- The Browning Photograph Collection contains photographs produced primarily in the 1920s and 1930s by Irving Browning and his commercial photography firm in and around New York City. The varied subject matter, which includes street life during the Great Depression and the construction of Art Deco skyscrapers, reflects the social and economic realities of the time period while also showcasing Browning's technical and aesthetic brilliance.
- This collection consists of 91 photographs by famed New York Times fashion photographer Bill Cunningham of his friend, neighbor, and fellow photographer Editta Sherman posing in period costumes in front of New York City buildings matching the same era as her clothing. Cunningham and Sherman scoured antique shops, street fairs, and auctions for period clothing, and conducted painstaking research to identify appropriate matching buildings. The project took eight years to complete and culminated in a 1977 exhibition at New-York Historical and other venues, as well as the 1978 book Facades.
- The Eugene Gordon Photograph Collection contains black and white gelatin silver prints of street life, religious groups, buildings, and public events of New York City. The photographs show New Yorkers going about their lives in a vibrant city. Gordons attention to detail, and to the changing face of the citys population and streetscape, is evident in images showing ethnic neighborhoods in Queens. The largest groupings of photographs are of Times Square and the 1970 Women's Strike for Equality. Other images show Hare Krishnas, Sikhs, St. Peters Lutheran church being demolished, and the United Nations. Several photographs represent the following neighborhoods: Harlem, Jackson Heights, Flushing, and Long Island City in Queens, Brighton Beach and Greenpoint in Brooklyn. Gift given in two parts: Eugene Gordon, 2005 & Miriam Gordon, 2008.
- Collection of 133 silver gelatin photographs of Manhattan, approximately 1938 to 1960, taken by amateur photographer Arthur W. Grumbine. Part of the collection consists of street scenes and views of individual buildings taken in various neighborhoods around the city from the 1930s through the 1960s, and include images of street vendors, construction sites, signs and storefronts, building interiors, aerial and riverfront views, Times Square, Washington Square, South Street, and vignettes depicting life on the streets of Manhattan's Little Italy, Chinatown, and Lower East Side. The remainder of the collection consists principally of photographs of subjects such as elevated trains, ferries and riverboats, horse drawn carts, and a single image of a New York City streetcar. Also included are a handful of photographs of miscellaneous and unidentified subjects, as well as two photo prints of pen and ink drawings executed and photographed by Grumbine.
- This collection consists of 43 photographs, mounted on 44 loose album pages of gray paper (one photograph is missing), of New York City newsboys (or "newsies"), probably taken by Lewis Hine for the National Child Labor Committee circa 1908-1912. All photographs are captioned with the subject's name, age, address, school, whether they had a badge or not, and the location of the photograph.
- The collection contains 403 photographic negatives produced circa 1920-1980 (bulk 1920-1950) by commercial photographers on behalf of The Boys’ Club of New York ("BCNY"). The majority depict young BCNY members engaged in a variety of activities, either at the club’s Tompkins Square Building (later renamed Harriman Clubhouse) or at the William Carey Camp in Jamesport, New York. Many of the photographs were published in annual reports, where they served to promote the organization’s work.
- This collection of 41 negatives depicts New York subway tunnels under construction. The majority of the glass negatives bear dates from 1901 through 1902, just after the city awarded a subway construction contract in 1900. These negatives show work being done at unknown locations along the subway’s earliest route in Manhattan, which ran from City Hall to 42nd Street on the East Side, then west along 42nd Street to Times Square, and north along Broadway. Negatives show workers, trenches, tunnel entrances, horses hauling materials, and views of tunnel structures from above gound. None of the images bear captions or identification, only dates. The title of each negative is devised from what was written on the negative sleeves during collection processing. The seven film negatives probably date from a later period, and depict an unidentified elevated station.
- The Subway Construction Photograph Collection, 1900-1950, includes over 71,000 photographs taken by various New York City transportation agencies during the construction of the New York City subways. The Board of Rapid Transit, the Public Service Commission, and their successors photographed construction of the subway and its surface extensions in Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens in a succession of contracts: Contracts One and Two were awarded to what later became the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT); Contract Three was also awarded to the IRT, and Contract Four was awarded to what became the Brooklyn Manhattan Transit Corporation (BMT); Contracts Three and Four were known as the Dual Contracts; additional lines were subsequently built by the Independent City-Owned Rapid Transit Railroad (IND). The photographs were primarily taken for insurance purposes in the event that buildings shown would be damaged during construction. The photographs depict the streets as they appeared before construction began as well as actual construction shots. The digitization of the Subway Construction Photograph Collection was made possible by generous grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.