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There are millions of newspaper articles, photographs and other archival materials in The New York Times’s clippings library, a repository known to employees as the morgue.
Clippings and photographs are organized by name, place and subject matter, and tucked into file folders that are packed in steel filing cabinets and heavy cardboard boxes. On top of the cabinets and boxes are stacks of microfilm, encyclopedias and other reference texts.
There is no full accounting of every item in the morgue. The Times began codifying its clippings in 1907, and treasures and oddities are still “hiding in plain sight,” said Jeff Roth, the caretaker of the files.
Mr. Roth has been organizing, supplementing and, perhaps most importantly, understanding the morgue’s contents for nearly three decades. For a reporter who wants to know what The Times, or one of the 28 other publications that were once clipped and filed in the morgue, wrote about a subject, the archive is still a resource.
Here is a sampling of what the morgue holds. These items are just the tip of an archival iceberg, and a reminder that not all pages of history have been uploaded to the internet.
Check the Maiden Name
Before her photographs started new conversations about the artistic power of the medium, Diane Arbus ran a commercial photography business with her husband, Allan Arbus. Before that, she was Diane Nemerov, daughter of the wealthy Manhattan family that owned Russeks department store on Fifth Avenue.
The morgue has clippings in a folder titled “Arbus, Diane,” of course. But about 20 years ago, Mr. Roth decided to look up the file “Nemerov, Diane.” There, he found a picture of Diane that the Nemerov family had sent to The Times in 1941, announcing her engagement. She was 18 years old.
On March 4, 1941, The Times published the engagement photo on its society page, above a brief announcement: “Mr. and Mrs. David Nemerov of 888 Park Avenue have announced the engagement of their daughter, Miss Diane Nemerov, to Allan Franklin Arbus, son of Mr. and Mrs. Harry Arbus of 1225 Park Avenue.”
Revolutionary Literature
Around 2010, the morgue added 50 boxes of clippings and other material that The Times’s San Francisco bureau had collected over the years. There were handwritten notes taken by Wallace Turner, a reporter and bureau chief there, and original documents from the cultural ferment of the Bay Area during the 1960s and ’70s.
One of the biggest stories covered by Mr. Turner and the San Francisco bureau in those years was the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, the granddaughter of the publisher William Randolph Hearst, by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a militant left-wing group, in 1974. The American public closely followed Ms. Hearst’s apparent conversion to her captors’ beliefs: She committed bank robberies with the S.L.A. and was arrested and imprisoned for her participation, and her sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter.
In the boxes of the bureau’s material concerning Ms. Hearst’s kidnapping are issues of “Dragon,” the S.L.A. magazine.
For ‘Self-Respecting, Self-Supporting Men’
Darius Ogden Mills was born to farmers in Westchester County, N.Y., in 1825. He found wealth as a banker and financier in Gold Rush-era California and returned east in 1880, establishing himself in New York City as a developer and philanthropist. One of his causes was the plight of working men scraping by on meager wages.
Mills opened his first rooming house for single men in New York in 1887. It promised cheap rooms and sturdy meals in a clean, orderly setting. He opened a second Mills Hotel in 1905, and a third, at Seventh Avenue and 36th Street, in 1907. The morgue has a brochure promoting this third location, with prices, a menu and a statement from Mr. Mills.
“The Mills Hotel is intended for such self-respecting, self-supporting men, who desire cleanliness, comfort and convenience, but also want to lay up something towards attaining an independence,” he wrote.
The date on the brochure, Nov. 27, 1908, indicates when the item entered The Times’s files. The old Mills Hotel building on Seventh Avenue is now the Moxy NYC Times Square hotel.
Rose Mary’s Baby
The Committee for the Re-Election of the President was central to the Watergate scandal, which led to President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation in 1974. One of the Watergate burglars, James McCord, was head of security for the committee, and the committee operated slush funds using illegal donations raised for Mr. Nixon’s 1972 presidential campaign.
Rose Mary Woods, Mr. Nixon’s private secretary since his days as a senator, maintained a list of those who had donated to the committee. She kept names, addresses and exact dollar amounts, and the list became known in newsrooms as “Rose Mary’s Baby.” As the Watergate scandal unraveled, The Times obtained a copy, repurposing a binder that appears to have originally held a trade publication titled “The Livestock and Meat Economy of the U.S.” Someone at The Times pasted labels with “Woods List,” “Rosemary Woods’ List” and “Rosemary’s Baby” on the spine and cover.
The morgue claimed the binder from the Washington bureau in 2014 during renovations there.
Cut From the First Draft of History
Homer and Langley Collyer were wealthy brothers who barricaded themselves behind mountains of hoarded junk inside their Harlem brownstone. Their lives became a source of popular amusement and morbid curiosity to New Yorkers in 1942, when the Bowery Savings Bank attempted to evict them from the home, and again in 1947, when the brothers were found dead. Langley had been crushed under a pile of junk near the front door. Homer, blind and dependent on Langley, apparently died of starvation soon after.
Most of the clippings in the “Collyer, Homer” and “Collyer, Langley” files in The Times’s clippings library are from 1942 and 1947. There is one short article published in 1939, when Consolidated Edison’s attempt to remove a defunct gas meter from their home drew resistance from the brothers — and also drew a crowd of onlookers.
And there is one yellowed newspaper clipping from August 1938 that probably can’t be read anywhere else.
That’s because the article, a profile of the reclusive brothers based on interviews with neighbors and local merchants, was removed from the paper after the first edition, according to a note written above the clipping.
Whatever the reason for its removal, the article can’t be found in online newspaper databases, which use microfilm of The Times’s Late City edition.
A Gangster’s Paradise
Local officials in Apalachin, N.Y., knew something was up when Joseph Barbara Sr., a mobster with the Buffalo crime family, started buying up hotel rooms. Then, the fancy cars rolled into town. On Nov. 14, 1957, state police officers and federal agents raided the sprawling estate Mr. Barbara kept in Apalachin, and mobsters wearing gold watches and shiny shoes fled into the woods.
Sixty-five men were detained that day, according to a Times report published on Nov. 15. It was later understood that Mr. Barbara had invited representatives from criminal organizations around the country to meet under one agenda. Mr. Barbara’s ambitions, and the colorful scene of the raid, submitted the meeting into Mafia lore and made “Apalachin” a useful term in headlines above mob articles.
Mr. Barbara died in 1959. In the clippings library, subject files under New York State are organized by geography. In the “Apalachin” file in the morgue, there is a real estate listing promoting the sale of Mr. Barbara’s estate, the site of the famous meeting.
“The land consists of 58 rolling acres of very beautiful land,” the listing states. It continues: “A retirement home here would be heaven on earth.”
Self-Portrait of an Artist
Louis Eilshemius was an eccentric painter, poet, inventor and self-proclaimed magnetist whose work was sought by collectors in the 1930s after Mr. Eilshemius was championed by Marcel Duchamp.
His file in the morgue includes a profile of him published by The New Yorker in 1935, and a brochure from a show of his work arranged by the Valentine Gallery, a prominent house for modernism.
There are also pamphlets detailing his biography and achievements, which Mr. Eilshemius printed and handed out himself. In one, he proclaimed his mastery of the body’s electrical powers, which could be subdued to “influence persons at a distance,” even to put a stranger on the trolley to sleep.
“When a man of average mentality is my subject, my merely catching his eyes is sufficient to make him fall asleep,” Mr. Eilshemius wrote.
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