Among the government buildings in downtown Manhattan, with their spires, gargoyles, and balusters recalling a bygone era, there is one that houses contents as vintage as its exterior. In the basement of the Surrogate’s Courthouse, or Hall of Records, boxes upon boxes sit stacked and numbered behind locked mahogany doors. There are safes containing four-hundred-year-old litigation records, freezers keeping film reels fresh, and stacks of maps representing each borough’s early cartographic endeavors.
The entire history of New York City’s government—from handwritten court records of the first colonial Dutch settlers to the printed agendas of Bloomberg’s latest health initiatives—is filed, digitized, and preserved by the Department of Records. Eileen Flannelly (whose uncle founded the department, in 1977) is the deputy commissioner, and Kenneth Cobb (an employee since its inception) is the assistant commissioner. Together, with a few dozen staff members, they manage two hundred and twenty-one thousand cubic feet of historic city records.
“I remember when all this used to be in boxes in a loft on Park Row, above a Burger King. And now look at it!” Flannelly says, gesturing to the department’s visitor’s center, which opened a year ago. The new space, along with an effort to digitize seventeen million records, speaks to the department’s efforts to keep up with the times. “We’re on all the social media, too,” she adds. Cobb, wearing white gloves, looks up from a box. “But we’ll always keep the hard copies. Technology is great, but people want to see this—they want to touch it, feel it in their hands. It’s human nature, you know?”
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