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- New York subway construction negative collection, 1901-1902, and undated
- 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.
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- Subway Construction Photograph Collection, 1900-1950
- The Subway Construction Photograph Collection, 1900-1950, includes over 72,500 photographs taken by various New York City transportation agencies during the construction of the New York City underground 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 grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.