Postcard and Paper Collection

The original impulse was to collect view postcards of Ossining, our home town in Westchester County, north of New York City.

But the collecting urge soon overwhelmed geography, so now the collection contains cards, photographs, stereoviews, magic lantern slides, and pamphlets. And the views are not just of Ossining (once called Sing Sing, and from which the prison took its name) but now also Maryknoll and Briarcliff Manor (Scarborough). This portion of the collection is exhaustive - we collect anything we can find on these communities.

The expansion led us to collect selected views of neighboring communities

-- Croton-on-Hudson (including Harmon, Croton Point Park, and Croton Dam), Millwood, Peekskill, Indian Point (both the amusement park and the nuclear power plant), Valhalla, Tarrytown and North Tarrytown, Elmsford, Thornwood, Pocantico Hills, and Pleasantville.

Soon we were also adding selected cards reflecting the commuter's view of the world along the Hudson to Grand Central Terminal

-- the railroad stations on the Hudson, the Palisades, Hudson and East River bridges north of midtown and all the tunnels, and Grand Central itself and its neighborhood.

Other New York City locales were soon added

, including

Jackson Heights, N.Y. (where Mary grew up and where we lived for 11 years before coming to Ossining), parts of the East and West Sides of Manhattan (where we lived singly before moving to Queens), the Financial District and midtown (where we have worked most of our lives), the Bronx Zoo (where Mary formed much of her understanding of human behavior by studying the monkeys), Brooklyn's St. George Hotel, Haverstraw, N.Y. (where Bill once worked), Bear Mountain Park and Bridge, and some other views that we just like.

Bill's election to the Westchester County Legislature has given him a new area of interest, the infrastructure and facilities owned by Westchester County.

Major topics now include Playland Park (and its predecessors, Rye Beach Amusement Park and Paradise Park) and the Grasslands complex (whith includes the old Grasslands Hospital, the County Jail and Prison, and other facilities).

We also look for certain cards outside the New York area.

We collect every view we can find of the residential parks and the Police Recreation Center at Haines Falls and Tannersville, in Greene County, N.Y. (where we spent several happy summers) and selectively of Harrisburg, Pa. (where Bill grew up), Dartmouth College and Yale University (where Bill went to college), and Charles County and Gibson Island (Anne Arundel County), Maryland.

These cards are here for you to enjoy.

As we get new cards, we will scan them and add them to the site. We will be happy to make high-quality scans of these cards for $5 each, on request and pre-payment. If you have a card that you think we would like to add to the collection, please let us know. We respond quickly and will pay postage both ways if you send cards on approval.