There’s a photo of George Burns and Gracie Allen, who visited Hoboken in 1946 for a celebration of the 100th anniversary of the first baseball game. There’s a grainy picture of President Warren Harding and his wife, who visited the mile-square city in 1921. Hoboken’s history has come alive on the second floor of the public library, located at Fifth Street and Park Avenue, thanks to a recently-organized collection of more than 1,000 photos that document the town’s history. The photographs, which date as far back as the 1880s, capture dozens of visits to the mile square city by the rich and famous as well as scenes from more than 120 years of everyday life. While the library has owned many of these pictures for decades, finding them has been akin to searching for a needle in the haystack until recently. In October of 1998, Carol Foster, a retired registrar from NYU’s Medical School and a library volunteer, began organizing the 1,004-picture collection into several black three-ring binders. Drawing on her experience coordinating student records as a registrar, and wielding nothing more than an oversized magnifying glass and a passion for “giving something back” as she puts it, Foster has catalogued the collection, cross referenced them and entered them into a computer database. “This is something to get excited about,” the 15-year city resident explained Wednesday as she flipped back and forth between the binders and an index she created to help visitors find the pictures they need. “We have pictures of World War I activities, fire scenes and pictures of baseball. Lots of pictures of baseball. Everybody loves baseball. But they are all priceless.” (The first game of organized baseball was held in Hoboken’s Elysian Fields.) Founding fathers and posing politicos Dozens of photos of social club meetings, a humming waterfront, buildings that have been torn down or re-worked, politicos posing, the Stevens family huddled together and the evolution of the Stevens Institute’s grounds, can also be found in the collection. Picture number 115, a crystal-clear shot of a jitney careening down Washington Street in 1915, is emblematic of the collection’s historical value. Several city residents are clearly visible dressed in outfits that would look very out of place on the city’s streets today. Also visible are a handful of long-gone storefronts. Though Foster has been logging in two days a week at the library for a year and a half, she still says that there is a lot of work to do on the collection. Now that it’s better organized, she would like to work with library administrators to ensure that the collection is around for generations. “We need acid free envelopes,” she explained. “Every time anybody handles the pictures – especially the originals – some of the oils from their hands rubs off on the photos. That will cause them to deteriorate. Ultimately, I would like to scan them into a computer so people could flip through the collection there. It would just be faster, easier and less destructive.” Unfortunately the library’s little budget is unlikely to accommodate Foster’s big plans for the collection in the near future, so the enthusiastic volunteer says that she would settle for raising the money necessary to develop the tiny prints the library owns into a larger, more uniform, more visible size. “We also really need to continue to add to the collection,” she said with a gentle wave of her giant magnifying glass. “Now it is especially important with so many new buildings going up and old ones coming down. So I hope people will bring us their photos.” Though Foster says she has had no training in library sciences, she says the 29 years she spent as a registrar helped her understand how to perform her current task. “I was surprised at how familiar organizing these pictures were to me,” she explained. “In a lot of ways, this is similar to handling students records. We keep academic records forever and we plan to do the same here with these.”
Our Digital Archive from 2000 – 2016
