I was walking my dog the other day in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan, NYC. Came across an abandoned 3-story house, totally boarded up, sandwiched between sky scrapers and became instantly fascinated. Went home and started looking up the address on Google, found some interesting information but it was pretty all over the place. I've decide to write about the history of the place and how it changed over the years, as the city and the neighborhood changed around it.
From what I've dug up about this building, it may have been, at various times over the century: part of a German pre-prohibition brewery, an aerospace engineering facility where the paraglide may have been invented, a telecommunications office where operators connected calls with wires, and perhaps most surprisingly, the headquarters of the short-lived American Nazi Party, founded in 1954 by DeWest Hooker. It's now incongruously sandwiched between a high rise condo building and a fancy glass NYU Hospital wing.
This information referenced above all comes from online sources such as Wikipedia, genealogy forums, Google Books, the online archives of The NY Times and Ancestry.com. I now have a lot of detective work to do to piece together these titillating fragments of fact that I may have found.
While not a historian by trade, I did get my BA in History about a decade ago so I retain a decent understanding of how to classify various sources I might come across. I feel that the majority of my current sources are all very weak and want to build this story starting with factual data and contemporary sources, and only then coloring in with tertiary sources like Wikipedia and forum entries.
My question is - where do you think I should start with finding factual and contemporary data? Can I find the historical deeds over the years at the NY Public Library, or somewhere else? I know I can view the current deed but not sure about those dating back to the early 20th century. What other sources do you recommend I look at?
In many parts of the country there's a County Clerk, and the office of the County Clerk has the deed books. You can usually find the description of the property in tax records (there will be a tax map showing its place with others- that gives the parcel number). With that, and the address, you can go to the County Clerk's office and ask for help to do a deed search. This will involve pulling books off shelves filled with deeds, looking up your deed and seeing which previous deed book it was entered in, going to that deed book, repeat... working your way backwards through the chain of ownership.
For NYC, I would expect it to be different. I would think a lot of records ( though perhaps not the earliest ones) to be digitized and even available online. Here's a little illustrated webpage on the topic.
Property records are among the most complete and accessible historic records—but you have to think beyond what's online. In most places, those records are with a county office, but all of New York City is served by a single City Register
Because the chain of ownership is so important in real estate law and title disputes, there are many services you could have prepare a complete title chain for you. Any real estate attorney should be able to give you a referral.
You can get a title report for less than a hundred dollars from a title company. Save yourself the time and just buy it. You may want to pay a lawyer for an hour of his time to explain what everything means. Online records usually wouldn't go back that far, and getting copies from the county or city registry is more expensive than getting them from a title company.