We choose an ordinary doorway, find a name in the records, and follow what can be verified.
No Fiction. No Hype. Just What We Find.
The project
Every doorway has a story, even if nobody thought to write it down. The Doorway Files takes one ordinary address at a time and follows the evidence wherever it leads — through census records, directories, newspapers, archives, photographs and forgotten documents — until a name becomes a person and fragments become a story.
No famous residents required. No extraordinary history expected. Just real doors, real names and whatever the records still remember about the people who once walked through them.
Latest files
FELLS POINT, BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
Baltimore, Maryland
A narrow wooden house. A shoemaker. A ship carpenter. A dressmaker. And two women associated with the cigar trade from the same doorway, more than a decade apart.
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DUBLIN, IRELAND
36 Fitzwilliam Square West, Dublin, Ireland
A single line in Ireland’s 1926 census led from a Georgian doorway to Mainie Jellett—the artist who helped force modernism into the Irish conversation.
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OpenGREENPOINT, BROOKLYN, NEW YORK
Greenpoint, Brooklyn, New York
A nineteenth-century brick house, a family of seven, two additional women in the household — and one directory entry that still resists explanation.
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“No fiction. No hype. Just what we find.”
Method
We start with a photograph and an address. An ordinary doorway as it stands today — sometimes photographed by us, sometimes discovered from afar — with no idea who we might find behind it.
National archives, census returns, city directories, cadastral records, newspapers and photographic archives. Every record that ties a name to a doorway, followed one clue at a time, until the people behind it come into focus.
We share what we uncover — the names, photographs, documents and human connections — written as a file that brings forgotten lives back to the doorway, while clearly separating what we know from what remains unknown.
THE MAILING LIST
New Doorway Files, discoveries from ongoing investigations, and stories pulled from the surviving record — sent when there is something worth sharing.
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