The opportunity to republish the 1943 New York City Market Analysis came about with the help of several people and institutions.

First, we have to thank the newspapers that conceived of and published the document in the first place. They created the document to help generate advertising revenue, but they have left us a lasting piece of history that lives beyond any commercial motives at the time. The publishers were (in the order they appear in the document):

Public domain

The 1943 document was copyrighted. But copyright law as subsequently amended required copyright owners to explicitly renew the copyright within 28 years or forego rights to the material. In this case, the 28 year period ran to 1971. With the help of CUNY's legal team, the NYU Bobst Library (a federal depository library), the New York Times photo archives staff, and our own research into the Library of Congress's Catalog of Copyright Entries (as digitized by Google and others), we determined that the copyright was not renewed. The 1943 document is in the public domain.

The Hearst Corporation also indicated to us that it had no objection to our publishing the material online.

CUNY's legal staff provided invaluable guidance throughout the copyright process.

A graduate student's find

The Center for Urban Research was able to convert the 1943 document into scanned images because the Center's mapping director, Steven Romalewski, had purchased a copy of the document from the New York Bound bookstore during its going-out-of-business sale in 1997. An urban planning graduate student at the time, Romalewski knew the "scarce book" (as it was catalogued by New York Bound) would play a key role one day. It was well worth the $100 cost!

Technical essentials

The Welcome to 1940s New York website is the result of David Burgoon's professionalism, creativity, and efficient, effective development. Kristen Grady georeferenced maps from the 1943 document in order to create a GIS layer of neighborhood areas which you see on the website. The website's logo was designed by Jeannine Kerr.

The website relies on jQuery, the basemap is from MapBox, map navigation is provided through Leaflet.js, and the neighborhood map layer is hosted by cartoDB.

We are indebted to DocumentCloud for hosting the individual scanned pages from the 1943 document, and for providing online access to the material, including high-resolution versions of the Market Analysis profiles.

Several people reviewed early versions of Welcome to 1940s New York and provided helpful critiques and recommendations for improvement. Hopefully we did justice to their suggestions. They include: Jordan Anderson, Neil Freeman, Kristen Grady, Amanda Hickman, Michael Keller, Nathaniel V. Kelso, Jeannine Kerr, and Dan Nguyen.

The individual pages from the 1943 Market Analysis were scanned by the FedEx Office staff at the 34th St & Madison Ave location. Big thanks to them!