About the Collection
Dan McNulty’s collection of negatives was donated to the Jersey City Free Public Library after his death in 1976.
In the 1980s, a selection of nearly 500 images depicting street scenes was selected to be printed, and 80 of those made into a slide show, through a grant from the NJ Historical Commission. The prints came to be among the most popular items in the local history collection, and in 1998 became the basis for a book by Kenneth French, then Department Head of the New Jersey Room.
Throughout the 21st century McNulty’s images have appealed to artists who have matched his vision of city life with theirs for then-and-now juxtapositions, as well as those who want a glimpse into the city they or their family lived in decades ago.
The remaining hundreds of negatives remained in storage, underutilized for many years. In 2006 an inventory was created, matching the brief descriptions provided by McNulty to sets of negatives. In 2020 a grant from the Hudson County History Partnership Program provided for the purchase of a scanner capable of digitizing the 4”x5” photonegative format. Several months of scanning and editing of images followed, and beginning in late 2021 the scanned images were matched with their inventory descriptions and uploaded to this digital library platform.
The descriptions we have of the images are minimal. Fortunately most include a date, but beyond that only a word or short phrase was applied. In early 2022 a selection of the images were shared on the Facebook nostalgia group “We Grew Up In Jersey City” by page moderator Bob Gajewski (and others), allowing for comment “crowdsourcing” to add to some of the descriptions. Historian Joe Murray, whose father James F. Murray Jr. features in many images, has been a valuable resource. We hope that users who recognize a place or (even better) people will add comments to the photos that we can then check out and add to the description.
The subject categories are those used by McNulty, and may not all be correctly matched to the content. Rather than wait until all the “metadata” was perfect, we share these images as a work in progress which will be enhanced not only by our own staff’s work, but by input from the general public.