Moscow's Park of Culture and Rest was one of the topics in a controversial series of travelogues aired by WNYC in late 1937 and early 1938. Critics of the station charged the broadcasts were Soviet propaganda meant to gloss over the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin.

Howard Hughes wades through a scrum of reporters at Floyd Bennett Field, July 14, 1938. Hughes and his four-man crew had just returned to New York after circumnavigating the globe and covering 14,672 miles in a record-setting three days, 19 hours, 14 minutes and 10 seconds.

Hom Hong Wei (1915-2011) at his WNYC engineering shop workbench in the early 1940s.

WNYC's first Music Supervisor (Music Director) Herman Neuman was a an accomplished conductor and composer and oversaw the department from its beginning in 1924 to 1967. He continued to do his regular "world" music program (classical), Hands Across the Sea into the 1970s.

In a rare appearance behind the microphone, Major Edwin H. Armstrong, the inventor of frequency modulation (FM) broadcasting, addressed the WNYC audience 63 years ago today. The occasion was the launch of WNYC's new FM transmitter.

Belgian-born soprano Lily Djanel sings the French national anthem “La Marseillaise” to a crowd of 50,000 on June 6, 1944. The D-Day rally broadcast by WNYC was presided over by Mayor La Guardia.  

Col. Charles A. Lindbergh receives a medal of valor from New York City Mayor Jimmy Walker, June 13, 1927. The aviator stood in front of the WNYC and network microphones, having just garnered tributes in Washington, D.C. for his historic non-stop solo flight across the Atlantic. 

During the fall of 1946, the American Women's Voluntary Services produced a program for WNYC titled “How Does Your Kitchen Fare,” aimed at helping housewives to make nourishing and economical meals, despite post-war food shortages.  The AWVS, founded by Alice Throckmorton McLean, was modeled after the British Women's Voluntary Services. During the war years the organization aided the war effort by sewing garments for servicemen, the members were also trained in "first aid, air raid and war gas work, home nursing and evacuation procedures." (The New York Times, Oct 20, 1940)

Dr. John Haynes Holmes addressed tens of thousands at an anti-Nazi rally in Battery Park on May 10, 1933, broadcast over WNYC. The Pastor of the Community Church recalled his earlier protests of the pogroms against the Jews in Czarist Russia and said, Hitler was "more cruel than the Czar."

Lest you feel the NYC Municipal Archives' WNYC Collection is made up of only parades and tree lighting ceremonies, we've decided to start up a new mixtape mini-series of songs culled from the hours of archival audio we catalog.

New York Mayor John P. O'Brien* pinned a gold medal on Wiley Post, 'round-the-world flier' on the steps of City Hall, July 26, 1933. Post's wife Edna Mae is on the right behind the WNYC microphone.

Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia on the steps of City Hall with attorney Allen Wardwell, Chairman of the Greater New York Campaign of Russian War Relief, Inc. launching Russian War Relief Week, June 20, 1942.

Concert pianist Nadia Reisenberg standing in front of the Louis Schanker WPA mural at WNYC, April 25, 1942.*

A 1950s era New York City subway advertisment for WNYC by Amelia Opdyke Jones, a.k.a. "Oppy". Oppy was the cartoonist  behind a twenty-year run of subway posters and advertisments beginning in 1946.

Throughout the 1940’s WNYC aired a program titled Pals of the P.A.L., a youth-oriented variety show in cooperation with the Police Athletic League (P.A.L.).

In this 1945 WNYC broadcast, Austrian born Marie Lemmermeyer tells the “one true story of 'Silent Night'.”

On Christmas Eve 1948, three lucky children flew to Montreal, where they met Santa Claus and escorted him back to New York to deliver presents to the City's children.

Malcolm X in front of the Teresa Hotel in Harlem when he was still a spokesperson for the Nation of Islam.

In December 1942, just three years after the tree lighting spectacular at City Hall when one of Mayor La Guardia's children flipped a switch and instantly lit up 22 trees throughout the boroughs, strict wartime dimout regulations dictated how people in New York, New Jersey and Delaware celebrated the holiday season.

Hobby Helps Determine Signal Reach