A few months ago, the NYPL Milstein Division of United States History, Local History & Genealogy put our collective local history obsessive minds together to bring you a list of our favorite NYC non-fiction books. Now we reveal our favorite New York documentaries. These documentary films best depict New York, either in moments or over lengths of time, providing a capsule of a New York experience.

Battle For Brooklyn
The story of a reluctant activist Daniel Goldstein as he struggles to save his home and community from being demolished to make way for a professional basketball arena and densest real estate development in U.S. history.

Milstein says: “Although fairly one-sided, it’s a prime example of big projects versus residents that is so common in NYC.”

Bill Cunningham New York
Documentary on New York times fashion photographer Bill Cunningham. For decades, Cunningham "has been chronicling fashion trends and high society charity soirées for the Times Style section in his columns 'On the Street' and 'Evening Hours."

Milstein says: “Bill succeeds in his classic paradox New York lifestyle only after riding a bike around town for 60 years and spending every Sunday in church. He is paid to follow the nightlife of tastemakers but is mortified by elite treatment and wears a blue janitor’s smock from the hardware store. He lives in a rent control studio in Carnegie Hall two blocks from the highest retail rents in the world. “I don’t touch money,” says Bill. New York has a habit of using small parts of itself as a stunt double for the universe, and the city needs Bill Cunningham to take pictures of it.”

Blank City
In the late 1970s to the middle 1980s, Manhattan was in ruins. But true art has never come from comfort, and it was precisely those dire circumstances that inspired artists like Jim Jarmusch, Lizzy Borden, and Amos Poe to produce some of their best works. Taking their cues from punk rock and new wave music, these young maverick filmmakers confronted viewers with a stark reality that stood in powerful contrast to the escapist product being churned out by Hollywood. Documents the history of "No wave cinema" and "cinema of transgression" movements.

Milstein says: “A vivid portrait and love letter to a time when artists could afford to work and play in Manhattan. Makes you nostalgic for a grittier version of the Lower East Side.”

Capturing the Friedmans
The Friedman's seem to be a typical family from affluent Great Neck, Long Island. One Thanksgiving, as the family gathers for a quiet holiday dinner, a police battering ram splinters the front door and officers rush inside. The police charge Arnold and his son Jesse with hundreds of shocking crimes. As police investigate, and the community reacts, the fabric of the family begins to disintegrate, revealing questions about justice, family and finally the truth.

Milstein says: “Absolutely disturbing and yet absolutely fascinating. You will really question what is true and what is fabricated.”

Dark Days
Documentary about a community of homeless people living in a train tunnel beneath Manhattan. Depicts a way of life that is unimaginable to most of those who walk the streets above: in the pitch black of the tunnel, rats swarm through piles of garbage as high-speed trains leaving Penn station tear through the darkness. For some of those who have gone underground, it has been home for as long as 25 years.

Milstein says: “This is like a peek into a secret and sad world that you would never have permission to enter. It will make you redefine the word ‘community’.”

Grey Gardens
Portrait of the relationship between Edith Bouvier Beale and her grown daughter, Little Edie, once an aspiring actress in New York who left her career to care for her aging mother in their East Hampton home, and never left again. The aunt and cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis feed their cats and raccoons and rehash their pasts behind the walls of their decaying mansion, Grey Gardens.

Milstein says: “A dark study of an overly codependent relationship in hovel that should be a castle.”

Jamel Shabazz: Street Photographer
Photographer Jamel Shabazz has documented urban life for more than 30 years and has covered the growth of hip-hop in New York City since the 1980s. The documentary "Jamel Shabazz Street Photographer," is a portrait of his life, career, and impact as a photographer, educator, and visual artist.

Milstein says: “Just as much as Shabazz’s iconic books of photographs, Back in the Days, A Time Before Crack, and The Last Sunday in June, this film transports you to his NYC, an under-represented beauty of black families, B-Boys, Black Muslims, and street bravado.”

Man on Wire
On August 7th, 1974, a young Frenchman named Philippe Petit stepped out on a wire illegally rigged between the New York World Trade Center's Twin Towers. After dancing for nearly an hour on the wire, he was arrested, taken for psychological evaluation, and brought to jail, before finally being released.

Milstein says: “This feat and this story portrayed the WTC Twin Towers in a way I had never pictured them before. And a tightrope walker as your storyteller - I would not have envisioned that but I’m glad to see the vision manifested.”

Manhatta
Photographer Paul Strand and painter Charles Sheehan filmed Manhatta in 1921. An 11-minute documentary, it explores photography using the medium of cinema, and is also a tribute to Manhattan. The film consists of 65 shots of various views of the city. The camera is static. Movement comes from within the picture frame, from people, cars and trucks, trains, tugboats, passenger liners, and from the steam and smoke they produce, nearly all at a distance, rendered somehow impersonal. Skyscrapers and bridges dominate. The film begins with a shot of the skyline, seen from the East River, then the Brooklyn Bridge, before moving to a shot of commuters streaming out of the Staten Island Ferry. For the most part we cannot see their faces. Next we see a shot of Trinity Church Cemetery, followed by a view of the large blank windows of an office building, dwarfing the people walking by. Next a shot of the Woolworth Building, the Cathedral of Commerce. We see some views at street level, of people on the sidewalk, on their way to work, and so on. But mostly the shots are from above, or at a distance. The camera shows construction workers in silhouette, part of the skyline. We see the rooftops and their chimneys and water towers, the windows of skyscrapers, and further on, the horizon, the sun setting over the Hudson.

Milstein says: “The film is modern, at times abstract, almost surreal. Interstitial titles quote Walt Whitman, lines which precede and underpin the shots that follow. The film is both modern and sublime, a large scale tribute to Manhattan. It does not concern itself overly with individual people, rather the monuments they build. Manhatta does not seem overtly political. It does not explore the down sides to industrialism, technology, capitalism, and modern living, tropes popular in modernist works. Yet one cannot help but think of the cinematic passages in Manhattan Transfer, a very political, and modern text. I feel sure that the book's author Jon Dos Passos must have seen Strand and Sheehan's film.”

Mulberry Street
Born in the Bronx and raised in upstate New York, Abel Ferrara started his professional film career on Mulberry Street in 1975. For the past year he's been living on the block, and the feast of San Gennaro is the subject of his new film. While he has used this location for a few of his features, this time it's the star of the film.

Milstein says: “A week in the life of Little Italy's San Gennaro Festival, directed by the O. Henry of Fear City, Abel Ferrara (King of New York, Driller Killer). A sausage-and-peppers homage to New York street life and ethnic pride which still haven't gone the way of subway tokens, Howard Johnson's, and smoking in bars. Plus the brief appearance by a Frank Vincent bubble-head doll.”

New York: A Documentary Film - Ric Burns
An eight-part, 17½ hour, American documentary film on the history of New York City.

Milstein says: “This series was a big deal for me when I immigrated and all I knew was Ramones, Seinfeld, Taxi, Madonna, Hip Hop and bagels. It's a great introduction to New York History.”

On the Bowery
1956 American docufiction film directed by Lionel Rogosin. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The film chronicles three desperate days in a then impoverished lower Manhattan neighborhood, New York's skid row: the Bowery. It is the story of Ray (Ray Salyer), a railroad worker, who drifts on to the Bowery to have a drunken spree after a long bout of laying tracks and then falls in with a band of drunks.

Milstein says: “This is not strictly a documentary despite being nominated for ‘Best Documentary feature’. It is however amazing footage of the Bowery in the 1950s. It’s footage New Yorkers should see, especially if they’ve ever walked along today’s more upscale version of the iconic street.”

Page One: Inside the New York Times
This documentary chronicles the transformation of The New York Times newsroom and the inner workings of the Media Desk, as the Internet redefines the media industry by surpassing print as the main source of news.

Milstein says: “As New Yorkers, the Grey Lady is ours. There is no better paper to observe in this changing era of news than this one.”

Paris Is Burning
Behind-the-scenes story of the fashion-obsessed New Yorkers who created 'voguing' and drag balls, and turned these raucous celebrations into a powerful expression of fierce personal pride.

Milstein says: “An absolutely perfect time capsule of the late 1980s in the NYC drag scene. The director lets the subjects explain themselves instead of trying to superimpose definitions on an underrepresented group of fascinating frolickers.”

Public Speaking
Wise, brilliant, and funny, Fran Lebowitz hit the New York literary scene in the early '70s when Andy Warhol hired the unknown scribe to write a column for Interview magazine. Today, she's an acclaimed author with legions of fans who adore her acerbic wit. Public speaking captures the author in conversation at New York's Waverly Inn, in an onstage discussion with longtime friend and celebrated writer Toni Morrison, and on the streets of New York City.

Milstein says: “The director of Goodfellas profiles NYC writer and personality Fran Lebowitz, whose machine-gun wit and opinions, like the wiseguys, blow people's heads off. Fran talks in fast punchlines and her New York story is inter-spliced by an abundance of footage recounting the post-war legacy of New York artists and intellectuals, including James Baldwin debating William F. Buckley and Serge Gainsbourg's 1964 video for "New York USA."

Style Wars
Exploration of the subculture of New York's young graffiti writers and break dancers, showing their activities and aspirations and the social and aesthetic controversies surrounding New York graffiti. Dramatizes conflicts between graffiti artists and the city, as well as among the graffiti artists themselves.

Milstein says: “Another perfect time capsule. Mid ‘80s breakdancing and graffiti art all set in their natural backdrop of the NY transit system. Anyone interested in hip hop or street art should see this.”

Do you have a favorite NYC documentary? Let us know in the comments!