
Street View of 1980s New York - dested
http://80s.nyc/#show/40.6218/-73.9900
======
erikig
For anyone that was as curious as I was:

WHERE DO THESE PHOTOS COME FROM?

During the mid-1980s, the City of New York photographed every property in the
five boroughs. The project had a bureaucratic origin: the photos were used by
the Department of Finance to estimate real property values for taxation
purposes. Buildings as well as vacant lots were photographed because both are
taxed. Because it was difficult to distinguish while shooting between taxable
and tax-exempt buildings, like religious institutions or government offices,
the photographers just shot everything. The result is a remarkable body of
imagery – over 800,000 color 35mm photos in both negative and print formats.

~~~
acuozzo
Unfortunately what's presented here was taken from NTSC video; likely U-matic
tape.

Checkout this uncropped frame:
[http://files.80s.nyc/photos/3/05338/0023.jpg](http://files.80s.nyc/photos/3/05338/0023.jpg)

~~~
CydeWeys
How does this work exactly? Did they have some kind of device that allowed
them to record a single frame to video tape at a time?

~~~
erikig
Actually from the site it looks like the digitized copies were saved as - get
this - LaserDisc! Kudos to NYC, they decided to go full-on 80's mode for sure.

~~~
acuozzo
The final storage medium was LD, but these images were definitely stored and
edited on a tape format prior to LD mastering.

~~~
ch4ck
LD video is analog format anyway.

~~~
acuozzo
Indeed it is, but each frame presented here shows distortion consistent with
being stored on a tape format at some point in time, definitely prior to LD
mastering.

------
mapgrep
Incredible. I pulled up my neighborhood, a vibrant lovely neighborhood in
Brooklyn. I moved here when I arrived in NYC four years ago.

The first thing I notice is all the trees are not there in the 1980s. Amazing
how much more bleak things are without the big leafy trees. The building where
I live now is boarded up and much shorter (three stories were added c.2003 for
housing and the retail levels were renovated). The avenue where I do most of
my shopping, filled with restaurants and cafes and pocket gyms and salons and
bars and real estate offices and corner stores, is just desolate. There is a
church and a butcher and a salon but there are also lots of empty storefronts
and whole vacant multi-story buildings with windows boarded up or just
missing.

What's interesting is most of the structures have not changed. They are lovely
old buildings now, as they were in the 1980s. But the context could not be
more different. Today they are full — the buildings full of tenants and
businesses, the streets full of shoppers and locals, bikes and buses and cars.
The neighborhood in the pictures looks so much more stark and empty.

~~~
grouseway
Some of the bleakest and surprising photography I have ever seen has been
Jacob Holdt's photo of the American underclass in the 80s. I never imagined
that a city like new york was at this level of decay. It gives me hope that we
can always turn these kinds of conditions around. I don't know who deserves
the credit in the case of NY.

[http://www.american-
pictures.com/gallery/usa/pages/usa-00524...](http://www.american-
pictures.com/gallery/usa/pages/usa-00524.htm)

Note: Some of these images are NSFW.

That link contains photos from various states - I'm not sure how to link to
just the NY/NJ albums.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
Poor people don't use wood stoves as much anymore. A lot of the more rural
areas look about the same. The cars are 30yr newer but still 30yr old.

The captions remind me all the stories you accumulate when you hang around
with poor people that are completely unbelievable and unrelatable to more well
off people.

A lot of this has to be earlier than the 80s. There's a lot of pictures of
blacks with guns in public and semi-public places sprinkled in there. After
they passed all sorts of gun control nobody was gonna stand around and let a
white man, from Denmark or not, take pictures of them with their piece.
There's a lot of pictures that look like they might be from late 60s anti-war
protests as well.

I think the photographer didn't like the cold. None of his pictures are in
poor areas in northern states in the winter.

Edit: I think most of these pics are late 60s to early 70s but some definitely
go up to the late 80s and early 90s

------
Bucephalus355
Apparently VHS came out with an HD format in the early 1990’s.

Here’s a sample clip from 1993 of NYC: [https://youtu.be/fT4lDU-
QLUY](https://youtu.be/fT4lDU-QLUY)

It’s amazing. It so...looks like today, but it’s not. I don’t know how to
describe the realness of image quality that looks like it was filmed earlier
this afternoon but is in fact over 20 years ago. Unsettling yet beautiful.

~~~
jrumbut
Thanks for sharing this, it's very uncanny to watch, brings back memories of
seeing the world when it actually looked this way.

------
millisecond
This looks to be a much better interface to a data set the city has and makes
available but with a horrible UI.

There's also a 1940's dataset that isn't available online but you can order
prints. Got a 1940's one yesterday for my new place and has a kid looking out
the neighbor's window. Crazy to think what's transpired out that window in the
intervening time.

Would love to see the 1940's one online and wrapped up in street view!

~~~
milemi
Can you please share how you ordered it?

~~~
vesinisa
> The Archives will be digitizing the 1940s photos in 2018. You can buy high-
> quality prints of the 1940s and 1980s photos via the "Order Online" link on
> the Municipal Archives website.

[https://www1.nyc.gov/dorforms/photoform.htm](https://www1.nyc.gov/dorforms/photoform.htm)

~~~
toomuchtodo
I wonder if I could FOIA the archives and get the digital corpus into the
Internet Archive.

------
wholemoley
[http://files.80s.nyc/photos/1/00189/0035.jpg](http://files.80s.nyc/photos/1/00189/0035.jpg)

Ghostbusters!

~~~
anta40
Whoa!

------
leblancfg
I know they aren't photo spheres, but I wonder how hard it would be to patch
all these locations into 360 images and plug them into a custom Google Street
View.

[https://maps.googleblog.com/2013/12/create-your-own-
street-v...](https://maps.googleblog.com/2013/12/create-your-own-street-
view.html)

Extrapolating a bit further, I would really want to play the next GTA
installment in 80s New York... you'se guys.

~~~
anoncoward111
GTA 3 was basically late 80s/early 90s mafioso themed, but I think they were
talking more about Philly than Nyc.

I too think it would be really cool to map everything directly to how the city
is in the real world. Think of all the shady shit happening in Canarsie and
Hoboken XD

------
40acres
I grew up in Brooklyn in the late 90s, early 2000s. It wasn't the safest
neighborhood in the 90s but over time crime dropped significantly. Our
neighborhood had/has a huge West Indian population. Growing up I rarely saw
white people in the neighborhood. The only other race was Asian folks who
owned restaurants and other businesses nearby on Flatbush Ave.

I moved from NYC in 2013 and every time I go back I'm amazed at how much the
neighborhood has changed. There is a million dollar condo down the block from
my childhood apartment with an art gallery in the bottom floor, an art
gallery!

It's good to see the neighborhood grow but its disheartening to see how many
people have been pushed out. I have family members who are in rent controlled
apartments and developers / landlords are doing everything in their power to
kick them out. My mom's apartment needs frequent repair which the landlord
drags his feet on but just down the hall there is a yuppie with a newly
renovated apartment (and the rental bill to show for it). NY has changed so
much.

------
DINKDINK
Photos of the birthplace of hiphop:
[http://80s.nyc/#show/40.8340/-73.8763](http://80s.nyc/#show/40.8340/-73.8763)

------
dotancohen
Warning: Opening the link freezes up my machine reproducibility. I need to
hard reset.

I believe that the problem is swapping as I see the disk light on. This is on
an eight-core i7 Dell Latitude with 8 GiB RAM, using Firefox 62.0 on Kubuntu
18.04.

~~~
tinus_hn
If a website crashes your computer, your browser is broken.

~~~
dotancohen
I agree.

Considering that Firefox 62.x seems to be a popular web browser I thought it
prudent to warn others before they open the site.

------
jacobush
Am I going crazy or do these images look like NTSC video?

They are very low resolution, but it's not only that I don't think - there's
something more done to them... like being sent through some kind of baroque
video signal chain.

~~~
acuozzo
It's definitely sourced from NTSC video. Checkout:
[http://files.80s.nyc/photos/3/05338/0023.jpg](http://files.80s.nyc/photos/3/05338/0023.jpg)

We've got crosstalk typical of NTSC video being passed through a 2D adaptive
comb filter during decoding: cross-chrominance and cross-luminance are both
visible in this sample.

Based on the appearance I'm assuming these images were stored sequentially on
U-matic tape.

If they had chosen to repeat each image twice they would have enabled perfect
3D comb filtering (SNR issues aside). Unfortunately, they didn't.

~~~
DINKDINK
Where Can I learn more about cross-chrominance and cross-luminance?

~~~
LeoPanthera
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composite_video#Demodulation_l...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composite_video#Demodulation_loss)

------
timonoko
I bicycled there in winter of 1988 with dynamo-powered video camera.
[https://youtu.be/8D-S8nYCwjA?t=4m28s](https://youtu.be/8D-S8nYCwjA?t=4m28s)

------
joering2
Its very interesting to see the city change so much through the year. Lived in
NYC for so many years, they will never stop rebuilding it. You think
skyscrapers on 7th Avenue will be there 70 years from now? Once a new stronger
materials will be invented with technology of faster elevators, these sky
scrapers will be rebuild from new, most likely reaching 3x of current heights.
So if you happen to be alive in 2099, check 2018s.nyc to see how New York City
looked "before" :)

~~~
jimmy1
Whats remarkable to me is how this stands in contrast to some historical
European cities like in Greece, Italy and Spain where some of the buildings
and cities have remained essentially the same for hundreds of years! (In many
cases, longer than America has been a country!)

~~~
roywiggins
And in other parts of Europe, entire cities were razed during WWII and rebuilt
more or less from scratch.

------
whiddershins
I believe there is something awry here.

I lived in Brooklyn in the 80s.

Most of these buildings had (and have) bars on the windows.

I am not seeing the window bars in these photos.

Unless there was like a year, say, 1982, when all the bars were nearly
simultaneously put on, and these pictures were taken directly before that ...
something is fishy.

------
electricslpnsld
Why are there no shots of Columbia? The rest of Mo Heights looks exactly the
same as it did in the 80s, though (I think the building I lived in a couple
years ago still had the same scaffolding up, ha).

Also, I can't believe that McDonald's on 125th and Broadway has been there
since the 80s!

~~~
pbnjay
They're from tax records, so non-profits didn't need to be recorded. In some
cases the Churches and other were photographed "just because" but Columbia is
big enough I'm sure they skipped it on purpose.

------
joewee
People always wonder why I’m reluctant to talk about what it was like growing
up as a poor kid in nyc. Now I can tell them to take a walk down the same
street I lived on, when I was a kid, and tell me if this is something you
would want to chit chat about...
[http://80s.nyc/#show/40.6931/-73.9412](http://80s.nyc/#show/40.6931/-73.9412)
these empty lots often contained dead animals and people.

Living in nyc in the 80’s was tough on children.

------
stevenking86
Good ol' CBGB,
[http://80s.nyc/#show/40.7250/-73.9919](http://80s.nyc/#show/40.7250/-73.9919)

~~~
phildougherty
managed to get a broken nose there my first week in NYC. way to go me. cool to
see some good shows there before it became condos.

------
ilamont
This is really amazing. Did any other cities do this in the 20th century as a
way to assess properties or keep a record of construction within a
municipality?

~~~
PinkMilkshake
In 1943 a large chunk of Sydney, Australia was photographed from the sky. It's
now available on the NSW Government website here:
[http://maps.six.nsw.gov.au/](http://maps.six.nsw.gov.au/) You can flick
between the aerial photography and the modern satellite imagery, or overlay
the maps and fade between them. Fantastic stuff.

------
jdpigeon
Wow, Williamsburg was _bleak_ back then.

~~~
liveoneggs
navigate up to the bronx

------
olingern
I lived in NYC for five years, and got to know the city quite well by bike.

Things I noticed:

\- Brooklyn has undergone an incredible amount of change

\- 14th & 6th midtown area maintains a lot of its image

\- The amount of change on the west side is uncanny. The Hudson Yards etc.

\- Save the Pearl st. area, the financial district still looks like it did

------
canada_dry
Be a helluva undertaking, but I imagine there exists overhead photos of New
York during the same period which could - with current tech - recreate a
pretty effective 3D street view where the missing bits are extrapolated.

Probably not a whole lot of value, but a damn interesting exercise!

~~~
xefer
The USGS has historical high resolution aerial photographs for large portions
of the country, some places going back to the 1930s:

[https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/](https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/)

The interface is really clunky but some of the data is amazing.

On the first tab on the right, select "Search Criteria", select "Coordinates"
which allows you to put the points of a polygon on the map.

Next, select the "Data Sets" tab. Select "Aerial Photography | "Aerial Photo
Single Frames"

The "Results". If there are any, thumbnails show up. You can then download the
actual images which can be huge.

Once you get used to the interface, you can narrow the results down by date,
etc.

------
ChrisArchitect
[2017] comments from a year ago
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15332171](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15332171)

------
JaggerFoo
Or you can watch old episodes of Kojak for a late 70's perspective.

But a nice undertaking.

Cheers

------
gwbas1c
I just see all black... Anyone else have the same problem?

~~~
bdon
Dev here, what browser are you on?

~~~
gwbas1c
Chrome / Mac. It worked okay on my other computer, also Chrome / Mac.

------
agumonkey
Feels weird about the amount of data and nostalgia today.

------
lanius
Very cool! Is there anything similar for other cities?

------
phildougherty
just had a lot of fun with this. thanks for making it.

