Introduction and Significance to the Humanities
Harbor City Archive Collaborative requests USD 285,000 over 30 months to stabilise and describe the primary sources that document Harbor City's waterfront industry, dock labour, immigrant neighbourhoods, the 1936 flood and its rebuilding, and the 1950s-1960s urban renewal that displaced the Westside neighbourhood. The project will rehouse the photographs most at risk of physical loss, process the civic papers that record how the city planned flood recovery and renewal, and describe both at the level researchers need to locate individual images and files. The aim is historical interpretation rather than advocacy: the Collaborative will keep the evidence intact and findable so that historians, teachers, students and residents can examine for themselves how a port city changed and how its decisions were recorded.
The collections at issue are the Harbor City Municipal Photograph Collection and the Collaborative's civic papers. The photograph collection holds 40,000 photographs dated 1898 to 1974, comprising 6,200 glass plate negatives, 18,500 acetate film negatives and 15,300 prints, stored in 420 boxes. The civic papers run to 1,200 linear feet dated 1871 to 1985 and include city council minutes, planning department files, Harbor Commission records, and the records of neighbourhood associations and civic clubs. Together they document four subjects: the operation of the waterfront and the labour that sustained it; the immigrant neighbourhoods that grew around the docks; the 1936 flood and the rebuilding that followed; and the renewal programmes of the 1950s and 1960s that cleared the Westside. The photographs supply the visual record of streets, workplaces and housing that no longer exist, and the civic papers supply the administrative record of why and how they were removed. Each set gains meaning from the other, which is why this project treats them together.
The physical evidence is deteriorating. A 2025 in-house survey sampled 1,800 acetate negatives and found 22% at A-D strip level 2 or higher. Applied to the 18,500 acetate negatives, that proportion projects to roughly 4,070 at risk of vinegar syndrome; the figure is an estimate from a sample, and the project's own survey will confirm it before rehousing begins. The same survey found 4% of the glass plates, 248 plates, cracked and in need of individual support. It also found 310 linear feet of civic papers held in acidic boxes and folders, among them the urban renewal and 1936 flood files. Acetate deterioration is progressive, cracked glass continues to break with handling, and acidic enclosures continue to embrittle the paper they contain.
Excerpt from the first section, unedited. The full narrative continues for about 7,000 words.