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Spared From the Shredder (for Now): 'Priceless' Bank Records of Old New York
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(David P.)
Apr 3, 2019, 3:33:00 PM4/3/19
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Spared From the Shredder (for Now): ‘Priceless’ Bank Records of Old New York
The Bowery Savings Bank, shown in about 1900, is no longer in business. But records from the bank, dating to the early 19th century, were spared from destruction, at least temporarily, on Monday. Archivists are hoping the material can be permanently preserved.
By Jim Dwyer, April 2, 2019, NY Times
A roaring omnivore of a shredding truck was parked Monday morning on Fulton Street in Brooklyn, chewing through centuries’ worth of paper.
It was poised to make a meal of a rare, powerful trove of the history of working-class New York: the archives of the Bowery Savings Bank, which was founded in 1834 for the benefit of its depositors.
The papers were among the materials being cleaned out of the basement of a Capital One branch in Brooklyn that is closing next month.T
At what seemed to have been the last minute, the records were given a stay of destruction, apparently when archivists and others began appealing to Capital One.
“We are going through a normal review process and will make appropriate decisions,” Sie Soheili, a spokesman for Capital One, said.
Disputing that archival bank material had been lost, he characterized the papers disposed of so far as “old newspapers and trash.”
But workers handling them said that, to their amazement, they saw documents dated from 1904 and into the 1940s — long before Capital One existed — headed into the shredder. By midmorning, workers said, they were told to divert pre-1930 records from the stream bound for the truck.
The fate of the historical materials is “to be determined,” Mr. Soheili said.
An organization of archivists in New York City is keen to make sure that the trove is not destroyed. “It would be priceless,” said Marion Casey, an associate professor at New York University’s Glucksman Ireland House.
The records of 19th-century savings banks have hardly ever been preserved, but those that survive — including a cache from the Emigrant Savings Bank, held at the New York Public Library — have opened new windows onto the long-vanished lives of ordinary people, Professor Casey said.
[Image] A Bowery Savings Bank ledger.
The library’s curator of manuscripts and archives, Thomas Lannon, sent word to Capital One on Tuesday that he would like to inspect the Bowery materials.
Their pages show what kind of work men and women did, where they lived, how much money they saved or borrowed, the names of their parents, spouses and places of birth. Such archives make social archaeology possible.
The Bowery bank, which did not pay its officers or trustees for decades and grew to be among the largest savings banks in the United States, no longer exists. Since the mid-1980s, it has been bought, sold, merged and acquired in a dizzying line of transactions.
The historical records moved from the Bowery’s landmark headquarters at 130 Bowery — now the home of Capitale, an event space — to an office park in Lake Success on Long Island. Around 2004, when that space was being emptied out and the archive was at risk of abandonment, it was moved to the basement on Fulton Street at the urging of the branch manager at the time, Joseph Kopitz. “I had so much space there,” Mr. Kopitz said.
Mr. Kopitz, who lives in the neighborhood, said he recently became concerned about the archive again when he saw a notice that the Capital One branch was closing.
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Few people know the heft of history in those boxes better than Barbara Haws, who served as the bank’s first archivist ahead of its 150th anniversary in 1984.
“It was amazingly continuous — every single depositor from the time when it opened its doors,” Ms. Haws said. “Big ledgers. It appealed to immigrants and people without a lot of money.”
The ledgers were the hard drives of the 19th century — terabyte-sized. “At this stage, I couldn’t be their archivist because I couldn’t lift them,” Ms. Haws said. “They’re about three to four feet tall, two feet wide. The bindings were about four inches thick and covered in a canvas material.”
Inside them, she said, is a roll call of Bowery depositors who arrived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan throughout the 19th century: Irish, Italians, Chinese, Eastern Europeans, among others. “Every single immigrant group was represented in that bank,” Ms. Haws said. She did not recall if the records included the race of the depositors.
Professor Casey said archivists in the city were willing to help the bank in its initial rough-sorting of the boxes in its basement.
[Image]
Depositors lined up at the Bowery Savings Bank to withdraw money in 1930.
After that, a number of the city’s major research institutions have agreed to move and temporarily store the material until a repository is found.
“A bunch of us will cobble the costs together of moving it to an interim place, and then we will triage it — ‘yes to this, no to that,’” Professor Casey said.
Ms. Haws said the records would be a robust resource for people doing genealogical research. Perhaps, she said, a commercial ancestry company would pay for them to be digitized.
“Everyone is strapped for space,” she said. “They would dovetail with the census and any city records. It would build out another layer of information about New Yorkers.”
Professor Casey said her students studying the archives of the Emigrant bank, for example, have found a group of farmers who held accounts there. “Of course, people in cities have to eat,” she said.
Mr. Kopitz said the bank could perform a profound public service by allowing others to keep them safe. “They could be heroes,” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/02/nyregion/bowery-savings-bank-records.html
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[Comments 34]
joellazar, Bethesda MD, 27m ago
I hope somebody else has dentified and honored Barbara Haws in her subsequent role as the New York Philharmonic's archivist since 1984--an indefatigable historian not only of that orchestra but of America's symphony orchestras in general.
Jack, FL, 31m ago
Banks were once impenetrable fortresses that depositors respected and trusted with the safe-keeping of their hard-earned money. Today, all barriers between depositor and teller have largely disappeared, along with the passbooks they issued. The gravitas that imposing marble columns conferred on the banking experience has morphed into loosey-goosey casual "cafes" with no structure and little or no privacy.
Michelle Teas, Charlotte, 54m ago
Oh these have to be saved - they simply must be. There is so much of everyday life in them - just like there is so much of everyday life in inventory lists from much earlier times.
These documents touch on the lives of 'regular' people - not just the wealthy or famous - whose belongings tend to be more abundant and preserved by default.
Finally - in our electronic age we may not fully realize how much archival material is being lost. I would much rather look at a sheet of paper with my father's distinct penmanship than a saved email print out. His voice is there but his touch is not. And the longer he is gone - the more precious these physical notes become.
Give me faded ink on ledger paper touched with age any day!
Rod Thorn, Ridgefield, CT, 57m ago
This article reminds me of the African proverb: "When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground."
If the crass insensitivity of casually throwing away historical records doesn't horrify you think of the opportunity cost of losing these one-of-a-kind treasures.
For instance, imagine if you found a bank ledger entry from a notable historical figure, say, Thomas Edison, opening an account for his Edison Illuminating Company on December 17, 1880, for the purpose of building electrical generating stations. That would be an interesting piece of content that could be used with the media, investors, employees, customers, municipalities, and other audiences.
I have no idea if a ledger entry about Thomas Edison was in the pile of papers headed for the shredder. Or if there was an entry by Thomas Edison, whether it had anything to do with the Edison Illuminating Company. But we'd never know unless someone acted to save these papers.
At the very least, people and organizations should handle historical documents and artifacts with care, and think twice before discarding them.
Thomas Edison may be long gone, but no one wants to see a library burned to the ground. And you never know, saving one could shed light on some interesting opportunities.
Stanley, NY, NY, 59m ago
I am a human rights international lawyer and it is vital that these records be saved .....without going into all the details, our history is crucial in our quest for understanding our present duties and rights to resolve some of the most difficult problems we have today in order to have human progress. We have our planet but it needs to be managed and records help us understand how through time.
Richard, Dallas, 1h ago
Priceless, unfiltered history.
For my birthday, my brother gave me our dad's check ledger from 1957. There's a story in all those check stubs: doctor bills from my birth, clothing stores, groceries, and about $40 bucks a month to the local dairy, who delivered to our house weekly.
Thanks to the people who saved the Bowery treasure.
stan continople, brooklyn, 1h ago
That's an unusual location for a grand bank building in those days, in the middle of the block. Usually, they were situated on a corner so light could flood in through at least two exposures. Maybe it had a skylight?
Jeremy Iacone, Los Angeles, 1h ago
Thank you for reporting this story. Who are we if not our histories.
RBC, BROOKLYN, 1h ago
There are so many places that this can be preserved. I hope someone from the The New York Public Library or the New York Historical Society sees this article.
Citygirl, NYC, 2h ago
Please don’t Marie Kondo a part of New York City’s history. There are many of us native New Yorkers to whom this sparks joy.
HH, Rochester, NY, 2h ago
The people in the photograph are what we could now call the "legacy population." They are becoming a diminishing part of the U.S. population.
.
In the future very few will care about them.
Paul J. Bosco, Manhattan, 2h ago
Ah, the stupidity of bankers! This old paper is worth much more as antiques & collectibles than it is as scrap. American Banknote Company archives have been sold, by a series of specialized NYC-area auction houses, for considerable millions.
Ideally, the materials would be digitalized and cataloged, with some being donated to institutions and the rest intelligently sold.
One should not underrate the role of collectors in preserving and valuing material culture.
B Doll, NYC, 2h ago
Only fools would do this, would throw treasures, pieces of their very own history away. It's soulless -- symptomatic of a culture (and a whole city now) that is blind to anything except profit and faux opportunity within its immediate life span, that disrespect the pasts (if it even knows there was one) degrades the present and the future. This is so sad, so stupid...so typical.
Marge Keller, Midwest, 2h ago
"Spare the shredder, spoil the archivists."
Susan Udin, Buffalo, 3h ago
Archives like this are a historical treasure. My father, a retired accountant, spent the last 20 years of his life, working on the accounts of Jeremiah Boone, a Pennsylvania merchant of the 1700's, and then of Stephen Girard, America's first Millionaire (when a million was a million). Those boxes of receipts and ledgers held fascinating stories of America's history, pre- and post-Revolution.
Who knows how many stories reside in the Bowery Banks's records. What a sin it would be to lose them forever.
Dscott, Johnstown, PA, 4h ago
And...who of a certain age remembers this great radio jingle that I heard in the mornings before going off to school in the '60s:
It pays to save at the Bowery
So, start your savings account right away
Save more and borrow less
Save for your happiness
Save at the Bowery Savings Bank
Yes, all of this material is priceless. Don't just digitize it. Continue to keep the originals somewhere, just in case something happens to the digital medium on which the data is stored.
Tonjo, Florida, 4h ago
I have never forgotten the classical music tune, 'It pays to save at the Bowery'. It was the last movement of Tchaikovsky symphony no. 5.
Cookin, New York, NY, 4h ago
After his family moved east from Ohio in 1927, my father's first bank account was at the Bowery at 110 East Forty-Second Street. His passbook shows a first deposit of $30.00 on August 23rd of that year. Ten years later, he had a balance of $311.30 and was earning $1.12 in quarterly interest.
When my father returned from the Pacific in 1945, he opened a new account for me, aged 3 months. As I grew up, I loved going with him into that elegant marbled space on 42nd Street where he did his own banking and continued to make small deposits in my name, providing me with pocket money during my college years.
Then during the 1960s and '70s, as an antiwar activist I began to withhold my telephone tax, which had been levied specifically to pay for the war in Vietnam. One day in 1974, I got an early morning call from a Bowery Bank teller named Terrence. He informed me that the IRS had arrived and was seizing money from my account. He wondered why. I told him. "I never knew this was going on," he said. I'll call you back when they leave." He did that, giving me information about which forms I needed to make the claim that my funds - a total of about $50.00 - had been taken illegally.
Such are the stories behind the figures in my old Bowery passbooks. When the Bowery finally closed, I felt I'd lost a family friend. And Terrence, if you're out there, I hope you're well. You had my back.
3 REPLIES
JPZiller, Terminus, 3h ago
@Cookin Thank you for a wonderful accompanying family story. I started my first job in NYC in 1976 so I remember those days. And thank you for you antiwar activism. I started college in Cleveland a mere year and a half after the massacre at Kent State.
gluebottle, New Hampshire, 1h ago
@Cookin - How did the telephone tax (only in NYC?) help pay for the Vietnam war? Not doubting you, just never heard of anything like that. That's an interesting subject in its own right.
Glenn, Sacramento1h ago
@Cookin
I hope Terrence is still out there, and sees this. (Stranger things have happened.) I, too, withheld that tax from my phone bill, but you're the only other person I've heard of that did the same thing, and completely across the country, yet. But not only did the IRS not contact my bank about recovering the money, it never occurred to me that they would or could do that. Simpler times, in many ways...
John, LI NY, 4h ago
How many time I passed that building and thought of the growing country around it.
Save the records! Let’s not burn down Alexandria again.
JPZiller, Terminus, 4h ago
Lovely landscape on Mr Kopitz's wall, Barbizon School? And the photograph of the people in line at the teller windows is revealing, particularly the dandy on the left mugging for the photographer, eyebrow arched.
1 REPLY
Erica, Sacramento, CA, 2h ago
@JPZiller He's great! I also loved the smiling woman on the right. I could picture her coming home and gushing to her husband about "getting her photograph taken today at the bank."
Tom, Elmhurst, 4h ago
Archive them properly for posterity in perpetuity.
Caroline, Brooklyn, 4h ago
As an archivist, I find this entire thing absolutely horrifying. What jackass at CapitalOne Bank looked at a store of historical records and decided they should be shredded? How can anyone be so nonchalant about committing this kind of historical crime? I'm glad my fellow archivists came to the rescue here.
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2 REPLIES
MJ, New England, 3h ago
@Caroline
Ditto from a sister archivist, but sadly I’ve found this type of occurrence to be the norm rather than the exception.
Virginia Tuttle, Camden, Maine, 3h ago
@Caroline
Can anyone help me track down the archives of the Waldorf-Astoria? I'm researching the early years, while it was still just the Waldorf.
Marge Keller, Midwest, 4h ago
"Their pages show what kind of work men and women did, where they lived, how much money they saved or borrowed, the names of their parents, spouses and places of birth. Such archives make social archaeology possible."
So often, folks are in a hurry to destroy history rather than savor and learn from it. To have that golden opportunity of peering through "new windows onto the long-vanished lives of ordinary people" is priceless.
Thank goodness there are still people like Joseph Kopitz around who cherishes and values the importance of history. The photographs alone are works of timeless beauty and appreciation.
Very cool article and very cool people who are advocating for the archiving of these documents rather than shipping them off to the shredder.
GWPDA, Arizona, 4h ago
You'd think someone would call NARA and get them on site.
National Archives at New York City
One Bowling Green, Room 328
New York, NY 10004
Phone: 212-401-1620
Toll-free: 1-866-840-1752
Fax: 212-401-1638
Email: newyork....@nara.gov
Beaconps, CT, 5h ago
I have a ledger from a lower Broadway florist shop with entries from 1880. Ledgers can be quite interesting. It is surprising how many people lived on store credit, such as 5 cents for a dozen tomato plants. The helper earned $1 a day, which was 10 or 12 hours back then.
1 REPLY
GWPDA, Arizona, 2h ago
@Beaconps - That would be quite an ROI for the tomato plants! 12 plants x 1/2 bushel tomatoes each plant = fruit for everybody! See how 5cents can grow....
CH, Brooklynite, 5h ago
It's very possible that my grandparents and great-grandparents banked there.
DeMe, Charlotte, 5h ago
The handwriting in the ledger is beautiful and conveys fastidiousness and trust.
His Story, Nashville, TN, 5h ago
I actually consulted (and film copied) some of these voluminous records as a graduate student in the late 1970's. They were in a turn-of-the twentieth century vault next to the original granite and cast-iron vault from the 1830's to which the even the staff did not have the key. The page you are showing is from the North River Savings Bank from the late 1860s. acquired by the Bowery in the late 1940's. For years, I have stored my incomplete records. I am glad this treasure has been retrieved.
Currents, NYC, 5h ago
A last minute stay. Thank you to all who made that happen. These materials are filled with our history and the lessons learned from it.
NorthernVirginia, Falls Church, VA, 5h ago
That sounds like a few weeks work for a supervisor and a couple of student interns. The entire trove could be scanned and stored on a one terabyte drive costing about $30. It would be a tragedy to lose such intact, historical data.
4 REPLIES
Archivist, New York, NY, 5h ago
@NorthernVirginia
You're right, it would be a tragedy. But it takes far more time, professional manpower, and money to acquire, describe, digitize, preserve, and make archival records available to the public. Please don't minimize the work that goes into important projects like this.
Caroline, Brooklyn, 4h ago
@NorthernVirginia This comment is not only wrong but, frankly, insulting to the entire archival profession. This stuff isn't just quick scan digitization work for anyone to do quickly.
NorthernVirginia, Falls Church, VA, 2h ago
@Archivist and @Caroline, I am only pointing out the ease with which such records can be faithfully digitized and stored, especially in light of the pending decision to shred the material. I am not trivializing or belittling the process of making sense of what has been digitized, which will no doubt take years, but which will be accomplished by experts in that field using computers to access the newly-digital records.
GvN, Long Island, NY, 2h ago
@NorthernVirginia
I would strongly advice against using hard drives to store this information since they tend to die like flies. The only reason that cloud storage works is because it keeps multiple copies of everything on multiple storage media in geographically different locations.
Pretty much any kind of affordable digital storage right now has a very limited lifetime. For many years I kept copies of stuff that I wanted to archive on multiple storage media. At a certain point the failures became too rampant to deal with as an individual. I gave up and moved to payed cloud storage.
Does anyone know what the preferred storage method for these kind of important historical documents is?
Jake, New York, 6h ago
I would think the folks at the Ellis Island Museum would be all over this.
The Bowery Savings Bank, shown in about 1900, is no longer in business. But records from the bank, dating to the early 19th century, were spared from destruction, at least temporarily, on Monday. Archivists are hoping the material can be permanently preserved.
By Jim Dwyer, April 2, 2019, NY Times
A roaring omnivore of a shredding truck was parked Monday morning on Fulton Street in Brooklyn, chewing through centuries’ worth of paper.
It was poised to make a meal of a rare, powerful trove of the history of working-class New York: the archives of the Bowery Savings Bank, which was founded in 1834 for the benefit of its depositors.
The papers were among the materials being cleaned out of the basement of a Capital One branch in Brooklyn that is closing next month.T
At what seemed to have been the last minute, the records were given a stay of destruction, apparently when archivists and others began appealing to Capital One.
“We are going through a normal review process and will make appropriate decisions,” Sie Soheili, a spokesman for Capital One, said.
Disputing that archival bank material had been lost, he characterized the papers disposed of so far as “old newspapers and trash.”
But workers handling them said that, to their amazement, they saw documents dated from 1904 and into the 1940s — long before Capital One existed — headed into the shredder. By midmorning, workers said, they were told to divert pre-1930 records from the stream bound for the truck.
The fate of the historical materials is “to be determined,” Mr. Soheili said.
An organization of archivists in New York City is keen to make sure that the trove is not destroyed. “It would be priceless,” said Marion Casey, an associate professor at New York University’s Glucksman Ireland House.
The records of 19th-century savings banks have hardly ever been preserved, but those that survive — including a cache from the Emigrant Savings Bank, held at the New York Public Library — have opened new windows onto the long-vanished lives of ordinary people, Professor Casey said.
[Image] A Bowery Savings Bank ledger.
The library’s curator of manuscripts and archives, Thomas Lannon, sent word to Capital One on Tuesday that he would like to inspect the Bowery materials.
Their pages show what kind of work men and women did, where they lived, how much money they saved or borrowed, the names of their parents, spouses and places of birth. Such archives make social archaeology possible.
The Bowery bank, which did not pay its officers or trustees for decades and grew to be among the largest savings banks in the United States, no longer exists. Since the mid-1980s, it has been bought, sold, merged and acquired in a dizzying line of transactions.
The historical records moved from the Bowery’s landmark headquarters at 130 Bowery — now the home of Capitale, an event space — to an office park in Lake Success on Long Island. Around 2004, when that space was being emptied out and the archive was at risk of abandonment, it was moved to the basement on Fulton Street at the urging of the branch manager at the time, Joseph Kopitz. “I had so much space there,” Mr. Kopitz said.
Mr. Kopitz, who lives in the neighborhood, said he recently became concerned about the archive again when he saw a notice that the Capital One branch was closing.
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Few people know the heft of history in those boxes better than Barbara Haws, who served as the bank’s first archivist ahead of its 150th anniversary in 1984.
“It was amazingly continuous — every single depositor from the time when it opened its doors,” Ms. Haws said. “Big ledgers. It appealed to immigrants and people without a lot of money.”
The ledgers were the hard drives of the 19th century — terabyte-sized. “At this stage, I couldn’t be their archivist because I couldn’t lift them,” Ms. Haws said. “They’re about three to four feet tall, two feet wide. The bindings were about four inches thick and covered in a canvas material.”
Inside them, she said, is a roll call of Bowery depositors who arrived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan throughout the 19th century: Irish, Italians, Chinese, Eastern Europeans, among others. “Every single immigrant group was represented in that bank,” Ms. Haws said. She did not recall if the records included the race of the depositors.
Professor Casey said archivists in the city were willing to help the bank in its initial rough-sorting of the boxes in its basement.
[Image]
Depositors lined up at the Bowery Savings Bank to withdraw money in 1930.
After that, a number of the city’s major research institutions have agreed to move and temporarily store the material until a repository is found.
“A bunch of us will cobble the costs together of moving it to an interim place, and then we will triage it — ‘yes to this, no to that,’” Professor Casey said.
Ms. Haws said the records would be a robust resource for people doing genealogical research. Perhaps, she said, a commercial ancestry company would pay for them to be digitized.
“Everyone is strapped for space,” she said. “They would dovetail with the census and any city records. It would build out another layer of information about New Yorkers.”
Professor Casey said her students studying the archives of the Emigrant bank, for example, have found a group of farmers who held accounts there. “Of course, people in cities have to eat,” she said.
Mr. Kopitz said the bank could perform a profound public service by allowing others to keep them safe. “They could be heroes,” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/02/nyregion/bowery-savings-bank-records.html
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[Comments 34]
joellazar, Bethesda MD, 27m ago
I hope somebody else has dentified and honored Barbara Haws in her subsequent role as the New York Philharmonic's archivist since 1984--an indefatigable historian not only of that orchestra but of America's symphony orchestras in general.
Jack, FL, 31m ago
Banks were once impenetrable fortresses that depositors respected and trusted with the safe-keeping of their hard-earned money. Today, all barriers between depositor and teller have largely disappeared, along with the passbooks they issued. The gravitas that imposing marble columns conferred on the banking experience has morphed into loosey-goosey casual "cafes" with no structure and little or no privacy.
Michelle Teas, Charlotte, 54m ago
Oh these have to be saved - they simply must be. There is so much of everyday life in them - just like there is so much of everyday life in inventory lists from much earlier times.
These documents touch on the lives of 'regular' people - not just the wealthy or famous - whose belongings tend to be more abundant and preserved by default.
Finally - in our electronic age we may not fully realize how much archival material is being lost. I would much rather look at a sheet of paper with my father's distinct penmanship than a saved email print out. His voice is there but his touch is not. And the longer he is gone - the more precious these physical notes become.
Give me faded ink on ledger paper touched with age any day!
Rod Thorn, Ridgefield, CT, 57m ago
This article reminds me of the African proverb: "When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground."
If the crass insensitivity of casually throwing away historical records doesn't horrify you think of the opportunity cost of losing these one-of-a-kind treasures.
For instance, imagine if you found a bank ledger entry from a notable historical figure, say, Thomas Edison, opening an account for his Edison Illuminating Company on December 17, 1880, for the purpose of building electrical generating stations. That would be an interesting piece of content that could be used with the media, investors, employees, customers, municipalities, and other audiences.
I have no idea if a ledger entry about Thomas Edison was in the pile of papers headed for the shredder. Or if there was an entry by Thomas Edison, whether it had anything to do with the Edison Illuminating Company. But we'd never know unless someone acted to save these papers.
At the very least, people and organizations should handle historical documents and artifacts with care, and think twice before discarding them.
Thomas Edison may be long gone, but no one wants to see a library burned to the ground. And you never know, saving one could shed light on some interesting opportunities.
Stanley, NY, NY, 59m ago
I am a human rights international lawyer and it is vital that these records be saved .....without going into all the details, our history is crucial in our quest for understanding our present duties and rights to resolve some of the most difficult problems we have today in order to have human progress. We have our planet but it needs to be managed and records help us understand how through time.
Richard, Dallas, 1h ago
Priceless, unfiltered history.
For my birthday, my brother gave me our dad's check ledger from 1957. There's a story in all those check stubs: doctor bills from my birth, clothing stores, groceries, and about $40 bucks a month to the local dairy, who delivered to our house weekly.
Thanks to the people who saved the Bowery treasure.
stan continople, brooklyn, 1h ago
That's an unusual location for a grand bank building in those days, in the middle of the block. Usually, they were situated on a corner so light could flood in through at least two exposures. Maybe it had a skylight?
Jeremy Iacone, Los Angeles, 1h ago
Thank you for reporting this story. Who are we if not our histories.
RBC, BROOKLYN, 1h ago
There are so many places that this can be preserved. I hope someone from the The New York Public Library or the New York Historical Society sees this article.
Citygirl, NYC, 2h ago
Please don’t Marie Kondo a part of New York City’s history. There are many of us native New Yorkers to whom this sparks joy.
HH, Rochester, NY, 2h ago
The people in the photograph are what we could now call the "legacy population." They are becoming a diminishing part of the U.S. population.
.
In the future very few will care about them.
Paul J. Bosco, Manhattan, 2h ago
Ah, the stupidity of bankers! This old paper is worth much more as antiques & collectibles than it is as scrap. American Banknote Company archives have been sold, by a series of specialized NYC-area auction houses, for considerable millions.
Ideally, the materials would be digitalized and cataloged, with some being donated to institutions and the rest intelligently sold.
One should not underrate the role of collectors in preserving and valuing material culture.
B Doll, NYC, 2h ago
Only fools would do this, would throw treasures, pieces of their very own history away. It's soulless -- symptomatic of a culture (and a whole city now) that is blind to anything except profit and faux opportunity within its immediate life span, that disrespect the pasts (if it even knows there was one) degrades the present and the future. This is so sad, so stupid...so typical.
Marge Keller, Midwest, 2h ago
"Spare the shredder, spoil the archivists."
Susan Udin, Buffalo, 3h ago
Archives like this are a historical treasure. My father, a retired accountant, spent the last 20 years of his life, working on the accounts of Jeremiah Boone, a Pennsylvania merchant of the 1700's, and then of Stephen Girard, America's first Millionaire (when a million was a million). Those boxes of receipts and ledgers held fascinating stories of America's history, pre- and post-Revolution.
Who knows how many stories reside in the Bowery Banks's records. What a sin it would be to lose them forever.
Dscott, Johnstown, PA, 4h ago
And...who of a certain age remembers this great radio jingle that I heard in the mornings before going off to school in the '60s:
It pays to save at the Bowery
So, start your savings account right away
Save more and borrow less
Save for your happiness
Save at the Bowery Savings Bank
Yes, all of this material is priceless. Don't just digitize it. Continue to keep the originals somewhere, just in case something happens to the digital medium on which the data is stored.
Tonjo, Florida, 4h ago
I have never forgotten the classical music tune, 'It pays to save at the Bowery'. It was the last movement of Tchaikovsky symphony no. 5.
Cookin, New York, NY, 4h ago
After his family moved east from Ohio in 1927, my father's first bank account was at the Bowery at 110 East Forty-Second Street. His passbook shows a first deposit of $30.00 on August 23rd of that year. Ten years later, he had a balance of $311.30 and was earning $1.12 in quarterly interest.
When my father returned from the Pacific in 1945, he opened a new account for me, aged 3 months. As I grew up, I loved going with him into that elegant marbled space on 42nd Street where he did his own banking and continued to make small deposits in my name, providing me with pocket money during my college years.
Then during the 1960s and '70s, as an antiwar activist I began to withhold my telephone tax, which had been levied specifically to pay for the war in Vietnam. One day in 1974, I got an early morning call from a Bowery Bank teller named Terrence. He informed me that the IRS had arrived and was seizing money from my account. He wondered why. I told him. "I never knew this was going on," he said. I'll call you back when they leave." He did that, giving me information about which forms I needed to make the claim that my funds - a total of about $50.00 - had been taken illegally.
Such are the stories behind the figures in my old Bowery passbooks. When the Bowery finally closed, I felt I'd lost a family friend. And Terrence, if you're out there, I hope you're well. You had my back.
3 REPLIES
JPZiller, Terminus, 3h ago
@Cookin Thank you for a wonderful accompanying family story. I started my first job in NYC in 1976 so I remember those days. And thank you for you antiwar activism. I started college in Cleveland a mere year and a half after the massacre at Kent State.
gluebottle, New Hampshire, 1h ago
@Cookin - How did the telephone tax (only in NYC?) help pay for the Vietnam war? Not doubting you, just never heard of anything like that. That's an interesting subject in its own right.
Glenn, Sacramento1h ago
@Cookin
I hope Terrence is still out there, and sees this. (Stranger things have happened.) I, too, withheld that tax from my phone bill, but you're the only other person I've heard of that did the same thing, and completely across the country, yet. But not only did the IRS not contact my bank about recovering the money, it never occurred to me that they would or could do that. Simpler times, in many ways...
John, LI NY, 4h ago
How many time I passed that building and thought of the growing country around it.
Save the records! Let’s not burn down Alexandria again.
JPZiller, Terminus, 4h ago
Lovely landscape on Mr Kopitz's wall, Barbizon School? And the photograph of the people in line at the teller windows is revealing, particularly the dandy on the left mugging for the photographer, eyebrow arched.
1 REPLY
Erica, Sacramento, CA, 2h ago
@JPZiller He's great! I also loved the smiling woman on the right. I could picture her coming home and gushing to her husband about "getting her photograph taken today at the bank."
Tom, Elmhurst, 4h ago
Archive them properly for posterity in perpetuity.
Caroline, Brooklyn, 4h ago
As an archivist, I find this entire thing absolutely horrifying. What jackass at CapitalOne Bank looked at a store of historical records and decided they should be shredded? How can anyone be so nonchalant about committing this kind of historical crime? I'm glad my fellow archivists came to the rescue here.
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2 REPLIES
MJ, New England, 3h ago
@Caroline
Ditto from a sister archivist, but sadly I’ve found this type of occurrence to be the norm rather than the exception.
Virginia Tuttle, Camden, Maine, 3h ago
@Caroline
Can anyone help me track down the archives of the Waldorf-Astoria? I'm researching the early years, while it was still just the Waldorf.
Marge Keller, Midwest, 4h ago
"Their pages show what kind of work men and women did, where they lived, how much money they saved or borrowed, the names of their parents, spouses and places of birth. Such archives make social archaeology possible."
So often, folks are in a hurry to destroy history rather than savor and learn from it. To have that golden opportunity of peering through "new windows onto the long-vanished lives of ordinary people" is priceless.
Thank goodness there are still people like Joseph Kopitz around who cherishes and values the importance of history. The photographs alone are works of timeless beauty and appreciation.
Very cool article and very cool people who are advocating for the archiving of these documents rather than shipping them off to the shredder.
GWPDA, Arizona, 4h ago
You'd think someone would call NARA and get them on site.
National Archives at New York City
One Bowling Green, Room 328
New York, NY 10004
Phone: 212-401-1620
Toll-free: 1-866-840-1752
Fax: 212-401-1638
Email: newyork....@nara.gov
Beaconps, CT, 5h ago
I have a ledger from a lower Broadway florist shop with entries from 1880. Ledgers can be quite interesting. It is surprising how many people lived on store credit, such as 5 cents for a dozen tomato plants. The helper earned $1 a day, which was 10 or 12 hours back then.
1 REPLY
GWPDA, Arizona, 2h ago
@Beaconps - That would be quite an ROI for the tomato plants! 12 plants x 1/2 bushel tomatoes each plant = fruit for everybody! See how 5cents can grow....
CH, Brooklynite, 5h ago
It's very possible that my grandparents and great-grandparents banked there.
DeMe, Charlotte, 5h ago
The handwriting in the ledger is beautiful and conveys fastidiousness and trust.
His Story, Nashville, TN, 5h ago
I actually consulted (and film copied) some of these voluminous records as a graduate student in the late 1970's. They were in a turn-of-the twentieth century vault next to the original granite and cast-iron vault from the 1830's to which the even the staff did not have the key. The page you are showing is from the North River Savings Bank from the late 1860s. acquired by the Bowery in the late 1940's. For years, I have stored my incomplete records. I am glad this treasure has been retrieved.
Currents, NYC, 5h ago
A last minute stay. Thank you to all who made that happen. These materials are filled with our history and the lessons learned from it.
NorthernVirginia, Falls Church, VA, 5h ago
That sounds like a few weeks work for a supervisor and a couple of student interns. The entire trove could be scanned and stored on a one terabyte drive costing about $30. It would be a tragedy to lose such intact, historical data.
4 REPLIES
Archivist, New York, NY, 5h ago
@NorthernVirginia
You're right, it would be a tragedy. But it takes far more time, professional manpower, and money to acquire, describe, digitize, preserve, and make archival records available to the public. Please don't minimize the work that goes into important projects like this.
Caroline, Brooklyn, 4h ago
@NorthernVirginia This comment is not only wrong but, frankly, insulting to the entire archival profession. This stuff isn't just quick scan digitization work for anyone to do quickly.
NorthernVirginia, Falls Church, VA, 2h ago
@Archivist and @Caroline, I am only pointing out the ease with which such records can be faithfully digitized and stored, especially in light of the pending decision to shred the material. I am not trivializing or belittling the process of making sense of what has been digitized, which will no doubt take years, but which will be accomplished by experts in that field using computers to access the newly-digital records.
GvN, Long Island, NY, 2h ago
@NorthernVirginia
I would strongly advice against using hard drives to store this information since they tend to die like flies. The only reason that cloud storage works is because it keeps multiple copies of everything on multiple storage media in geographically different locations.
Pretty much any kind of affordable digital storage right now has a very limited lifetime. For many years I kept copies of stuff that I wanted to archive on multiple storage media. At a certain point the failures became too rampant to deal with as an individual. I gave up and moved to payed cloud storage.
Does anyone know what the preferred storage method for these kind of important historical documents is?
Jake, New York, 6h ago
I would think the folks at the Ellis Island Museum would be all over this.
Marilyn Shamlian-Garcia
Sep 12, 2020, 4:18:39 PM9/12/20
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