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Who Takes 3,000 Photos Of NYC's Doors?

Roy Colmer
/
New York Public Library

Street View: New York City's Doors: A Special Research Project of NPR History Dept.

A door is for closing. And for opening.

From the doorkeeper-to-God in Psalms to the wild night outside the door in King Lear to Charlie Rich getting Behind Closed Doors, the door is the ampersand between here & there.

It is the gateway and the getaway.

Often a door is an opening to the future — the doors of Let's Make A Deal! for example, Tiffany, what's behind Door Number Three? And Dante's entryway to Hell: "All Hope Abandon, Ye Who Enter Here."

But while clicking through the New York Public Library's online exhibit Doors, NYC –- which includes more than 3,000 photos of the city's doorways taken by Roy Colmer in the mid-1970s –- we couldn't help but think of those doors as portals to the past.

And of Colmer's camera as still another kind of door that allows our imaginations to step into an ever-receding past.

So NPR History Dept. asked NPR multimedia producer extraordinaire Claire O'Neill to delve into these doors and she returned with

Street View: New York City's Doors: A Special Research Project of NPR History Dept.


Follow me @NPRHistoryDept; lead me by writing lweeks@npr.org.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Linton Weeks
Linton Weeks joined NPR in the summer of 2008, as its national correspondent for Digital News. He immediately hit the campaign trail, covering the Democratic and Republican National Conventions; fact-checking the debates; and exploring the candidates, the issues and the electorate.