Author: the Editor

While the Office for Metropolitan History has — fabulously — made Manhattan new building application information available through a database covering the years from 1900 to 1986, the building permits of the nineteenth century represent a larger project that is yet to be undertaken.

It turns out that the Internet Archive is hosting scanned and searchable copies of the Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide from 1879 to 1922, each reporting new buildings, alterations, purchases, mortgages, and other transactions in detail. Searching for this journal returns a list of volumes available in pdf and other formats. The one unnumbered volume is 73 (1904), and volumes 26, 28, 30, 38, and 46 appear to be unavailable. Of those, volume 28 (second half of 1881) is available from Google Books.

[Update 12.31.2009: This information reposted from Dartmo.com.]

[Update 05.31.2010: A favorite way to search for specific individual or address is by using Columbia’s copies of the Record & Guide. Type this into Google to learn about 101 West 97th:

"97th st., no. 101" "real estate record" site:www.columbia.edu

The address takes some fiddling to account for boundary-based descriptions and OCR misspellings:

97th st., s s

should narrow things down. Also try

97th street, no. 101

and

101 west 97th

Google ignores the punctuation and line breaks. Most programs’ “find” commands do not ignore these features, so searching the Record & Guide via Google will turn up information that would be missed in a search of only the text files or the pdf downloads.]

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[Update 11.10.2012: Broken link to search page below fixed.]
[Update 04.10.2011: This post notes that the Avery Library’s search page is now up.]

One of the main sources of information on the early days of the Romantic suburb of Short Hills, New Jersey is William Ingraham Russell’s gossipy book The Romance and Tragedy of a Widely Known Business Man of New York. It appears to have been self-published in at least three editions through 1913 as Russell added postscripts. No one yet seems to have tried to figure out the pseudonyms he used for his neighbors in the early 1880s:

• “Frank Slater” is Franklin H. Tinker
• “Charlie Wood” is Charles Towner Root
• “George Lawton” is George M.S. Horton
• “Charlie Fiske” is Charles Alonzo Rich
• “Walter E. Stowe” is William Ingraham Russell
• “Knollwood” is Short Hills
• Ingraham’s trade paper is American Metal Market
• “A. * * S. * * * & Co.” is Arthur Strauss & Co.
• “Mr. Mallison” might be Mr. Allison, since it appears that way once
• “A gentleman of wealth” is Stewart Hartshorn

House names (“Redstone,” “Sunnyside”) are unchanged, as are place names and addresses outside of Short Hills. “Edward ‘Ned’ Banford,” “William Curtice,” “George Todd,” “Albert Caine,” and “Mr. Viedler” will require more work. (Is “Mr. Viedler” George Vietor?) The Banfords rented 39 Knollwood Road and the Todds rented 1 Park Place around 1893, so it should be possible to identify them.

[Update 12.31.2009: This information reposted from Dartmo.com.]

[Update 08.27.2010: More pseudonyms puzzled out.]