“This is it,” Jeff Roth said as he flung open the door.

Three levels below ground, in a nondescript building beside The New York Times’s headquarters — and hardly a stone’s throw from Times Square, one of the most frenetic intersections on the planet — lies an unexpected and strangely quiet repository.

Quiet, that is, aside from the periodic rumble of the No. 7 subway line.

Mr. Roth is the caretaker of The Times’s “morgue,” a vast and eclectic archive that houses the paper’s historical news clippings and photographic prints, along with its large book and periodicals library, microfilm records and other archival material — federal directories, magazine collections and a variety of indexes.

Almost everything is stored in ageless steel filing cabinets — several thousand drawers’ worth — and in sturdy cardboard bankers boxes. An assortment of bookshelves lines some of the walls.

“They don’t make filing cabinets like this anymore,” Mr. Roth said, tapping one as he passed it. “Heck, they don’t even make steel like this anymore.”