The Museum of the City of New York's Prints, Drawings, and Photographs Collection documents the built environment of the city and its changing cultural, political, and social landscape from its earliest days to the present.  Over half a million views of the city and its people provide a rich visual resource.

Holdings include:

• Works by such noted photographers as Berenice Abbott, Jacob Riis, and Jessie Tarbox Beals

• More than 22,000 original prints taken by the Byron Co. in New York between 1890 and 1942. The complete Byron Collection database is searchable online. The database is currently undergoing maintenance and will be available again soon.
  

• The photographic archives of the Gottscho-Schleisner firm,  LOOK Magazine, Irving Underhill, Charles Von Urban, and the Wurts Brothers, as well as photographic work commissioned by the renowned architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White.

• The Harry T. Peters Collection, including the most complete set of hand-colored Currier and Ives prints in existence.

• Reginald Marsh's watercolor mural studies for the U.S. Customs House at Bowling Green, work produced by city printmakers under the Federal Art Project, and thousands of topographical engravings, hand-colored lithographs, and rare maps.

• Some of New York's earliest photographic views, represented in the waxed-paper negatives of Victor Prevost

• Drawings ranging from 18th-century pastel portraits to mural studies by Reginald Marsh from the 1930s. Also included are 19th-century architectural drawings by A.J. Davis; political cartoons from the 1920s and 1930s by Rollin Kirby and John Cassel; architectural renderings by Hughson Hawley; drawings by Rea Irvin; and the archives of the Planning Board of the 1939 New York World's Fair. 

For more information about the Prints, Drawings, and Photographs Collection, please contact Collections Access at research@mcny.org or call 212-534-1672 extension 3399.  For more information on the Museum's research policies, click here

For information about reproducing material from the collection, please visit Rights & Reproductions.