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The photographer known as Weegee made his mark on photography by hunting for crime scenes and uncomfortable shots in New York City. We may soon be seeing some of the crime scenes he captured from an alternate perspective.

Thousands of historical crime scene photographs shot by the New York Police Department will soon be digitized and released for the public to see.

The New York Times reports that the National Endowment for the Humanities has just announced a $125,000 grant that will allow the Department of Records and Information Services in New York to digitize 30,000 photos taken between 1914 and 1975 by NYPD photo unit officers. These photos were stored in boxes after the conclusion of cases and stored away out of sight in a basement

“The images recall those taken by the famous tabloid photographer Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee,” the Times writes. “[A]t some crime scenes, the police photographer who took them and the night-crawling newsman may have been standing just a few feet apart.”

“The police photographers more than held their own. These guys are well-trained photographers,” Municipal Archives deputy director Michael Lorenzini tells the Times.

The New York City Department of Records says that 2,000 of the photos were captured by the city’s Emergency Services Unit from 1928 through 1941. The images show “mayhem including street car accidents, early airplane crashes, explosions and the proverbial cat stuck in a tree.”

Dusting Off a Police Trove of Photographs to Rival Weegee’s

The picture, of a coat and a hat, was one of seven taken that afternoon at the Latin Lounge. But why?

Hours earlier, someone had fatally stabbed a man identified as Edward Curbreia, 32, in the bar, on Broadway at West 100th Street in Manhattan. It was Feb. 1, 1959, and two detectives arrived at the scene — in car 1514, according to a meticulously kept logbook — with their big, tripod-mounted camera. They took a picture of the busy block (a sign in a neighboring grocer’s window advertised a special on smoked tongue: 39 cents a pound) and others inside the bar and its bloodstained bathroom. The detectives carried various flashbulbs that would have popped as they lit up the dark room.

The coat check closet must have caught someone’s eye. Inside were a single hat and coat, each one with a chip, No. 38.

The detectives set up the camera. Pop.
Crime Scene

The Latin Lounge photos were among thousands taken from 1914 to 1975 by officers assigned to the New York Police Department’s photo units. Later, when the cases were closed, the photos were boxed up and stored in various places, including, most recently, a basement room at 1 Police Plaza.
Photo
A Police Department photo from 1959 showing the scene of a stabbing on the Upper West Side. Credit Jake Naughton for The New York Times

Many of the photos will soon be available for public viewing for the first time. On Monday, the National Endowment for the Humanities will announce a $125,000 grant it has awarded to the Department of Records and Information Services for the digitization of 30,000 of the pictures. The photographs will be scanned starting in July and will be available for online viewing sometime after that.

The images recall those taken by the famous tabloid photographer Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee, and at some crime scenes, the police photographer who took them and the night-crawling newsman may have been standing just a few feet apart.

“The police photographers more than held their own,” said Michael Lorenzini, deputy director of the Municipal Archives. “These guys are well-trained photographers.”

Mr. Lorenzini recalled the day he entered the crowded basement storage room — “the smell,” he said. When old film begins to break down, it smells like vinegar. Archivists working with the collection have labeled and stored most of the negatives in a freezer at a facility in Brooklyn to stop further decay.

The trove includes well-known scenes, like the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan shortly after Malcolm X was assassinated there in 1965, and exploded lockers at Pennsylvania Station from one of the many attacks in the 16-year rampage in the 1940s and 1950s of George P. Metesky, the so-called Mad Bomber.

But the collection also lays bare the workaday jobs that officers were called upon to investigate, like a stickup in a pool hall on Broome Street in 1942: A detective photographed the inside of the bare-bones hall, the cue sticks lying where they had been abandoned on a pool table, and, outside, the body of the dapper robber himself, who had been shot and killed by a patrolman.

Arnold Roussine, 80, was one of the photographers. He joined the department in 1957 and transferred to the photo unit in 1960.

“The film size was 8 inches by 10 inches,” he said Friday in a telephone interview from his Long Island home. “The camera was set up on a tripod. It was a bellows-type camera — you know, the bellows on an accordion?”
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Alleyne Brothers, in a Police Department photo taken on April 22, 1934, that identifies her as being charged with felony assault with a knife. Credit NYC Municipal Archives

The weight of the camera would, decades later, damage Mr. Roussine’s left shoulder, the one that lugged the gear. Many crime scenes were in dangerous locations, he said, and he kept his right hand free to hold his gun.

In 1990, he arrived at the Happy Land Social Club after an arsonist set a fire there that killed 87 people. He also worked on a drug-related blood bath in the 1980s that was one of many homicides in the city that the tabloids would label a Valentine’s Day massacre.

“We see things that people just can’t comprehend,” he said.

Another retired photographer, Martin Shapiro, 84, remembered the hero’s welcome he would get when he rolled up to a crime scene with his camera. “They’d say, ‘Hey, Marty’s here, don’t worry, we got it solved,’ ” he said with a chuckle.

The deliberation that went into taking the photos is remarkable compared to today, when hundreds of digital photos are taken at a crime scene from every possible angle. Back then, Mr. Shapiro said, some guys shot, say, five pictures at a job. He was more concerned about missing something, so he would take eight.

It is unclear whether the killer in the Latin Lounge homicide in 1959 was ever caught. According to the handwritten notes on the file with the photos, an arrest was made, but that person was cleared by a grand jury.

Both of the retired photo unit detectives were asked to consider the photo of the hat and the coat in the closet.

“Could be the D.O.A.’s,” Mr. Shapiro said.

Or perhaps they belonged to someone who had left in a hurry. “The coat and the hat,” Mr. Roussine said, “may have been from the perpetrator.”