Subscribers
Philharmonic subscribers from selected seasons between 1883 and 1907: where they lived, the seats they held, and the page of the original subscription book where they appear.
About this dataset
The Philharmonic subscriber database was created by a team of sociologists led by Dr. Shamus Khan (Columbia University) and Dr. Fabien Accominotti (London School of Economics), with funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. They transcribed the Orchestra’s subscription records to study how the seats people held related to where they lived. The database covers three periods, more than 550,000 rows in all:
- 1883–1907: 24,945 seat entries from 11 subscription books, with subscribers’ names, addresses, rehearsal and concert seats, and comments.
- 1953–1980: 319,927 seat entries by series and year, with addresses and prices but no names.
- 1997: the box office’s account file, 207,033 rows with ZIP codes but no names. About 12,800 of these accounts subscribed that season, holding 31,092 seats; the rest are accounts without a subscription that year.
This page searches the 1883–1907 records: one row for each subscriber, season, and book page, with all of that subscriber’s seats together. Names are listed surname first; where the ledger spells a name differently, its spelling is shown as well. You can search names, addresses, seats, and comments.
Records from 1953 on are not searchable here, to protect the privacy of people who may still be living. All three periods are included in the downloads below.
“View book” opens the whole subscription book in the Digital Archives. Use the page and image numbers to find the entry.
Download the data
The complete database, all three periods, as CSV files as released by the research team, or the same data as JSON. The records on this page are also available as JSON (2.4 MB).