Jessica Reinis of Boerum Hill was only in the fourth grade at the Brooklyn Friends school, but she had plenty of questions for Carol Bellamy, who, from 1977 to 1985, was the City Council president:
“Can I wear a dress and still be like Susan B. Anthony?â€
Is it wrong to support women’s lib and men’s lib, she asked in her neat script. Was President Jimmy Carter a male chauvinist pig for firing Bella Abzug from his Commission on Women after she publicly criticized his budget?
Ms. Bellamy patiently replied that wearing a dress “doesn’t symbolize submission to male chauvinism, especially if you maintain our personal beliefs and voice them with confidence and an ample measure of tact.â€
She said supporting liberation for men and women was a matter of personal conscience (“conscious†is what the Council president’s typewritten letter actually said) after you “acknowledge but don’t necessarily accept as fact, the opinions of those adults around you.†And she explained that while Mr. Carter could himself have been more tactful, it would be unjust to label him a male chauvinist “without examining his overall performance in the area of women’s concerns.â€
This exchange of letters, in 1979, amounting to a lesson in diplomacy and civics, is among more than 930,000 City Council documents that have been microfilmed and digitized and are being made available this week by the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives at LaGuardia Community College, part of the City University of New York.
The collection includes a half-century of Local Laws since 1955, searchable by date and topic, and, as evidence for doubters, 66,000 photographs of council members “at work†through 2005.
At a ribbon cutting on Thursday, the college honored Peter F. Vallone, a Queens Democrat and the former Council speaker, and Assemblywoman Catherine T. Nolan, who were instrumental in making the legislative archives available, according to Richard K. Lieberman, director of the LaGuardia and Wagner repository.
Professor Lieberman said that until recently, the mayors’ papers provided the primary source for researchers interested in learning about the governing of the city. Now, he added, “for the first time historians, journalists, students and the general public will have access to the other half of New York’s history.â€
The letters cover a broad range of topics. They include pleas on behalf of legislation that would preserve neighborhoods and minimize threats to public health and safety.
“In these times of calling for transparency in government, the City Council legislative archive makes accessible the back-story on how all the local laws for the past 50 years were debated and written,†Professor Lieberman said.
The files include constituent letters for and against a range of hot-button topics, including gay rights legislation and financing to help the homeless.
A Bronx man whose larynx was removed because of cancer passionately urges more regulation of tobacco sales. A woman from Mariners Harbor sarcastically suggests, “why don’t the politicians just move all the decent families off Staten Island and declare Staten Island the New York City Dump!’’
A Lower Manhattan resident complains that the city is housing too many homeless people in his neighborhood. A Bronx woman complains two decades ago that her two sons were roughed up for no reason by the police.
Presumably appealing for library financing, a woman named Debbie Langsmer wrote to Mr. Vallone’s predecessor: “I like books. So I hope you get money.†And a woman named Daleich Smith apologized to Ms. Bellamy for almost falling asleep during “that long talk we had†at school, an otherwise unexplained encounter with the Council president.
Ms. Reinis said Tuesday that she wrote the letter to Ms. Bellamy on her own, not part of a school assignment. She is now the director of marketing for a law firm. She wears a dress to work.
