the Vincent Voice Library at Michigan State University, the New York Public Radio archives, and the Library of Congress. In 2007 the readings were added to the library’s National Recording Registry which called the broadcasts, “one of the most interesting and, historically, certainly most memorable uses of the medium.” https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-recording-preservation-board/documents/LaGuardiaComics.pdf

The Registry recognized the lasting cultural impact of these broadcasts by understanding “the social function of comics to its adult readers,” calling it “the mark of a true populist—to actually understand what's important to people, even the stuff they wouldn’t normally admit to.”

Manhattan Building Plans Processing Project Update

In 1977, the Municipal Archives accessioned more than 100,000 plans and 1,200 cubic feet of permit folders from the Manhattan Borough Office of the Department of Buildings. Dating from 1866 through the 1970s, the records document structures on 958 blocks in lower Manhattan, from the Battery to 34th Street. The plans comprise sections, elevations, floor plans, and details, as well as engineering and structural diagrams. The corresponding permit folders include official Building Department forms, specifications and correspondence for new building, plumbing, elevator, and other applications.

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New Building Application, 28-30 Avenue A. Department of Buildings collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

City archivists re-housed the permit folders, eventually completing the task in the early 2000s. The plans, however, remained in their original unorganized condition until 2018 when the New York State Library awarded a grant to the Archives to begin necessary preservation and cataloging activities. The State Library has continued to support the project with additional funding. For the Record tracked project progress, beginning with The Manhattan Building Plans Project when it launched in 2018, and most recently The Manhattan Building Plans Project Update in August 2024.

Beginning in 2018, the State Library funding supported processing plans for buildings in the Tribeca, SoHo, and Greenwich Village neighborhoods. In 2023, archivists began working on building plans for the Lower East Side and East Village. The buildings in those neighborhoods encompass many types of uses—residential, manufacturing, and retail—and include townhouses, rowhouses, tenements, apartments, stores, factories, warehouses, hotels, theaters, boardinghouses, churches, synagogues, schools, stables, and garages.

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Elevation and stoop details for synagogue at 242 East 7th Street, 1908. Manhattan Building Plans Collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

With funding from the State in 2025, archivists processed 6,032 plans and rehoused them 94 containers. They performed repairs on 1,498 items so they can be safely handled by patrons. This week, For the Record looks at the work completed this past year with illustrations of some of the interesting “finds” identified in the collection. 

The Department of Buildings practice of requiring plans to be filed when issuing permits to build new buildings coincided with a period of intense immigration to the United States by Eastern European Jews who settled in the Lower East Side; consequently, the collection is particularly rich in drawings reflecting those immigrant communities.

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242 East 7th Street, ca. 1939. 1940s Tax Photograph collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

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The collection also provides generous examples of buildings that accommodate all features of city-life, such as hotels, stores, garages, stables, and restaurants. 

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Lovely 1883 elevation of 28-30 Avenue A, showing the building as a clothing store and also a 1912 cross-section drawing of the same building (which eventually became a bar and theater and by 1940 a ) with chandelier and cornice and coving details. Manhattan Building Plans Collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

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28-30 Avenue A, cross-section. Manhattan Building Plans Collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

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28-30 Avenue A, ca. 1939. 1940s Tax Photograph collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

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Free Public Baths for the City of New York, front elevation. Manhattan Building Plans Collection, NYC Municipal Archives. Public baths were a unique feature of Lower East Side life. 

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Free Public Baths for the City of New York, cross section. Manhattan Building Plans Collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

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New Building Application, 538/540 East 11th Street. Department of Buildings collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

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Free Public Baths for the City of New York, first floor plan. Manhattan Building Plans Collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

Free Public Baths, also known as the East 11th Street Baths, are one example. One of the first public baths built by the city, architect Arnold William Brunner filed plans in 1903. The baths remained open until 1958. The building has been landmarked. Front elevation showing separate men’s and women’s entrances, a cross-section drawing, and a drawing of the showers and baths on the first floor.

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538/540 East 11th Street, ca. 1939. 1940s Tax Photograph collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

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538/540 East 11th Street, ca. 1985. 1980s Tax Photograph collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

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In 1903 McKim, Mead and White submitted plans for construction of the Tompkins Square Branch of New York Public Library, also a landmarked building.

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Front elevation, Tompkins Square Branch of New York Public Library, 331/333 East 10th Street, Manhattan Building Plans Collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

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Tompkins Square Branch of New York Public Library, 331/333 East 10th Street, ca. 1939. 1940s Tax Photograph collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

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Third Floor Plan, showing the reading room and adjacent caretaker’s apartment (with added notes and figures hand-written in pencil), Tompkins Square Branch of New York Public Library, 331/333 East 10th Street, Manhattan Building Plans Collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

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New Building Application, 331/333 East 10th Street. Department of Buildings collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

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Plans identified in the collection this past year have served as illustrations in recent For the Record articles. Happy Birthday Calvert Vaux featured plans submitted to the Buildings Department by Central Park architect Calvert Vaux. The story of the rushed construction of the Empire State Building, including plans of the iconic structure from the collection, is recounted in Race to the Top. 

Look for future updates as archivists continue processing this unique collection.  

Mystery Item, Part II

A whole season has passed since DORIS kicked off its popup exhibit 400 Years of NYC Government Records, 1636-2025, featuring some of our favorite items from the Municipal Archives and Library. We also included a “mystery item” from within the Old Town Collection. It looked like a genealogical chart, but its presence generated questions such as, who were these people and how did we end up with it? We put it on display and asked attendees for opinions—and we received some great answers—and some laughs. And, as promised, we’re back with updates. 

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Our “mystery item,” believed to be part of the Old Town Records. NYC Municipal Archives.

A few days after the exhibit, digitization specialist Matthew Minor (who has an interest in heraldry) emailed archivist Alexandra Hilton asking if she had more information about the mystery item. She thought that perhaps they could join forces to learn more. Matt made high-quality scans of the bifold document, a side for each of the four lineage charts, to help with the analysis. 

Now, Alex and Matt share their exploration of the origin and meaning of our mystery item.  

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Alex: With the magic of digitization, the document suddenly became a lot easier to read. Scanning it over, something caught my eye, and my heart stopped for a second. Was that “Tudor” I just read? I took a second look—yes, yes it definitely was Tudor. Feeling a little faint with excitement by this discovery, I start doing the Tudor genealogy in my head as I glanced at the bottom of the chart, verifying the names I was expecting to see—Queen Mary I of England with her husband, King Philip II of Spain, beside her. 

I didn’t want to spoil the fun for Matt but couldn’t resist sending him a message to get excited, promising him that I wouldn’t spoil anything until he had a turn. Meanwhile, I discovered the four couples whose lineage is charted in the document. 

1. King Philip II of Spain (1527–1598) & Queen Mary I of England (1516–1558) 

2. King Francis II of France (1544–1560) & Mary, Queen of Scots (1542–1587) 

3. Philibert II, Duke of Savoy (1480–1504) & Margaret of Austria (1480–1530) 

4. King James V of Scotland (1512–1542) & Margaret of Valois (1523–1574) 

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Annotated sheet showing the ancestors of Philibert II, Duke of Savoy and Margaret of Austria.

Matt: My background is in art, so I was struck by all the vivid, finely drawn heraldry. Preferring not to work on a screen, I printed a poster-size copy and pored over it. Eventually, I recognized a few names, and by using online resources, came to the same conclusions as Alex. 

“So, someone was trying to marry a hypothetical child of Mary, Queen of Scots to a child of Mary I and Philip II?” I asked her. 

She noted that such a marriage would be a way of preserving Catholicism in Britain. We discussed this and other possibilities (all while exchanging funny memes about royalty). Alex’s knowledge of European royalty is quite a bit more extensive than mine. 

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Annotated sheet showing the ancestors of King James V of Scotland and Madeleine of France.

Alex: Luckily, I knew the perfect British person to pepper with all my questions. She’s a DORIS alum and current archivist at The London Library, the one and only—Nathalie Belkin! Likely laughing at my American excitement for finding something “old,” she told me that “these types of things were commonplace around that time” but if we could figure out the type of paper it was on and its dimensions, she’d share it with a contact. 

Matt: I took the document to one of the conservators, Nora Ligorano. Examining it over a lightbox, Nora told me that it was handmade paper, most likely linen fiber. We also noticed that the paper had two watermarks. One was a shield with three fleurs-de-lis, the coat of arms of French royalty. The other we couldn’t quite make out. Since the document was found in an American archive, Nora checked the watermarks against a catalog of historical American watermarks but did not find any matches. This lends weight to the idea that the document (which we measured at 31.5 x 41.5 cm) was made in France, perhaps for official use.  

Alex: Nathalie’s friend got back to her and suggested that we send close-up images of the watermarks to the British Association of Paper Historians. 

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Watermark, visible when viewed on a lightbox. Old Town Records. NYC Municipal Archives.

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Watermark, visible when viewed on a lightbox. Old Town Records. NYC Municipal Archives.

She also recommended checking out Briquet Online, a watermark database containing the works of noted Swiss filigranologist Charles Moïse Briquet (1839–1918). The idea is to compare a watermark to the images in the database to come up with an estimated date of creation. It’s tedious work but we’re dropping the images of the watermarks here in case you want to try your hand at searching and comparing! 

Matt: In the past, I had studied basic heraldry, so I noted a few interesting things on the document. 

First, several of the escutcheons (heraldry speak for shields) had what looked like collars underneath them. By enlarging my scans and doing a deep dive online, I figured out that the collars show membership in orders of chivalry—specifically, the Order of the Golden Fleece and the Order of Saint Michael. These are the two most prominent Catholic orders, the former founded by a Holy Roman Emperor, the latter by a French King. 

Second, it was fascinating to look at how the different shields were combined in successive generations to show family heritage. It was also interesting that both men and women have escutcheons on the chart, rather than the traditional shield for men and lozenge (diamond shape) for women.  

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Our “mystery item,” believed to be part of the Old Town Records (verso). NYC Municipal Archives.

Finally, some of the shields showed the French arms with white fields instead of blue. There were multiple variations for certain families, such as the Tudors. This isn’t strange, and in most cases, I could find a record of them somewhere, but a few stood out. Specifically, the arms used for Elizabeth Woodville (Queen of England and wife of King Henry IV) were unusual. Elizabeth used several coats of arms throughout her life—the Woodville arms, her first husband’s arms, and her own version of the royal arms of England—but none of them look like the shield on the document.  

Having hit a wall, I contacted the College of Arms in London to ask if they could help. I got a response from John Petrie. Sir John is the Windsor Herald, the royal family’s official authority on British heraldry. He told us that unfortunately he could not add much information, although he did note that the pedigrees from this period in the archives of the College of Arms usually don’t have this much heraldry on them. 

Our Findings 

Why was it created? 

While we don’t know for sure, the presence of both the House of Burgundy and the House of Bourbon alongside the Habsburgs, Tudors, Valois, and Stuarts suggests that this document isn’t merely a diplomatic artifact or a marriage chart. Rather, it likely has dynastic, genealogical, and possibly propagandistic significance, meant to trace or emphasize the convergence of major royal bloodlines. 

• Dynastic display and propaganda: Charts like these were often created to demonstrate the legitimacy, nobility, and interconnectedness of royal bloodlines. The presence of so many recognizable arms—Burgundy, Bourbon, Savoy, Castile, Aragon, Valois—suggests a deliberate effort to underscore shared ancestry among Europe’s Catholic monarchies. 

• Catholic dynastic unity: These charts visually affirm the intermarriage network of Europe’s Catholic ruling houses at a moment (mid-16th century) when the Protestant Reformation fractured traditional alliances. The selection of these four couples highlights the Catholic dynastic web uniting Spain, France, Scotland, England (via Mary I), and Savoy. 

• Heraldry as genealogical proof: Before printed genealogies became widespread, heraldic genealogy served as visual proof of lineage. Each shield isn’t decorative—it encodes descent. Blue fields with golden fleurs-de-lis signal France; the red-and-yellow quarterings denote Castile and Aragon; the white cross on red signifies Savoy. 

• Political statement: By linking these lineages, the document could have served a courtly or diplomatic purpose—perhaps created for a Habsburg or Savoy court—to illustrate how Europe’s greatest royal lines were intertwined and how legitimate claims to multiple thrones (Spain, France, England, Scotland, Savoy) derived from common ancestry. 

What do the four lineages have in common? 

• All descend from or marry into Burgundian and Bourbon bloodlines. 

• All represent Catholic royal houses interconnected through diplomacy and marriage. 

• All reflect dynastic consolidation efforts through intermarriage rather than conquest. 

• Each marriage carries political symbolism: union of realms, alliance against Protestant England, or reinforcement of Habsburg-Valois power balance. 

What are its origins? 

The document’s characteristics strongly indicate that it’s of French origin, created sometime during the 16th to early 17th century: 

• The language is primarily early modern French, with some Latinized forms for titles and connective words (e.g., ex, uxor, filius, filia). 

• The handwriting is a French humanist cursive typical of courtly genealogical manuscripts from about 1550–1620. 

• The mix of Latin for formal lineage notation and vernacular French for commentary was standard for genealogical charts produced for noble patrons in this period. 

And why is it at DORIS? 

We’re still not sure. It’s not an organic fit for either the Old Town or Dutch records collections but could be part of the early Common Council papers. It would be an unusual gift to the Mayor, but that is a possibility as well.   

Our research has concluded for now, but we’d love to hear your comments! Share what you know below.