Spared From the Shredder (for Now): ‘Priceless’ Bank Records of Old New York

How interesting it is that these banks were built with those impressive facades that gave the impression of being inpenetrable. Certainly they gave the depositors the feeling that their money was safe.The interiors were lined with marble and granite - which even in those times was expensive. . Compare them to today's banks which look more like economy convenience stores.

Although my personal records are too recent to be saved I remember The Bowery Savings Bank with tremendous fondness. I don't know if it was through school or from my parents but I had a passbook savings account there at the 130 Bowery location in lower Manhattan from about 1958-1973. I went every week to make my deposit and was thrilled when interest was added on. But mostly it was the building I loved. Quiet, cool marble columns, huge vaulted ceiling; being there made me feel so grown up and part of the big world out there. Glad they were able to save these invaluable documents.

These records need to be preserved, digitized, & made available to the general public.

Perhaps the Capital One celebrity spokespersons could get onboard and raise the profile of the effort - Samuel L. Jackson, Alec Baldwin, Spike Lee, etc.

I remember decades ago an enormous dumpster outside St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights, with well-dressed people climbing in and out. After realizing what was being discarded, I joined in the free-for-all (literally!). I myself acquired records from Columbia University going back to the 1800s, plus many other historical documents, some from the Paris exposition that featured the newly constructed Eiffel Tower. This is how contemporary, unthinking people treat our history: as worthless trash to be thrown away or, at best, recycled into toilet paper.

These document must be preserved and digitized. It would be a travesty if they were to be discarded. And it is lamentable that it may take private sector money to save/digitize them. Stand up America, preserve your proud history..the history of ordinary Americans.

I hope somebody else has dentified and honored Barbara Haws in her subsequent role as the New York Philharmonic's archivist since 1984--an indefatigable historian not only of that orchestra but of America's symphony orchestras in general.

Banks were once impenetrable fortresses that depositors respected and trusted with the safe-keeping of their hard-earned money. Today, all barriers between depositor and teller have largely disappeared, along with the passbooks they issued. The gravitas that imposing marble columns conferred on the banking experience has morphed into loosey-goosey casual "cafes" with no structure and little or no privacy.

Oh these have to be saved - they simply must be. There is so much of everyday life in them - just like there is so much of everyday life in inventory lists from much earlier times. These documents touch on the lives of 'regular' people - not just the wealthy or famous - whose belongings tend to be more abundant and preserved by default. Finally - in our electronic age we may not fully realize how much archival material is being lost. I would much rather look at a sheet of paper with my father's distinct penmanship than a saved email print out. His voice is there but his touch is not. And the longer he is gone - the more precious these physical notes become. Give me faded ink on ledger paper touched with age any day!

This article reminds me of the African proverb: "When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground." If the crass insensitivity of casually throwing away historical records doesn't horrify you think of the opportunity cost of losing these one-of-a-kind treasures. For instance, imagine if you found a bank ledger entry from a notable historical figure, say, Thomas Edison, opening an account for his Edison Illuminating Company on December 17, 1880, for the purpose of building electrical generating stations. That would be an interesting piece of content that could be used with the media, investors, employees, customers, municipalities, and other audiences. I have no idea if a ledger entry about Thomas Edison was in the pile of papers headed for the shredder. Or if there was an entry by Thomas Edison, whether it had anything to do with the Edison Illuminating Company. But we'd never know unless someone acted to save these papers. At the very least, people and organizations should handle historical documents and artifacts with care, and think twice before discarding them. Thomas Edison may be long gone, but no one wants to see a library burned to the ground. And you never know, saving one could shed light on some interesting opportunities.

I am a human rights international lawyer and it is vital that these records be saved .....without going into all the details, our history is crucial in our quest for understanding our present duties and rights to resolve some of the most difficult problems we have today in order to have human progress. We have our planet but it needs to be managed and records help us understand how through time.

Priceless, unfiltered history. For my birthday, my brother gave me our dad's check ledger from 1957. There's a story in all those check stubs: doctor bills from my birth, clothing stores, groceries, and about $40 bucks a month to the local dairy, who delivered to our house weekly. Thanks to the people who saved the Bowery treasure.

That's an unusual location for a grand bank building in those days, in the middle of the block. Usually, they were situated on a corner so light could flood in through at least two exposures. Maybe it had a skylight?

Thank you for reporting this story. Who are we if not our histories.

There are so many places that this can be preserved. I hope someone from the The New York Public Library or the New York Historical Society sees this article.

Please don’t Marie Kondo a part of New York City’s history. There are many of us native New Yorkers to whom this sparks joy.

The people in the photograph are what we could now call the "legacy population." They are becoming a diminishing part of the U.S. population. . In the future very few will care about them.

Only fools would do this, would throw treasures, pieces of their very own history away. It's soulless -- symptomatic of a culture (and a whole city now) that is blind to anything except profit and faux opportunity within its immediate life span, that disrespect the pasts (if it even knows there was one) degrades the present and the future. This is so sad, so stupid...so typical.

Ah, the stupidity of bankers! This old paper is worth much more as antiques & collectibles than it is as scrap. American Banknote Company archives have been sold, by a series of specialized NYC-area auction houses, for considerable millions. Ideally, the materials would be digitalized and cataloged, with some being donated to institutions and the rest intelligently sold. One should not underrate the role of collectors in preserving and valuing material culture.

"Spare the shredder, spoil the archivists."

Archives like this are a historical treasure. My father, a retired accountant, spent the last 20 years of his life, working on the accounts of Jeremiah Boone, a Pennsylvania merchant of the 1700's, and then of Stephen Girard, America's first Millionaire (when a million was a million). Those boxes of receipts and ledgers held fascinating stories of America's history, pre- and post-Revolution. Who knows how many stories reside in the Bowery Banks's records. What a sin it would be to lose them forever.

And...who of a certain age remembers this great radio jingle that I heard in the mornings before going off to school in the '60s: It pays to save at the Bowery So, start your savings account right away Save more and borrow less Save for your happiness Save at the Bowery Savings Bank Yess, all of this material is priceless. Don't just digitize it. Continue to keep the originals somewhere, just in case something happens to the digital medium on which the data is stored.

I have never forgotten the classical music tune, 'It pays to save at the Bowery'. It was the last movement of Tchaikovsky symphony no. 5.

After his family moved east from Ohio in 1927, my father's first bank account was at the Bowery at 110 East Forty-Second Street. His passbook shows a first deposit of $30.00 on August 23rd of that year. Ten years later, he had a balance of $311.30 and was earning $1.12 in quarterly interest. When my father returned from the Pacific in 1945, he opened a new account for me, aged 3 months. As I grew up, I loved going with him into that elegant marbled space on 42nd Street where he did his own banking and continued to make small deposits in my name, providing me with pocket money during my college years. Then during the 1960s and '70s, as an antiwar activist I began to withhold my telephone tax, which had been levied specifically to pay for the war in Vietnam. One day in 1974, I got an early morning call from a Bowery Bank teller named Terrence. He informed me that the IRS had arrived and was seizing money from my account. He wondered why. I told him. "I never knew this was going on," he said. I'll call you back when they leave." He did that, giving me information about which forms I needed to make the claim that my funds - a total of about $50.00 - had been taken illegally. Such are the stories behind the figures in my old Bowery passbooks. When the Bowery finally closed, I felt I'd lost a family friend. And Terrence, if you're out there, I hope you're well. You had my back.

How many time I passed that building and thought of the growing country around it. Save the records! Let’s not burn down Alexandria again.

Lovely landscape on Mr Kopitz's wall, Barbizon School? And the photograph of the people in line at the teller windows is revealing, particularly the dandy on the left mugging for the photographer, eyebrow arched.

Archive them properly for posterity in perpetuity.

"Their pages show what kind of work men and women did, where they lived, how much money they saved or borrowed, the names of their parents, spouses and places of birth. Such archives make social archaeology possible." So often, folks are in a hurry to destroy history rather than savor and learn from it. To have that golden opportunity of peering through "new windows onto the long-vanished lives of ordinary people" is priceless. Thank goodness there are still people like Joseph Kopitz around who cherishes and values the importance of history. The photographs alone are works of timeless beauty and appreciation. Very cool article and very cool people who are advocating for the archiving of these documents rather than shipping them off to the shredder.

You'd think someone would call NARA and get them on site. National Archives at New York City One Bowling Green, Room 328 New York, NY 10004 Phone: 212-401-1620 Toll-free: 1-866-840-1752 Fax: 212-401-1638 Email: [email protected]

I have a ledger from a lower Broadway florist shop with entries from 1880. Ledgers can be quite interesting. It is surprising how many people lived on store credit, such as 5 cents for a dozen tomato plants. The helper earned $1 a day, which was 10 or 12 hours back then.

It's very possible that my grandparents and great-grandparents banked there.

The handwriting in the ledger is beautiful and conveys fastidiousness and trust.

I actually consulted (and film copied) some of these voluminous records as a graduate student in the late 1970's. They were in a turn-of-the twentieth century vault next to the original granite and cast-iron vault from the 1830's to which the even the staff did not have the key. The page you are showing is from the North River Savings Bank from the late 1860s. acquired by the Bowery in the late 1940's. For years, I have stored my incomplete records. I am glad this treasure has been retrieved.

A last minute stay. Thank you to all who made that happen. These materials are filled with our history and the lessons learned from it.

That sounds like a few weeks work for a supervisor and a couple of student interns. The entire trove could be scanned and stored on a one terabyte drive costing about $30. It would be a tragedy to lose such intact, historical data.

I would think the folks at the Ellis Island Museum would be all over this.