La Guardia and Wagner Archives
| Country | United States |
|---|---|
| Type | Archive |
| Scope | New York City |
| Established | 1982 |
| Location |
Fiorello H. LaGuardia Community College/CUNY 31-10 Thomson Avenue Room E-238 Long Island City, NY 11101 |
| Coordinates | 40°44′39.1″N 73°56′15.7″W / 40.744194°N 73.937694°WCoordinates: 40°44′39.1″N 73°56′15.7″W / 40.744194°N 73.937694°W |
| Website | laguardiawagnerarchive |
The La Guardia and Wagner Archives was established in 1982 at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, Queens, New York, to collect, preserve, and make available primary materials documenting the social and political history of New York City, with an emphasis on the mayoralty and the borough of Queens. The archives serves a broad array of researchers, journalists, students, scholars, exhibit planners, and policy makers. Its web site provides guidelines to the collections, as well as over 55,000 digitized photographs and close to 2,000,000 digitized documents.
This growing repository contains the papers of several mayors, the records of the New York City Council, the New York City Housing Authority, the piano maker Steinway & Sons, and a Queens History Collection. Many of the documents and photographs are available on the archives' website.
As mayor during the turbulent period from 1934 to 1945, Fiorello H. La Guardia initiated major reforms during the Great Depression and World War II. In 1982, the mayor's widow, the late Marie La Guardia, donated her husband's personal papers to LaGuardia Community College. These documents, photographs, and personal artifacts chronicle Mayor La Guardia's life and times, providing an invaluable record of New York City history.
The collection contains transcripts of La Guardia's speeches, personal correspondence, and more than 3,000 photographs. It also has original sketches, scrapbooks, and records of his tenure as director general of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration after World War II. The archives holds a microfilm copy of selected series of La Guardia's mayoral papers housed at the New York City municipal archive. This includes the mayor's scrapbooks, which record the media's reaction to La Guardia and the issues of the time. Selected documents are available online on the Archives' website in full-text digital form, including letters from Mayor LaGuardia to his sister Gemma, who sought her brother's help in returning to the United States after surviving a Nazi forced labor camp. After his last term, LaGuardia traveled across war-torn Europe and China to deliver aid to starving children as Director General of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). The thank you letters he received from children in Italy are featured. Also available electronically are the text of his Sunday radio broadcasts over WNYC from 1942 through 1945. The archives has available a microfilm copy of La Guardia's congressional papers, which are housed at the New York Public Library. The collection contains more than 100 hours of audio and video tapes of and about La Guardia, including oral history interviews with the mayor's friends and associates, radio broadcasts and newsreel footage.
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