New York City Transit Photographic Unit collection
Scope and Contents
The collection contains photographic negatives, positives, and slides documenting the provision of transportation services by NYCT both above and below ground, as well as the routine operations of the administrative persons and entities behind said services, events coordinated for both internal and external purposes, and projects to renovate and/or construct new capital infrastructure. While these photographic materials make up the bulk of the collection, paper records exist for 3 discrete series, as described in depth below. The collection has been arranged into 10 series.
Dates
- 1898 - 2011
- Majority of material found within 1966 - 2004
Creator
- NYCT Photographic Unit (Organization)
Conditions Governing Access
Access is available to the public at the archivist’s discretion.
Conditions Governing Use
Some restrictions may apply to materials included in Series 6, which contains sensitive legal information.
Biographical / Historical
The New York City Transit (NYCT) Photographic Unit was an internal division charged with visually documenting transit agency facilities, operations, and events for administrative, public relations, legal, and general documentary purposes. Within the dates treated in the collection, the unit was staffed by Felix Candelaria, Michael Coughlan, Arnold Krockman, James Coppola, Edward Sheehan, Roland Harvey, and Phil Bartley, among other individuals. The images captured had various routine print destinations, including “At Your Service,” the MTA employee news bulletin; “MTA Facts & Figures,” an annual guidebook reporting the entity’s operational statistics, achievements, and goals; and “Transit Transit,” a news and information service. A significant portion of the photographs comprised in the collection were captured explicitly for reproduction in these publications. On other occasions, images were expressly authorized by the entity’s legal department, in order to document NYCT properties and infrastructure. In 2004, the NYCT Photographic Unit was dissolved and reorganized around digital technologies, rendering the formats present in the collection essentially obsolete and the physical custody of the collection newly outside the scope, auspices, or physical premises of the new unit.
Extent
53.21 Cubic Feet (137 boxes)
Language of Materials
English
Abstract
Photographic materials depicting routine transit operations and technical facilities for NYCT surface and subway services both on-site and within administrative departments, as captured by the agency’s Photographic Unit.
System of Arrangement
Because the collection is comprised predominantly of photographic materials, the arrangement schema has been effected so that slides (both glass and plastic) as well as negatives in all sizes and of all emulsion types have been segregated from positive prints of all sizes and formats, including contact sheets, in order to minimize medium degradation. While the description of all inclusive formats is detailed in the inventory below, the physical arrangement of the materials has been treated discretely, to allow for the negatives’ long-term accommodation in a cold storage facility. Therefore the box and folder locations listed in the collection inventory provides up to four separate locations for each folder, indicated by the following symbols:
+ positives
- negatives
O oversize
R+ records
These symbols appear towards the right margin in each series listed in the collection inventory. An “x” appears where no materials exist for a particular format type on the folder level.
Oversize materials are housed according to size and are designated either O1 / O2 (12 x 16”) or O3 (16 x 20”), or in some instances, more than one.
Exceptions to this convention are as follows: In Series 5. Contracts & Construction, where voluminous paper records exist, the “+” column is supplanted by “R+” ; in Series 6. Legal Claims, “R+” is added to “+” and “-” ; and in Series 10. Records & Drawings, owing to the total absence of photographic materials, both “+” and “-” are removed and “R+” is used exclusively.
It should be noted that the co-incidence of positive and negative materials for any given folder does not necessarily indicate the existence of a photographic negative and corresponding positive for any given image contained therein. Rather, such correspondences on an item-level basis have been noted on the physical materials themselves, as per the following procedure: Positive images for which a negative exists have been marked on the reverse with the frame number to which the image corresponds in a set of negatives, or in the case of contact sheets, the total number of exposures therein contained. Positives for which no negative exists have been marked “no neg” on their verso.
Other Finding Aids
PDF URL
Provenance
The collection was donated to the Archives by Winston Mitchell in 2013, when the materials were located in a disused darkroom and workspace of the since dissolved Photographic Unit. A second cache of related materials was subsequently accrued to the collection in 2016.
Series Abstracts
Series 1. Surface Operations: Images relating to public transit services rendered by automotive and trolley buses, including bus fleet, equipment, depots, personnel, routes, signage, access, safety, accidents, and unique events or services.
Series 2. Subway Operations: Images relating to the provision of New York City’s rapid transit system, including subway car fleet, rail yards, supporting facilities, tracks and equipment, stations, signage, access, safety, accidents, and unique events or services.
Series 3. System-Wide Operations: Images relating to transit services both above and below ground and whose manufacture, application, and general nature affects the totality of services and products supplied by NYCT. This includes auxiliary vehicles and facilities, bus and subway fare collection schemas, as well as system-wide signage, access, safety and security operations, informational services, and outreach events coordinated in support of the New York City’s transit system.
Series 4. Administrative Operations: Images depicting the administrative body of NYCT and its various departments, including agency-owned properties, headshots of executives and supporting staff, procedures to ensure office safety, and diverse programs and initiatives designed in support of employee development, recognition, and advancement.
Series 5. Contracts & Construction: Photographic negatives documenting construction projects underway as contracted to various entities by NYCT, depicting construction sites, excavations, and foundations, and accompanied in most cases by contract log books containing basic data on the project at hand, dates of duration, location and route section, and identifying information on the subcontracted companies.
Series 6. Legal Claims: Photographic negatives capturing NYCT-owned and -operated locales, machinery, and structures for legal purposes.
Series 7. New York Transit Museum: Images depicting the Transit Museum’s physical spaces, collection holdings and objects, temporary exhibitions, merchandise and retail sites, and events.
Series 8. Non-NYCT Domestic & Foreign Transit: Images documenting transportation means and modes operative within the New York Metropolitan Area outside the jurisdiction of NYCT, including MTA subsidiaries, as well as transportation services rendered in other cities.
Series 9. Non-Transit-related NYC: Images documenting city scenes outside the reach of public transit.
Series 10. Records & Drawings: Meeting minutes and memoranda, drawings, renderings, and diagrams pertaining to daily activities and specific projects undertaken by NYCT and its employees and contractors, with an emphasis on safety precautions and provisions for token booths, and including records on the day-to-day operations of the Photographic Unit.
List of Acronyms
ACF American Car & Foundry
ADA Americans with Disabilities Act
AFC Automated Fare Collection
APTA American Public Transportation Association
AVM Automated Vending Machine
BMT Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit
EAP Employee Assistance Program
ERP Employee Recognition Program
GOH General Overhaul Program
HEET High Entry/Exit Turnstile
ICSP Integrated Customer Service Group
IRT Interborough Rapid Transit
IND Independent Subway System
MTA Metropolitan Transportation Authority
NYCT/A New York City Transit/Authority
PCC Presidents’ Conference Committee (street car)
RCI Road Car Inspector
RTO Rapid Transit Operations
RTS Rapid Transit Series (bus)
TMC Transportation Manufacturing Corporation
TENS Transit Employees News Service
UITP International Association of Public Transport
- Aerial photographs
- Black-and-white negatives
- Black-and-white photographs
- Black-and-white slides
- Bratton, William J.
- Bus drivers—Training of
- Bus lines—Ridership
- Buses—Maintenance and repair
- Color negatives
- Color photographs
- Color slides
- Contact sheets
- Cuomo, Mario, M., 1932-2015
- Dinkins, David N.
- Electric substations–Design and constructions
- Giuliani, Rudolph W.
- Gunn, David L., 1937
- Kiepper, Alan
- Koch, Ed, 1924-2013
- Local transit—Safety measures—New York (State)—New York
- New York (State). Metropolitan Transportation Authority
- New York City Transit Authority
- Photographs
- Railroad conductors—New York (State)—New York
- Railroad shops & yards
- Stangl, Peter
- Subway stations--New York (State)--New York
- Subway stations—New York (State)—New York—Design and construction
- Subways—Accidents—New York (State)—New York
- Subways—Decoration—New York (State)—New York
- Subways—Employees
- Subways—Maintenance and repair
- Trolley buses—Electric equipment
- Trolleybuses
- Title
- Finding aid for the New York City Transit Photographic Unit collection
- Status
- Completed
- Author
- Caroline Donadio and Emily Toder
- Description rules
- Describing Archives: A Content Standard
- Language of description
- English
- Script of description
- Code for undetermined script
Revision Statements
- 2022: Edited and reformatted by Elise Winks
- 2023: Manually entered into ArchivesSpace by Joanna Satalof
Repository Details
Part of the Archives and Reading Room Repository