The files in this repository are derived from the New York City Directories held by the New York Public Library collections.
For more on what's coming here, see "New York Public Library Digitizes 137 Years of New York City Directories" by Philip Sutton.
Currently, the NYPL Digital Collections interface does not support full-text search of these directories, or the ability to offer downloads of entire volumes as PDFs. See below for links to searchable PDF files for each of the digitized City Directory volumes until such time as these derivatives can be incorporated into the Digital Collections platform.
Meanwhile, the raw OCR text extracted from the PDFs is also available for each volume as a txt file.
N.B. The files below can be very large, ranging from 4MB to nearly 4GB. The volumes in both PDF and txt are listed below along with their file sizes to help you know what you're getting before you click. For individual pages or simple non-search browsing to get a sense of what's in the volumes, I suggest using the Digital Collections link provided in the table below for each volume.
The Brooklyn Collection, part of the Brooklyn Public Library, has published 140 volumes of city directories specific to the borough of Brooklyn. You can view and search those city directories on the Internet Archive.
All materials in this collection are in the public domain according to rights analysis by the NYPL Copyright and Information Policy group. As a result, all the data and PDFs in this repo are likewise in the public domain. A CC0 license has been applied to this repo -- in the off chance that someone believes new copyright could attach to these images or the files, they are hereby released CC0 (even though they don't need to be by virtue of being public domain in the first place).