House History Research at The New York Public Library: HOME

This guide is intended to help researchers interested in researching buildings in New York City. It includes information about the uses and availability of property maps, censuses, city directories, land conveyances, photographs, newspapers, published local histories, ephemera, and other archival and published sources available at The New York Public Library, and elsewhere in the Five Boroughs.

RESEARCH GOALS

This research guide is divided into sections that address common building research goals, including researching

• Ownership: how to find identify the owners of a building.
• Construction: when and by whom a building was commissioned to be built.
• Design: identifying and researching the people that designed a building.
• Residents: discovering who lived in a building.
• Neighborhood history: what was the neighborhood like?

Preparation: before you start your research, you will need to find key data that will help you find the various records that describe the history of a building in NYC. For this you'll be looking at databases, maps, and photographs and other images.

This guide will include links to a selection of other building research guides and examples of building histories.

This guide is also intended as a supplement to the NYPL class Researching the History of Your New York City Home. See Genealogy Essentials for details of when the next class is.

Image: The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. "Talman Street, #57" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1936.

Different records answer different research questions about buildings. The table below suggest some of the most useful sources in order of detail.