Historical note

The Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), an initiative of the Heritage Documentation Programs of the U.S. National Park Service, was established in 1933 as a make-work program for architects, draftsmen, and photographers left jobless by the Great Depression. At first tasked with documenting a representative sampling of America's architectural heritage, HABS recorders have since amassed upwards of 500,000 measured drawings, photographs, and narrative histories for over 40,000 historic structures dating from Pre-Columbian times through the twentieth century. Most of this output is accessible in digitized form via the Library of Congress at loc.gov/pictures/collection/hh/.

AKRF, an environmental, planning, and engineering consulting firm (founded in 1981 as Allee King Rosen & Fleming, Inc.) was contracted by Columbia University to undertake HABS-level documentation of four of the buildings represented in the present collection (see Box 1, Enclosures 1 through 4 in the container list). The fifth building, the Hotel Pennsylvania, was similiarly documented for review by the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation (see Box 1, Enclosure 5).