The contractors thought the boxes were full of pipe fittings. Instead, stacked floor to ceiling in the basement of a Sterling Place brownstone, they found 212 reel-to-reel tapes: four decades of live recordings from the Blue Door Lounge, the Nostrand Avenue jazz club that closed in 1987.

The tapes belonged to Earl "Sweets" Doran, who ran the Blue Door from 1958 until his death and apparently recorded nearly every Friday set from a booth beside the bar. His granddaughter, Renee Doran-Whitley, inherited the building but never went through the basement. "My grandfather told everyone he was taping the shows," she said. "Everyone assumed he was lying. He was not lying."

The Brooklyn Public Library will digitize the collection this fall in partnership with the Central Brooklyn Music Archive, which estimates the reels hold 600 hours of music, plus stage banter, arguments about the bar tab, and at least one marriage proposal.

Archivists have cataloged only 30 reels so far, but say the labels alone read like a lost history of the borough. One, dated March 1971, says simply: "Snowstorm. Nine people. Best night ever."