The Crime in New York 1850-1950 digital collection includes the rich criminal history of New York City. This collection offers access to primary materials documenting nearly a century of investigation, arrest, judgment and incarceration of many famous and unknown criminals in New York City. Materials have been gathered from the Lloyd Sealy Library's Special Collections and are available through this web-resource

Crime in New York 1850-1950 Image Collection
The Image Collection is the result of digitizing portions of two unique manuscript collections in our Special Collections. Photographs were digitized from The Papers of Lewis Lawes, Warden of Sing Sing Prison 1920-1941. Photographs and related documents were digitized from The Papers of Burton Turkus, who was Assistant District Attorney and Chief of the Homicide Division, Kings County (Brooklyn) 1940-1945.

Together the photographs and documents in this collection portray decades of criminal activity and careers in New York City with crime scene and investigation photographs, mug shots, rap sheets. Subjects covered include 1800s-1920s death-row prisoners at Sing Sing Prison and 1930s-40s Brooklyn crime and criminals, mainly those connected with the notorious Murder Inc. crime syndicate.

Crime in New York 1850-1950 Trial Transcripts Collection
The Lloyd Sealy Library's The Trial Transcripts of the County of New York 1883 - 1927 collection includes the verbatim typewritten proceedings of 3,326 court cases, mainly criminal trials held in the Court of General Sessions, New York County.

This project has created a searchable digital index of all of these transcripts, which are on 425 reels of microfilm. Another accomplishment of this project was the digitization of a small sample of 12 microfilm reels resulting in 150 full-text transcripts, available as searchable PDF's files linked to the web-index. All of the transcripts are available by appointment at the Lloyd Sealy Library and by interlibrary loan ordered by reel number through your home library.

About The Crime in New York 1850-1950 Digital Project
This was the first digital project for Lloyd Sealy Library, and was directed by Ellen Belcher, Special Collections Librarian and Ellen Sexton, Reference Librarian, with assistance from Bonnie Nelson, Associate Librarian for Information Systems. Web site and database design for the Transcript Collection was by Library Web-Designers Maxim Rubis and Javeria Sharif. Trial Transcript microfilm digitization was provided by iArchives. Content management of the Image Collection is provided through Greenstone which was customized by digital consultant, Sherry Breyette of LinguaLogica. This project was funded by a grant provided by a New York Digital Libraries grant from the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) through the New York State Regional Bibliographic Databases Program. (Announcement).

 

 

The Crime in New York 1850-1950 digitization project was supported in part by funds from: Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) through the New York State Regional Bibliographic Databases Program.

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