Angelo Rizzuto

[1][2]: 24 After drifting around the country, working odd jobs, and enlisting and being medically discharged from the military, he settled in Manhattan where he called himself Anthony Angel.

[1] For many years he was paranoid and delusional, tormented by the belief that he was the victim of a global conspiracy of communists, perverts and Jews.

[4] He lived in Manhattan, in a brownstone which he owned on 51st Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues which he is believed to have purchased with an inheritance after his brother died.

[2]: 13 Every day at 2 p.m. between May 1952 and June 1964 (excepting January through July 1960), Rizzuto would venture out with a camera to record images for what was to be a vast encyclopedic kaleidoscope of Manhattan, a book to be called Little Old New York.

[2] The library published a book described by photographic historian Michael Lesy as "bound with staples, illustrated with perhaps 60 indifferently printed reproductions of the dead man’s pictures."

The collection contains four kinds of material: (1) Contact sheets, 1952-1964, 10×10 inches... they represent all of the images in the negatives (2) Prints for an unpublished book called “Little Old New York,” 8×10 inches—all digitized and available online (3) Booklets and typescripts, filed in a supplemental archive (4) Film negatives, 1949–1967, 35mm and 120-size in 2.25 x 3.25 inches—preserved in cold storage"[3] The Library has encountered issues processing the collection because much of the material went undescribed by Rizzuto during his lifetime.