The Charles Gilbert Hine Photograph Collection is composed of platinum prints, cyanotypes, and silver prints housed individually and in three photograph albums. Photographs date from 1883 to 1908 and focus on Manhattan.Included are views of strets, busineses, monuments, theaters, billboards, posters, and scenes of everyday life. Night and rooftop views are included. The albums are a three volume series that Hine entitled "Broadway, New York: From the Sky Scraper to the Wild Flower." They are geographically arranged, following Broadway from south to north. Approximately 274 mounted photographs taken along Broadway are complemented by Hine's essay on the history of the thoroughfare and its development; clippings mounted in the album provide additional commentary on specific buildings and neighborhoods. Views of streets, theaters, businesses, prominent buildings and parks are joined by pastoral portraits of rural life at the end of the island, A few of the albumen prints attributed to both Charles Gilbert and Thomas A. Hine.
Charles Gilbert Hine of Woodside, New Jersey, and later Staten Island, New York, succeeded his father, Charles Cole Hine, as head of Hine Insurance Publishing Company in New York City. As an avid amateur historian and photographer he wrote and privately published over twenty five books on the local history of areas of New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts, illustrating them with his own platinum prints. He was a founding member of the Newark Camera Club in 1888.