Seward Park Branch, NYPL, ca. 1977.

One of the most important ways we can try to better understand a historical period is to examine primary documents and sources – first-hand records – from that time. Newspaper articles, government reports and letters are all important primary sources, but photographs are among the most fun to examine. They provide visual evidence of a time period or event that can expand your historical understanding – and help you really picture what life was like back then. Every week, we’ll share with you a photograph of real people or a real scene from New York in the early 1900s. Your job? Put on your Young Historian glasses and examine it. What do you see? What do you think it shows you about the people in the picture, the place where they are, and the time period? What are the clues in the picture that tell you something? You’ll be amazed by what you can discover when you look closely!

📚In 1901 after selling his corporation for $500 million, steel magnate and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie announced a $5.2 million donation to the City of New York for the construction of public library buildings. With this gift, 67 branch libraries were constructed in the five boroughs between 1903 and 1929. 📚

Over a 130 years ago, New York’s Lower East Side was home to the world’s largest Jewish community. Between 1881-1924 over 2 million Eastern European Jews called this neighborhood home. And just as generations of immigrants have and continue to do, this community transformed the LES, creating a network of businesses, synagogues, public gathering spaces and more. Today, the LES has gone through many changes, but look closely. Tucked along these bustling blocks, signs of immigrant Jewish life – and hopes – still remain.

Park Row Building ARCHITECT: R. H. Robertson DATE: 1896-99 STYLE: Skyscraper The 30-story, 391-foot Park Row Building was the tallest building in New York City and one of the tallest structures in the world between 1899, the year of its completion, and 1908. It is one of several surviving late nineteenth-century buildings that formed Newspaper Row, the center of newspaper publishing in New York City from the 1840s to the 1920s. Among its many tenants, the building housed the offices of the Associated Press news agency, as well as the headquarters of August Belmont’s Interborough Rapid Transit Company. The great height and irregular plan of this building led to the use of innovative construction techniques including a pile and steel-grillage foundation, a Roehling concrete floor system for fireproofing, and Sprague Electric elevators to transport the thousands of people using the building each day.

The Seward Park branch of The New York Public Library on Manhattan’s Lower East Side can trace its roots back to 1886, when the Aguilar Free Library Society founded it. The branch, which opened its doors at its current location on November 11, 1909, is located at the eastern edge of the park for which it is named. The four-story, red brick Renaissance Revival building was one of 65 NYPL branches built with funds from Andrew Carnegie, and it boasts high ceilings and arched windows designed by the firm Babb, Cook & Welch.