Since its opening in 1967, The Jefferson Market Regional Library has been collecting interesting, and sometimes rare, books on the history of
New York City and particularly Greenwich Village. Here is a very selective list of the more than 150 books in this special collection
that can be found downstairs in the Reference Room.
[Written by Frank Collerius, Supervising Branch Librarian, Jefferson Market Regional Library.]
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- Binzen, Bill
Tenth Street
New York: Grossman Publishers, 1968
The project: Document in photographs the life of a Manhattan
thoroughfare called Tenth Street, stretching from the East River to the
Hudson. The result: An impromptu band strikes up between First and A;
tattered posters announce a long-past public show "against sneering" on
Waverly; a boy clings to the back of a bus for a free ride on B; a
corpse missing a shoe sprawls on Third; and everybody either swings or
stares in Tompkins Park. Binzen went on to publish, among other things,
a number of photographically illustrated children's books available in
the New York Public Library collection.
- Sante, Luc
Evidence
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992
The mysterious face of death is revealed in 55 brutal
photographs of crime scenes taken by the NYPD between 1914 and the early 1920s.
- Greenwich Village Historic District Designation
Report
New York: The Commission, 1969
The history, architecture and facts about every building in the Village,
house number by house number.
- Petronius, pseudonym
New York Unexpurgated: an amoral guide for the jaded,
tired, evil, non-conforming, corrupt, condemned, and the curious, humans and
otherwise, to underground Manhattan
New York: Matrix House, 1966
Just what the title says. Must be read to be believed.
- Schwarz, Judith
Radical Feminists of Heterodoxy: Greenwich Village,
1912-1940
Lebanon, NH: New Victoria Publishers, 1982
The first published study of a club that comprised over 100 of the most creative, often politically active women of the twentieth century:
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mabel Dodge Luhan and Agnes DeMille, among
others.
- Harris, Sara
Hellhole: the shocking story of the inmates and life in
the New York City House of Detention for Women
New York: E.P. Dutton, 1967
Life on the inside: A serious discussion of a truly
horrific prison also reads like the script treatment for a movie starring Pam Grier.
Who could ask for anything more? (p.s. that's a teenaged,
pre-fame Andrea Dworkin getting arrested on the opening pages).
- Stokes, Isaac Newton Phelps
The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498-1909
Arno Press, 1967
Beautiful maps and descriptions from the past 500 years.
Find out who owned what land in 1701! Or the street layout of
the Dutch community in 1613!
- Valentine's Manual of Old New York, volumes 1916-1927
Brown, Henry Collins, Editor
Fascinating facts and history from the 19th century up until
the 1920s. For example, find out (in detail) what St. Marks Place was like 100
years ago. Find out when exactly "The Golden Age of Booze" took place.
Take a tour of the stately mansions of the Bronx. And sooooooooo much
more.
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