It was poised to make a meal of a rare, powerful trove of the history of working-class New York: the archives of the Bowery Savings Bank, which was founded in 1834 for the benefit of its depositors.
The papers were among the materials being cleaned out of the basement of a Capital One branch in Brooklyn that is closing next month.
At what seemed to have been the last minute, the records were given a stay of destruction, apparently when archivists and others began appealing to Capital One.
“We are going through a normal review process and will make appropriate decisions,” said Sie Soheili, a spokesman for Capital One.
Disputing that archival bank material had been lost, he characterized the papers disposed of as “old newspapers and trash.”
But workers handling them said that, to their amazement, they saw documents dated from 1904 and into the 1940s — long before Capital One existed — headed into the shredder. By midmorning, workers said, they were told to divert pre-1930 records from the stream bound for the truck.
The fate of the historical materials is “to be determined,” Soheili said.
An organization of archivists in New York City is keen to make sure that the trove is not destroyed. “It would be priceless,” said Marion Casey, an associate professor at New York University’s Glucksman Ireland House.
The records of 19th-century savings banks have hardly ever been preserved, but those that survive — including a cache from the Emigrant Savings Bank, held at the New York Public Library — have opened new windows onto the long-vanished lives of ordinary people, Casey said.
The library’s curator of manuscripts and archives, Thomas Lannon, sent word to Capital One on Tuesday that he would like to inspect the Bowery materials.
Their pages show what kind of work men and women did, where they lived, how much money they saved or borrowed, the names of their parents, spouses and places of birth. Such archives make social archaeology possible.
The Bowery, which did not pay its officers or trustees for decades and grew to be among the largest savings banks in the United States, no longer exists. Since the mid-1980s, it has been bought, sold, merged and acquired in a dizzying line of transactions.
The historical records moved from the Bowery’s landmark headquarters at 130 Bowery — now the home of Capitale, an event space — to an office park in Lake Success on Long Island. Around 2004, when that space was being emptied out and the archive was at risk of abandonment, it was moved to the basement on Fulton Street at the urging of the branch manager, Joseph Kopitz. “I had so much space there,” Kopitz said.
Kopitz, who lives in the neighborhood, said he recently became concerned about the archive again when he saw a notice that the Capital One branch was closing.
Few people know the heft of history in those boxes better than Barbara Haws, who served as the bank’s first archivist before its 150th anniversary in 1984.
“It was amazingly continuous — every single depositor from the time when it opened its doors,” Haws said. “Big ledgers. It appealed to immigrants and people without a lot of money.”
The ledgers were the hard drives of the 19th century — terabyte-sized. “At this stage, I couldn’t be their archivist because I couldn’t lift them,” Haws said. “They’re about 3 to 4 feet tall, 2 feet wide. The bindings were about 4 inches thick and covered in a canvas material.”
Inside them, she said, is a roll call of Bowery depositors who arrived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan throughout the 19th century: Irish, Italians, Chinese, Eastern Europeans, among others. “Every single immigrant group was represented in that bank,” Haws said. She did not recall if the records included the race of the depositors.
Casey said archivists in the city were willing to help the bank in its initial rough-sorting of the boxes in its basement.
After that, a number of the city’s major research institutions have agreed to move and temporarily store the material until a repository is found.
“A bunch of us will cobble the costs together of moving it to an interim place, and then we will triage it — ‘yes to this, no to that,’ ” Casey said.
Haws said the records would be a robust resource for people doing genealogical research. Perhaps, she said, a commercial ancestry company would pay for them to be digitized.
“Everyone is strapped for space,” she said. “They would dovetail with the census and any city records. It would build out another layer of information about New Yorkers.”
Casey said her students studying the archives of the Emigrant bank, for example, have found a group of farmers who held accounts there. “Of course, people in cities have to eat,” she said.
Kopitz said the bank could perform a profound public service by allowing others to keep them safe. “They could be heroes,” he said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.