Ephemera

As I reported last time, I finally unearthed the stash of medals that were donated along with this collection. Many of these medals were made by Tiffany & Co., the company famous for both its little blue box and because of . . . that movie. You know which one I'm talking about.

You may remember from this post that Tiffany was a member of the Chamber and also designed many of their invitations in the early 20th century.

Anyway, as an early holiday treat, here's a look at some of my favorites. This one, made by Tiffany, commemorates the opening of the NYC subway in 1902, which the Chamber was an instrumental proponent of--I think the front was meant to be personalized:




This one, also by Tiffany, commemorates the opening ceremony of the NYCC's building on 65 Liberty Street in lower Manhattan:




This is some sort of acknowledgment of the New York Stock Exchange, though I don't know when it was made or what it was for exactly:




Most of these medals are engraved with the name of their maker, but only a few are still housed in their original box. The Tiffany medals sit in a velvet bed and the lining seems like silk:


And one last medal, from the Paris Chamber of Commerce:


I apologize for the spotty photo quality--it has been a rather busy couple of weeks! Does anyone else think its weird that people used to make commemorative medals all of the time? Does anyone still do this?

I will be on vacation for the next couple of weeks, so no more posts until the new year. I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday season.

Ephemera

The Beginning of the End

In lieu of a lengthy blog post today, I am posting this short post just to mark the occasion--today, we received our final 9 record cartons of unprocessed material from off site storage! Needless to say, we are very excited. We have been processing like mad all week in an attempt to get as much done as possible before the holidays, and we've made a lot of progress just in this past week. So I think we deserve a little pat on the back!

We did a quick survey of the new boxes this morning and finally found all the medals I remember seeing, way back at the beginning of the project. I'll try to post some pictures of some of the medals soon. At least two of them were made by Tiffany & Co., one marks the opening of the new Chamber building in 1902, and one marks the opening of the NYC subway (of which the Chamber was a major proponent). It was a very cool Friday morning discovery!

The Beginning of the End