MIDTOWN — The city has added 30,000 additional photos to its public photo archive — including shots taken of a Communist Rally in Madison Square Park, speakers at an anti-Hitler parade in 1939, and the Hindenburg disaster.
All the photos — released by the New York City Department of Records and Information Services — were scanned from the Municipal Archive’s holdings of vintage large-format film and glass-plate negatives, color transparencies, century-old lantern slides, 35mm Kodachromes, and prints, officials said.
The latest round of photos brings the city’s online collection to 90,000, with thousands more unscanned photos still waiting in the city’s archives, officials said. The agency plans to digitize the remaining photos in the future, though no time frame has been given, they said.
The newly-scanned photos include a series of shots taken by the NYPD's "Alien Squad," which was responsible for documenting political organizations. There are photos taken of Communist Party rallies in Madison Square Garden, a Nazi summer camp in Long Island and speakers at a “Stop Hitler” parade in 1939.
The archives also contain photos from the NYPD’s Emergency Services Unit — from 1928 through 1941 — including everything from car accidents and airplane crashes to a shot of the Hindenburg dirigible explosion wreckage.
The photos can be viewed at the Department of Records website.
Reproductions of photographs are available for purchase.
