HOT off Press about National Archives in NY

UpFront with NGS


New York National Archives Plans Move, Offers Meetings

Posted: 13 Mar 2010 03:17 PM PST

The New York City Office of the National Archives will be relocating in
the fall of 2011; the exact date is yet to be determined.
Many of the records will be kept off-site.

The National Archives has just announced they will hold two public meetings
on May 4th at 10:30 AM and at 5:30 PM at the Alexander Hamilton US Custom House at One Bowling Green in New York City. Questions about the move should be directed to Nancy Shader, Director of Archival Operations at NYC NARA at nancy.shader@nara.gov.

For more information please see:
http://www.archives.gov/northeast/nyc/move-notice.html

As a reminder, this move was under consideration in August of 2009. Below is a quote describing the plan and its rationale from Adrienne Thomas, then Acting Archivist of the U.S., originally published at
http://www.oah.org/pubs/nl/2009aug/thomas.html:
We are considering moving from the Varick Street federal office building to the Customs House, a federal building in lower Manhattan that also houses the Smithsonian American Indian Museum, which draws 300,000 visitors annually, and is centrally located near the Ellis Island and Statue of Liberty ferry landings. A feasibility study is currently underway.

Because of the high cost of archival storage in Manhattan, we plan to move eighty percent of New York City holdings to our Federal Records Center (FRC) in northeast Philadelphia in a new archival bay. The most heavily used records and significant “treasures” from the holdings will remain in New York.