Ronald Lawson Research Files for the Tenant Movement in New York City

Abstract

Ronald Lawson (1940-) is a professor emeritus of the Urban Studies Department at Queens College, the City University of New York, and the editor of and contributing author to The Tenant Movement in New York City, 1904-1984 (1986), for which he attended meetings of various tenant organizations. The collection contains detailed accounts of building conditions, rent strikes, lobbying and other activism. There are files on tenant organizations from the individual building level to the New York City and New York State level, which include meeting minutes, correspondence, internal documents and public statements and printed ephemera; several boxes of questionnaires filled out by local movement activists and leaders, and, scattered thoughout the collection, numerous interviews with such individuals. There is a smaller amount of like materials created by landlords and their organizations. There are also several book-length "manuscripts" by Lawson (i.e., a combination of narrative, notes, interviews and other materials), on organizations such as the Metropolitan Council on Housing, the Bay Ridge (Brooklyn) organization of the Metropolitan Council on Housing, the New York State Tenants' Legislative Coalition, the Brooklyn Tenants Union, the Riverside Edgecombe Neighborhood Association, and others. There are also papers by Lawson's college students, some of them case studies of living conditions in individual buildings and/or of tenant organizations therein.