Dry Cleaning the City’s Oldest Maps
The tables in the basement of the Municipal Archives are covered with household staples: cotton swabs, tweezers, food strainers, measuring cups, ashtrays and other materials.
None are items that one would expect to find in a professional art conservation laboratory. But they are tools used by a group of government workers who wash and care for some of the oldest existing maps and architectural drawings of New York City. They call themselves “dry cleaners.”
“It’s like being a tailor, but a tailor for paper,” said Pauline Toole, commissioner of the city’s Department of Records and Information Services, which oversees the archives at 31 Chambers Street — what was once the Hall of Records, but is now the Surrogate’s Courthouse.
The building is home to 243,000 cubic feet of records — enough to cover more than four football fields — including maps, photographs, film spools and birth, death and marriage certificates that tell the story of the city’s past. The last four years have seen a push from researchers and archivists to digitize the annals, slowly making them more accessible to the public, but many of the faded, fraying documents are almost too fragile to endure that process, according to the conservators there. Among the endangered records are hundreds of maps of post-colonial New York, created as early as the 1700s, rolled tightly into cardboard wrapping and stored in the city’s proverbial attic.
“These things have been sitting rolled up in those acidic boxes for 30 years, at least,” said Nora Ligorano, a conservator at the Archives. “No one has opened them or touched them for decades.”
Tragedies and natural disasters in New York and abroad have placed an added urgency on preserving New York’s treasures. The 1966 Florence Flood in Italy, that city’s most devastating natural disaster of modern times, spurred an international effort to rescue valuable documents and set a precedent for how paper relics should be conserved. This century, collections at the World Trade Center were destroyed on 9/11 and works at South Street Seaport and the New York City Police Museum were lost in Hurricane Sandy, reminding New Yorkers — historians and conservators, in particular — of the importance of protecting our archival gems.
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“It’s really saving New York history,” Ms. Ligorano said. “We are the custodians of this history.”
Inside the lab, conservators talk about the care of antique maps like a doctor discusses a patient’s condition and treatment in an intensive care unit.
Conservators will lay a given map on a table for an exam and diagnose the issue: Is it brittle or burned? Damaged by water or tape? Crumbly, delaminated or peeling? Then they record the treatment in a chart of sorts so that years later, the next caretaker will know what remedy was given.
The repair process of a map — like that for a more than 200-year-old, torn illustration of Williamsburg, Brooklyn — typically takes several hours, though sometimes the conservators will spend days working on just one.
They must first carefully unpack the cardboard storage boxes that hold about a half-dozen coiled maps inside. Then they place each map in a “humidification chamber” in the sink to relax the material that has spent years twisted in a tube. The map is then flattened across a table, with the help of cloth-covered bricks, and left to dry. Only then can the healing process begin.
Much like with clothes, the decision to wash a map using water or to dry clean it, with a vacuum or soot sponge, depends on its material and condition. A sponge was used to dry clean a dusty, soot-sprinkled 1850s map of Russell Place in Brooklyn, for example. Soon, the document appeared brighter and clearer, revealing names like Wyckoff and Lefferts. Baltic and Water Streets by Dumbo, and parts of what is now Park Slope, slowly came into focus.
The dry cleaners concentrate mostly on New York City maps produced by city agencies or municipal government. Currently, they are cleaning hundreds of maps given to the Archives by St. Francis College in Brooklyn in 1988. “One piece will be beautiful, and the next will need extensive work,” said Cynthia Brenwall, another conservator. The sprawling maps, some of which run the length of an 18-foot table, tell the tale of Brooklyn when it was still its own city.
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Many of the maps in these collections were more detailed and personalized than one might imagine an official government map to be, the dry cleaners said.
Some maps of Brooklyn farmland depicted “a mansion house, and the ice house, and the oyster shack, and the grapery,” Ms. Brenwall said. “You know, where the gardens were, where the churches were, the small country road that took them to where the boat landing was — they’re all detailed in these maps. It’s charming.”
Pointing to a map from Sept. 18, 1800, Kenneth Cobb, assistant commissioner at the Archives, said: “They drew in every little tree here. The care taken is extraordinary. These measurements are to the inch. Fractional.”
The goal of nursing the maps back to health is to make them a relevant, informative part of New York’s DNA and to bring its history to life in a way that text-heavy records — like dense crime reports, handwritten government files or documents about New Amsterdam, penned in Dutch — might not be able to.
“You can trace the settlement of New York,” Ms. Toole said, and “assemble all of the maps to show exactly that story, visually, without words.”
“If we don’t take care of them and make them available, you would have a series of guesswork,” she added. “You’d have great texts, but to see it is something different.”
