In a windowless warehouse in Bushwick, archivists, researchers and librarians from the Brooklyn Public Library are huddled around a lightbox. They’re photographing a bronze souvenir bell, barely the size of a plum, cast from the remains of the original bell that once hung in Brooklyn Borough Hall and was destroyed in a fire in 1895.
It’s one of more than 11,000 objects in the Center for Brooklyn History’s collection of art and artifacts at the Brooklyn Public Library, now being carefully catalogued, photographed and digitized for public access.
Some of the items are expected: Civil War medals, early 20th-century menus or porcelain from Greenpoint’s Union Porcelain Works. Others verge on the uncanny: glassy eyes in a wax mannequin, or a ceramic pen holder shaped like the Williamsburgh Savings Bank.
Two locks of Alexander Hamilton’s hair, one reportedly carried by his wife and the other collected on his death.
Other objects are deeply personal: In the Center’s “AIDS Brooklyn” collection is a portable sharps container from someone suffering in the crisis, along with a teddy bear with the face of someone who died from the virus, donated by their family.
Everything from a crumbling feather boa used in a bygone West Indian Day Parade to a set of rusty Navy Yard machinist tools is documented individually. The work of archiving is methodical and not glamorous. Staffers wheel in wooden pallets shipped down from BPL’s off-site storage facility in Blauvelt, Rockland County. Each item is examined, measured precisely, and logged in a database. A collapsible lightbox, ring light and an iPhone serve as the photography setup.
Staff members from the Center for Brooklyn History at Brooklyn Public Library have been cataloguing objects from the art & artifacts collection for a year.
Most of the collection had been recorded at some point, said Michelle Kennedy, the library’s art collections and exhibitions coordinator. But when things move and time passes, inconsistencies and missing records can pile up.
“Things can get lost,” Kennedy said. “And the basis of everything we do has to be the inventory. If we don’t keep reviewing that every few years, things are going to slip through the cracks."
The team’s been at this new effort for a year, she said. It’ll take years more, but the goal is to launch a public portal this spring: a searchable, digital catalog of Brooklyn’s material memory.
A wax head from the “World in Wax Musée” at Coney Island
“We don’t want people to have to wait five, seven years in order to see the art and artifacts that we do know about,” Kennedy said. “So we’re going to launch as soon as we can.”
Kennedy is, for now, the only person who knows where most of the objects are, how they were acquired, and what history they’re tied to. She said success for the project would mean “if I got hit by a bus tomorrow, anyone could find out anything about this collection without me.”
Some of the objects are tied to other parts of the library’s holdings, which is sometimes only revealed when the box is opened. Kennedy opened a new box from the pallet to discover it contained a set of tools from when the Brooklyn Navy Yard was a working ship manufactory. They belonged to Henry Tatowicz, a machinist with whom the center conducted an extensive oral history interview in 1987.
Gloves worn by Col. William J. Cropsey in the Civil War, which appear stained with blood.
Kennedy pulls up the interview and hits play while she catalogs his tools. “I love this Brooklyn accent!” a coworker calls out.
She says the most exciting moments are the objects they didn’t realize they had, perhaps because old records were missing or mistaken. “It feels like you found a new treasure, even though it’s something that’s been around in this collection for so long,” Kennedy said.
Recently that was a framed lock of Alexander Hamilton’s hair, carried by his wife Elizabeth Schuyler in the 18th century.
Staffer Dee Bowers measures an iron fireplace toast holder.
Elsewhere: a set of swizzle sticks from the mid-century incarnation of Gage & Tollner restaurant; a box of identical spools of glove thread from the Merrick Thread company; a campaign badge from Brooklyn’s final mayor; a fragile wooden doll named Miss Columbia.
The digitization part of the process is expected to last two more years. But as the first hundreds of items are prepared for the public portal, the team is hopeful this is just the beginning.
“Once you catalog it,” Kennedy said. “They will come.”
