We used to have rubber-band fights sometimes. A Saturday-afternoon visit to his office was one of my favorite treats. Irving Browning’s office was like no one else’s. He was the founder and owner of Camera Mart, a motion-picture-equipment rental and supply company But there was little in his office about cinematography unless it was the row of antique movie cameras that lined a high shelf running around the walls. No, Irving’s office was, rather, an eclectic museum. Prominent on the wall to the left as you entered was an original Mutoscope, Charlie Chaplin flickering forever in its interior darkness. Stacked against it was an ever-changing assortment of antique weaponry from almost any historical epoch you could name, but especially from the American past. Remington bronzes loomed out of the semidarkness (there never seemed to be lights on; the office was always lit by natural daylight). Hanging on the wall behind his desk among a number of prints was a framed arrow labeled, “The Arrow That Killed Custer.” Even then I don’t think I believed it.

Irving wasn’t a well-educated man, I am told, but he certainly was fascinated by history, all history, and was never too busy to talk about it to a ten-year-old boy. Even better, nothing in his office was untouchable, and nothing gave him more pleasure than sharing his collection with others.

Irving died in 1961, and my father and his partners took over Camera Mart.

It wasn’t until nearly thirty years later that I learned about Irving Browning, the photographer. A small 1989 exhibit of his photographs at the New-York Historical Society took me completely by surprise. The quality and variety of his work were astonishing. Even more astonishing was the information from my father when, following the exhibit, I started to question him about Irving’s career as a photographer, many of his original negatives, I learned, were still in storage at Camera Mart.

On a March day I trundled home with eight cartons of collapsing cardboard, shrouded in three decades of dust. Inside, in a state of terrible neglect and deterioration, were some thirty-five cases of material. Prints and negatives tumbled out literally by the thousands, an unparalleled photographic history of a vanished New York.

Taken between 1918 and 1938, Irving’s photographs captured a city even then gargantuan, but somehow less intimidating. It was a city of proportion and scale, built and occupied by people not yet too small for their surroundings.

Irving seemed to have been everywhere and interested in everything. Down in gaping excavations where men with jackhammers were carving out the foundations for a future Rockefeller Center. Precariously perched on the cables of a George Washington Bridge whose roadway hangs truncated in empty space, stretching toward the Palisades. Up in the girders of an unfinished Empire State Building, the very emblem of the city it would soon crown. He documented the construction