Uptown and underground is the home of a dense community of New York architects, their colleagues, clients, and friends, their skyscrapers and townhouses. They are the denizens of the boxes and the file folders of the Avery Drawings and Archives, one of the richest collections of American architectural drawings and records. For the last 36 years, Janet Parks, curator of the Avery Drawings and Archives, has been mayor of this town, located in the lower level of Columbia University’s Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library. She is a maintainer of order, keeper of secrets, and the engine of its expansion. Since the library’s founding in 1890, with the books and architectural drawings of New York City architect Henry Ogden Avery, and early member of the Architectural League, the collection of drawings and manuscripts has grown tremendously. “It’s easily around two million items,” Parks estimates. “Probably 95 percent of which I have collected. If you do the math, it’s mostly my fault.”
Where does it all come from? The library’s reputation means that Parks doesn’t have to look too far, as relatives and researchers offer up collections. “Stuff comes in,” Parks says, and she and her staff have rescued drawings from barns, 95-degree basements, and other unlikely repositories of the city’s architectural history. One of Parks’ first acquisitions as curator was the drawings of New York theater designer Thomas Lamb, who built hundreds of theaters in the city in the 1910s and ‘20s. Lamb’s successor kept the archive in the dressing room of a 42nd Street theater: over 20,000 drawings of theaters from all over the world, New York to Cairo and Bombay. Parks and assistants had to carry each metal drawing tube down the stairs of the theater, while gunshots rang out around them, part of the movie playing in the background.
The trove of drawings, which took a good 18 months to sort through, contained the physical traces of a long-gone city — and not just how it looked. Parks remembers opening a tightly sealed tube of drawings: “This wafting smell of cologne and pipe tobacco came out. It had been trapped inside. We all stood around it and we were back in the 1920s.”
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Avery’s collections started as a teaching tool for Columbia architecture students, with prints of Egyptian monuments they would not be able to see first-hand. Today, architects, historic preservationists, homeowners, and museum curators, all rely on the archives to reveal the secrets of individual architects, buildings, and building practices. Then there are the personal connections: “Someone will write in, saying, ‘My husband loves architecture and this is his favorite building. I want to give him a print of it for his birthday.’ Personal-use copies. We do quite a bit of that.” Especially with “the Frank Lloyd Wright stuff, then you really get into the fan club.”
Other uses are more dramatic. Some visitors come for the drawings of the house from which the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped, designed by the prominent New York firm of Delano & Aldrich. Others research locations for movies. “Many years ago,” Parks recounts, “we got a letter from somebody asking for photocopies of the floor plans of great houses.” He was an inmate. “‘I know what this looks like,’ he wrote, ‘But I’m in for a crime I did not commit.’ And we debated. Well, he’s not going to break in using these things. So we sent him a couple of photocopies.”
Sometimes, people come in just to read. “We’ve had high school kids. You never know when some of these people might grow up to be an architect. If they are that interested, and they are 15 or 16 and want to come in and look at a building, with their parents, why not?”
“People think libraries are very quiet and that librarians have nothing to do.” But that’s hardly the case at Avery, as Parks tells it. “It’s like a tsunami of interest. There’s always somebody coming in and saying, ‘What’s this?’ or, ‘I’ve been thinking about X.’ You’re involved in multiple conversations. It’s never boring. But it’s hard to keep up with it. There’s never a slow day.”
On the eve of her retirement, and on the one morning a week that the archives are closed to researchers, Parks sat down with Urban Omnibus to share some of her favorite artifacts and their stories — a tour of her domain, and of two centuries of architecture in New York City.