Urban Renewal Records Around New York State
Introduction
In 2019 we received a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant, in partnership with the New York State Archives, to create inventories of urban renewal records held locally by many municipalities around the state. Ninety communities, ranging in size from villages of a few thousand residents to New York City, planned and implemented over 250 individual federally-funded redevelopment projects. About thirty retained some or all of their records. For most of the remainder, we were able to create partial inventories with the help of public librarians, historical societies, and appointed public historians. New York is unique on that last part—by a century-old law, every village, town, city, county, and each of the Five Boroughs has an appointed public historian. There’s about 1,600 of them around the state, and those from the urban renewal locations were very supportive of this project.
Our team’s travels took us everywhere: Long Island (PhD student Benjamin Zyndorf); lower Hudson Valley (PhD student Elisabeth Tatum); Rochester (city historian Christine Ridarsky and her team); the Southern Tier, Western NY, and the Lake Ontario shore (Ann Pfau and Dave Hochfelder). We’ll feature the urban renewal records and information about their projects from several places in the coming weeks.
