Through the spring and summer, NY1 will be taking a look-back in time throughout the five boroughs, by utilizing the vast historical archives of the Museum of the City of New York. NY1's Arts reporter Stephanie Simon filed the following report.

In an austere building on Fifth Avenue at the north end of Manhattan's Museum Mile sits the Museum of the City of New York. The nearly 90-year-old museum is charged with chronicling the city's history.

While it mounts 8 to 10 exhibits a year, the museum's collection of 1.6 million items, including a treasure trove of prints, photographs and books, are largely unseen. Now, over the next five months, NY1 will be partnering with the museum to bring some of these artifacts to the light of day.

"This collaboration will make it possible for the public to see photographs and prints from our collection that have never really been seen before," says MCNY President and Director Susan Henshaw Jones.

Starting on April 12, NY1 will spend a week unearthing some classic shots of Staten Island, and for a selected week in the each of the following months, the station, in partnership with the Museum of the City of New York will take viewers back in time in each of the five boroughs.

Currently, one of the museum's exhibits displays the works of cartoonist Charles Addams, whose dark, sardonic humor was coopted for TV and has now inspired a Broadway musical. It just might have Addams rolling over in his grave -- in a good way, of course.

"What we present are cartoons that really use New York as a character in the cartoon and people come and laugh and they smile. It's just a wonderful show," says Jones.

Also on display in the museum is a show that might be more synonymous with Detroit.

"Right now we have a show called 'Cars, Culture And The City,' and it's [about the] completely unknown but very important role that New York played in the early manufacture of cars, in our five boroughs, and later on in the ways cars were marketed to America," says Jones.

While time and space limit what the museum can present annually, benefactors have been funding the institution to enable archivists and curators to digitize and categorize some its expansive
photo collections.

"In eight months, we have digitized 43,000 photographs in very high detail in resolution, so we're making really good progress in it," says Ken Allen of Ken Allen Digital. "The digitization process is actually easier than applying all the meta-data so that people can find all of these photographs."

Museum officials hope to have thousands of photos of New York City never seen by the public available on its website sometime this summer.