Established in the year 2000, the New York Public Radio Archives are the station's physical link to its rich and storied past.
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The sounds of a city and a nation are captured through nearly a century of transformations, tribulations, and triumphs.
MoreTony Schwartz thought people should use tape recorders like cameras to capture meaningful events. Over the years he recorded more than 30,000 sound portraits of New York City life. These included cab drivers telling stories, zoo keepers feeding lions, elevator operators calling out floors and children singing nursery rhymes. The above look into a common childhood rhyme, as Schwartz found out, takes us back to a very different time and place.
For more than 30 years Schwartz produced a weekly program of sound portraits on WNYC. We recently found this broadcast in the Municipal Archives WNYC collection. The bulk of his WNYC, WBAI and Folkways tapes are now with the Library of Congress.
Growing up in New Jersey, Archivist Andy Lanset was probably the only 8-year-old who spent all of his paper route money on records and wind-up phonographs at the flea market and then cataloged them all in a 3x5 card file. Since then, he has gone on to amass an archive of his own as well as to collect, organize, and preserve thousands of recordings, photographs, and station-related ephemera for the WNYC and WQXR archive collections.
WNYC 93.9 FM and AM 820 are New York's flagship public radio stations, broadcasting the finest programs from NPR and PRI, as well as a wide range of award-winning local programming. WNYC is a division of New York Public Radio.
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