Collections : [Avery Drawings & Archives]

This collection includes administrative, legal, and financial records, correspondence, specifications, black and white photographs, and reprographic architectural and engineering drawings related to the operations of the City Construction Company in New York City between circa 1945 and 1955. Projects include primarily apartment buildings, theatres, and commercial buildings in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Because the company was working for architects, and often working on extant buildings, drawings from numerous architects are also included in this collection. Major projects include the 15 E. 91st St. Apartments; 25 Broad St. Building; 30 Broad St. Building; 1211 Madison Ave. Apartments; 1211 Madison Ave. Apartments; and the Parke-Bernet Gallery, all in Manhattan.

Included are architectural drawings, surveys, maps, and site proposals, for Columbia's Morningside Heights campus, designed primarily by McKim, Mead & White. Other architects represented include Adams & Woodbridge; Arnold Brunner (who designed the School of Mines); Eggers & Higgins; the Columbia University Buildings and Grounds Department; Howells and Stokes (designed St. Paul's Chapel); Reinhard, Hofmeister and Wahlquist; and James Gamble Rogers. Drawings for buildings no longer in existence or never constructed and drawings for later alterations, are included. Architectural drawings of the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum, and surveys of the asylum site prepared for Columbia, 1888-1894. Also included are site plans and proposals, surveys, and maps, circa 1890s-1910s, showing the surrounding area, including such institutions as the Jewish Theological Seminary, St. Luke's Home, Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Grant's Tomb, and others. Drawings for the Womans's Hospital in the State of New York (designed by Allen & Collens, erected 1903, demolished in the 1970s), circa 1903-1914, are also included. This building was used to house the Columbia School of the Arts in the 1960s since it was located near the campus.

The collection consists of 2,924 photographs and 1,327 drawing reproductions of architectural projects by the firm of John Russell Pope, and later Eggers & Higgins.

This collection includes original and reprographic architectural drawings, project files, photographs, correspondence, and professional papers related to preservation architect Giorgio Cavaglieri's architectural work, professional associations, and writings.

The bulk of this collection consists of more than 22,000 black and white photographic negatives and more than 10,600 black and white photographic prints documenting commercial, institutional, religious, and residential architecture throughout the United States, with particular emphasis on sites in the mid-Atlantic region. These images date from the mid-1930s to Molitor's retirement in the mid-1980s, with the great majority of images created between 1946 and 1980. Also included in the collection are images of landscapes, industrial design, portraits, and events of personal significance to Molitor. In some select cases, color prints, color negatives, color transparencies, and 35mm slides are also available in addition to or instead of the black and white negatives and prints. Researchers are also advised that documents in this collection indicate that when faced with a lack of storage space in 1973, Molitor contacted clients to return inactive negatives that they had comissioned before 1955. In at least some cases, those clients declined to accept their negatives and Molitor subsequently destroyed the images. Thus, this collection has lacunae in the negatives series.

This collection includes research materials, publication manuscripts, notes, correspondence, and architectural drawings related to the academic study, teaching, and writings of architect and urban historian Richard Plunz. The bulk of the collection contains research papers, administrative records, notes, and sketches, as well as reproductions of architectural drawings by other architects for various properties owned by the New York City Housing Authority, gathered by Plunz and his Urban Design Research Group students during their studies on the concept of "defensible space" in New York City public housing. Also included in this collection are notes and draft manuscripts for "Design and the Public Good" [Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1982], Plunz's compilation of writings by architect and educator Serge Chermayeff, as well as general research files about and correspondence with Chermayeff. Lastly, a small body of reproduced drawings documents various historic structures on Ellis Island, the 39th St. Ferry Terminal building in Manhattan and Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn.