Pach Brothers

Portrait collection including photographs of nationally prominent people and socially prominent New Yorkers. The Pach Brothers photographic firm was in business in New York City for over a century and a quarter. In that time, the location of its main portrait studio, following fashionable New Yorkers, migrated uptown from its start on the Bowery in the mid-1860s to upper Fifth Avenue in the mid-1960s, before closing its doors in the East 50s in the mid-1990s. Patrons included famous and ordinary Americans involved in business, politics, government, medicine, law, education, and the arts, as well as thousands of students, families and children who sat for Pach cameras from 1866 onward. Despite a devastating fire in 1895, which destroyed their New York studio and processing rooms as well as their entire negative archive, the Pach Brothers firm continued photographing for another hundred years with a second generation of Pach men behind the lens. The original Pach Brothers photographers in New York City were Gustavus (1848-1904), Gotthelf (1852-1925), and Morris (1837-?). Born in Berlin, Germany, they came to New York as babies, and began their photographic career as boys. According to their newspaper obituaries, the brothers became intrigued with the new science of photography in the mid-1860s, and traveled the streets of their New York neighborhood taking pictures of local residents. Gustavus Pach made his first appearance in the 1866-1867 New York City directory where he and Morris were listed individually as photographers working at 260 Bowery, with an additional entry for "Pach Brothers" at the same address. Morris Pach alone remained in the directory the next year with no occupation listed. Gustavus Pach's obituary provides an explanation for his own disappearance from the directory: respiratory problems resulted in his leaving for Toms River, New Jersey. The summer of 1868 found the Pach brothers in Long Branch, New Jersey, a shore town that was a favorite resort for wealthy Philadelphians such as George W. Childs and Anthony J. Drexel. There the brothers had the opportunity to make portraits of the families of Childs, Drexel and their close friend Ulysses S. Grant, who, in turn, were impressed with the brothers' photographic work and ambition. Grant, Childs, and Drexel pooled funds to underwrite the Pach brothers' first photographic studio there, which was built at Long Branch on the grounds of the United States Hotel, as well as their mobile horse-drawn darkroom. While Morris Pach stayed in New Jersey working as a cigar maker, Gustavus Pach returned to New York in time to be listed in the 1871-1872 city directory in a studio at 858 Broadway. He changed addresses twice before settling in at 841 Broadway in 1877, where he remained in business through 1890. In the 1881-1882 directory, a listing appears for the first time for G.W. Pach & Brothers; the next year the brothers are also individually listed. A fourth Pach brother, Oscar (1850-1903) was the business manager for the firm; he immigrated to the United States in 1873 and worked with his brothers until his death. A full listing of Pach Brothers studios in New York follows this biographical note. A series of chronologically arranged pictures of the buildings that housed the Pach studios are filed in Series III. In each of those photographs, the Pach business is represented to varying degrees: a 1905 image of the 935 Broadway address is really a fine, dramatic portrait of the iconic Flatiron Building, to the left of which can be seen a relatively tiny Pach Brothers trade sign. In addition, from the 1870s Pach Brothers operated studios (perhaps just seasonally) in college towns, where they specialized in photographing generations of athletes and student groups at Princeton, Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Vassar, and West Point; all processing and finishing work was done in New York. The firm also did record photography for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and, for many years