Eugene L. Armbruster photographs and scrapbooks, 1900-1939

This From the Vault post was originally written by Tess Colwell and published on September 13, 2017 by the Brooklyn Historical Society. To see the latest Photo of the Week entries, visit the Brooklynology blog home, or subscribe to our Center for Brooklyn History newsletter.

In the dog days of summer, it seems fitting to call out a collection that features our own playground by the sea, Coney Island.

In 2015, BHS received a generous grant from Gerry Charitable Trust to digitize and catalog seven scrapbooks from the Eugene L. Armbruster photographs and scrapbooks collection.

Armbruster was an amateur photographer and NYC historian during the early 20th century.  He was particularly interested in infrastructure and preserving history that he viewed as vanishing during a period of rapid growth and change in Brooklyn. In his book, The Eastern District of Brooklyn (1912), he writes, “If a history of the City of New York will ever be written, its compiler will look around for historical matter relating to the old towns, now forming parts of the metropolis, and this book was written that the Eastern District of Brooklyn may be represented then.”

The scrapbooks are organized by subject and include newspaper clippings, photographs, hand-drawn maps, drawings, and writings. The scrapbooks primarily feature Brooklyn, but also showcase Manhattan, Queens, Nassau County and Suffolk County. They are a particularly rich resource for housing research.

Armbruster created two full albums dedicated to Coney Island. In addition to the dapper man on the boardwalk, I wanted to add some more fanciful selections.

 

Check out all of the digitized scrapbook pages here.

Interested in seeing more photos from CBH’s collections? Visit our online image gallery, which includes a selection of our images, or the digital collections portal of Brooklyn Public Library. We look forward to inviting you to CBH in the future to research in our entire collection of images, archives, maps, and special collections. In the meantime, please visit our resources page to search our collections. Questions? Our reference staff is available to help with your research! You can reach us at cbhreference@bklynlibrary.org.