![]() The Directory was compiled the year after the city was first captured by the British and renamed New York, and is an invaluable record of the Dutch colonial period, a unique document that captures a particularly important moment in history. Perhaps fittingly the Honourable Peter Stuyvesant, who lived on “‘t Marckvelt” (the east side of Bowling Green, now the beginning of Broadway) is the first name listed. ![]() A contender for the title of the first New York City directory is A Directory for the City of New York in 1665, a list of mostly Dutch householders, men and women, in New Amsterdam, arranged according to the streets they lived on. ![]() City directories in the 19th century might list the name, profession, home and business addresses, and sometimes race of an individual. The Fire Department (or Fire Patrol as they are named) was an early adopter of the new technology, with five addresses listed in the directory.īefore the telephone directory if you wanted to look some one up you would use a city directory. A few of the businesses listed are still household names: E. Included in the listings were 46 banks and bankers, 26 jewelers, 27 produce, cotton, oil and commission merchants, 21 importers, 19 dealers in drugs, chemicals and essential oils, 18 "milliners etc", 10 hotels, 10 insurance companies, 9 "silk and lace," 6 transfer companies, and numerous sellers of luggage, safes, burglar alarms, cigars, railroad tickets, kid gloves, collars and cuffs, tailor's trimmings, and suppliers/purveyors of "passé partout" (possibly picture framing). The first telephone directory for New York City, issued October 23rd 1878, by the Bell Telephone Company of New York, also a card, listed the names and addresses (still no numbers) of 256 subscribers, all business addresses: residential subscribers were not published. ![]() directory, issued November 1878 was sold by Christie's for $170,500 at auction in 2008. Incidentally the only known surviving copy of the second (officially the first edition, but who's counting) New Haven District Telephone Co. No copy of the directory exists save in facsimile form. oh I get it.Īmmon Shea, in his 2010 book The Phone Book: The Curious History of the Book That Everyone Uses But No One Reads, suggests that the telephone directory was first identified as the book in Agatha Christie's Secrets of Chimneys in 1925, with the the line "By the way, Eversliegh, you might ring up a number for me now. Look it up in the book." Ironically the first telephone directory wasn't a book, but a single sheet card listing the names and addresses (but not numbers) of 50 subscribers to the New Haven District Telephone Co., in February 1878. The book's title page declares its ephemeral status with the legend "Destroy All Previous Issues." Why on earth should I be interested in that tatty, thin paged, dog-eared, information rich source of primary evidence that. The best end the book can hope for is that moment in the sun when its pages are shredded for ticker-tape. But why this sentimental nostalgia you may ask? The telephone book is supposed to be used and abused. ![]() How many copies of this book currently lie abandoned in a cupboard or drawer, waiting to be recycled? Should we mark the passing of a book we've never treated with any respect? We've ripped out its pages for lack of a pencil, used it to prop open doors, and have adorned the cover and pages with coffee cup rings and doodles. But what about the book? Both the New York Times and the Washington Post have this year reported that the White Pages may soon be discontinued. It can't have escaped your attention that there has been a lot of talk recently about the imminent demise of the book, at least the print version. ![]()
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