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A collection concerned with the various phases of black life in America, containing clippings, pamphlets, photographs, pictures, extracts from periodicals, and a representative group of approximately 350 letters, signatures, manuscripts, and documents. Among the letters are several each from Countee Cullen, Frederick Douglass, Alexander Dumas, fils, William Lloyd Garrison, Claude McKay, Abraham Lincoln, Henry Mencken, William Pickens, Albert A. Smith, and Booker T. Washington. Also, eighteen slavery documents.

The materials that comprise the Vertical File have been collected and added to from a variety of sources by former Avery Librarians. The vertical file contains clippings, pamphlets, reprints, and other miscellaneous materials relating to persons, places, organizations, and topical subjects relating to architecture, housing, and city planning. The purpose of the vertical file was to arrange and store small items, memorabilia, and ephemeral material on a variety of topics to facilitate access by researchers. For the most part, the vertical file contains printed items only. Manuscript material and other unique items were, generally, not placed in the vertical file. In some cases, manuscript material has been removed from the Vertical File and placed in its corresponding collection.

This collection is photograph archive of the works of architectural photographer George Cserna. Images include interior and exterior shots of prominent New York buildings primarily during the 1960s. The collection has been arranged alphabetically by the client or architect of the building. Some of George Cserna's most notable work in this collection includes photographs of Ulrich Franzen's Agronomy Building, Emerson Hall, and Goddard Library at Cornell University; Haines, Lundberg, and Waehler's U.S. Trust Building and Schering-Plough Headquarters; Victor Lundy's I. Miller Store and IBM Headquarters; and I. M. Pei's John Hancock Tower, Mount Royal Bank and Ville Marie Complex, and MIT Chemistry Building. The collection also contains photographs of exhibitions and openings at the Museum of Modern Art in the 1960s and 1970s, such as The Responsive Eye and Toward a Rational Automobile. Finally, the collection has photographic portraits of notable persons including John dos Passos, W.H. Auden, and William Faulkner.

The career, philanthropic, political, and personal aspects of Charles Richard Crane's life were closely intertwined. Among the correspondence of significance in the papers are letters to and from James Francis Abbott, Kathryn Newell Adams, Jane Addams, Edmund Henry Hynman Allenby, Edvard Benes, Boris III, King of Bulgaria, Louis Dembitz Brandeis, Nicholas Murray Butler, Frances F. Cleveland, Grover Cleveland, Archibald Gary Coolidge, Calvin Coolidge, John Dewey, Charles William Elliot, Hamlin Garland, William Rainey Harper, Jean-Jules Jusserand, William Lyon Mackenzie King, Alexander Kuprin, Robert Marion LaFollette, Seth Low, William Gibbs McAdoo, Jan Masaryk, Tomas Masaryk, Pavel Miliukov, John Pierpont Morgan, Alphonse Maria Mucha, Fridtjof Nansen, George Haven Putnam, John Davison Rockefeller Jr., Theodore Roosevelt, Upton Beall Sinclair, William Howard Taft, Lillian D. Wald, Herbert George Wells, Edith B. Wilson, Woodrow Wilson and other.

This collection primarily contains materials related to Percy and Harold Uris and their real estate businesses. Correspondence, financial records, and estate papers document the professional and personal lives of the brothers and their wives. The bulk of the business records are from their properties at 380 Madison Avenue and 300 Park Avenue. There is limited information about the other Uris properties and Uris Building Corporation. Finally, the collection contains records from the Uris Brothers Foundation, Inc about the family's philanthropic endeavors.