Eugene L. Armbruster

Armbruster was born in Baden-Baden, Germany in 1865 and immigrated to the United States in 1882. He was naturalized as a United States citizen in 1891. He owned a house on Eldert Street in Bushwick, where he lived with his wife Julia, and their two children Julia and Eugene Jr. He was a proprietor of the H. Henkel Cigar Box Manufacturing Company until his retirement in 1920. While Armbruster did photography and historical writing throughout his life, he conducted much of this work after he retired. Armbruster took thousands of photographs of Long Island throughout his life. His purpose for taking these photographs was documentary and he was not necessarily concerned with the aesthetic quality. Armbruster often worked as his own publisher and published many limited edition pamphlets. In the 1930s Armbruster served on a Work Progress Administration project collecting information for a local history project.

Substantial holdings of Armbruster's photographic prints and negatives, and scrapbooks can be found at the following cultural institutions: Queens Library, New-York Historical Society, Brooklyn Historical Society, and New York Public Library. His photographs were identified and described by Vincent Seyfried for Queens Library. According to the library's finding aid, Armbruster photographed areas in Kings County, New York, from approximately 1895 to 1936; Manhattan from 1920 to 1925; Nassau County, New York, from 1917 to 1925; Queens County, New York, from 1910 to 1931; Rikers Island in 1931; and Suffolk County, New York, from 1910 to 1934. The Queens Library collection divides their 6.950 photographs into eight series by county, plus "miscellaneous 1920–1925" and "unknown 1910–1925".