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Nazi Summer Camps, Fancy Dogs, and Other Gems from NYC's Amazing Photo Archive

The NYC Municipal Archives has released 30,000 never-before-seen digital images. You're going to want to check them out.
Two boys hitch a ride on a car. Image: NYC Municipal Archives

Good news for history nerds: Earlier this month, the New York City Department of Records and Information Services (DORIS) released 30,000 digital images to its online archives. This new glut of photos puts the online gallery up to more than 900,000 images, but even that only scratches the surface of the DORIS collection.

“We have somewhere around five million photographs in various formats from digital to glass-plate negatives,” Michael Lorenzini, the department's curator of photography, told me. “There is some duplication, that is we may have a print and a negative of the same image, so it might be more accurate to say we have three million unique images.”

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Since Lorenzini first started at the Municipal Archives 17 years ago, about four million new images have been added to the physical archives, and close to a million have been released online for the public. “Our goal is always to make our collections more accessible, and in this age that means online, but not all of our images would be appropriate to put online,” Lorenzini said. “And of course we are taking in more photographs all the time, so we are swimming against the tide.

Of course, digitizing the vast mountains of information stored in the Municipal Archives is a huge task, one that Lorenzini said the agency is far from completing.

“There is a public misconception that all information is online and that eventually we won't need libraries and archives, but of course even with the vast amounts of material online, it is something like six percent of the published information," he said.

While that tantalizingly low percentage definitely makes us want to visit the archives in person, the online gallery has more than enough eye candy for the armchair historian. One of the biggest highlights of the newly added images, for example, is a series of photos shot at Camp Siegfried, a Nazi summer camp in Yaphank, Long Island.

Run by the German American Bund, Camp Siegfried was only one of many camps across the country that proselytized Nazism in America. The images are about as eerie as you'd expect them to be, and provide an interesting glimpse into the years leading up to WWII.

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Welcome to Camp Siegfried, 1938. Image: NYC Municipal Archives
Long Island Nazis enjoying a sunny day. Image: NYC Municipal Archives

The Camp Siegfried images are from a particularly interesting sub-category of photos taken by the “Alien Squad,” a department of the New York City Police Department that kept watch over foreign causes and organizations. If you search the squad's records in the online gallery, all kinds of odd images pop up, including a series from a Communist Party rally in Madison Square Garden.

James W. Ford speaking at a Communist Party rally. Image: NYC Municipal Archives

Not all of the new images are political—in fact, a huge portion are casual shots of New York City neighborhoods, projects, and residents. Eugene de Salignac was singled out in the department's press release as one of the most intriguing photographers to look up, because his shots of regular NYC life are so strikingly poignant. For example, this sun-soaked photo of the interior of a Williamsburg Bridge trolley car.

 Image: NYC Municipal Archives

I collected some more of my favorite new images below, but you should check out the full online gallery for yourself. It's a delightfully disorienting step back in time.

The skeleton of the Hindenburg.  Image: NYC Municipal Archives
A plane crash in Brooklyn. Image: NYC Municipal Archives
Dressing up pets clearly has a long and storied history. Image: NYC Municipal Archives
Mayor LaGuardia smashing up slot machines and tossing them into the Hudson River. Image: NYC Municipal Archives
A homicide in a walk-up. Image: NYC Municipal Archives
Astoria, 1927. Image: NYC Municipal Archives
A train outpaces a horse-drawn carriage. Image: NYC Municipal Archives