
Every Building on Every Block: A Time Capsule of 1930s New York - pseudolus
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/28/nyregion/nyc-property-tax-photos.html
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mc32
You know what’s nice about these pictures? The near absence of brands --from
franchise restaurants to clothing. It’s refreshing. There are some like Canada
Dry, but it's sparse.

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quartz
It's a bit buried in the article, but here's the link to the complete and
searchable digital archives:
[http://nycma.lunaimaging.com/luna/servlet](http://nycma.lunaimaging.com/luna/servlet)

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pseudolus
Apparently an archive (color) for Manhattan taken in the 1980s also exists
[0]. For those who are interested, you can purchase prints from the archives
of individual buildings in either 8" x 10" or 11" x 14" size. Expensive but a
nice complement to family genealogy for those with NYC roots.

[0]:
[http://nycma.lunaimaging.com/luna/servlet/RECORDSPHOTOUNITMA...](http://nycma.lunaimaging.com/luna/servlet/RECORDSPHOTOUNITMAN~2~2)

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jurassicfoxy
I find it amazing that buildings (specifically the last one, the hotel) can be
maintained in essentially the same state for over 100 years. I guess to a
European this is normal but it feels like here in North America old things are
much more rare.

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petard
Would love to see stats on building lifetimes across cohorts, e.g. do
buildings from 80s, 90s etc have similar life span or are they demolished
sooner.

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akanet
Anyone who enjoys this may also enjoy [http://80s.nyc](http://80s.nyc) \- an
interactive map-based version of photography of NYC from the 80s made by the
talented Brandon Liu. You can peek into how he used ML to filter out duplicate
photography, too!
[https://twitter.com/bdon/status/1044760314804224000](https://twitter.com/bdon/status/1044760314804224000)

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walterbell
Backstory on the NYT photo archive's digitization:
[https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-
learning/h...](https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/how-
the-new-york-times-is-using-google-cloud-to-find-untold-stories-in-millions-
of-archived-photos)

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Spooky23
It’s sad how ugly my old neighborhood in Queens became over the years when you
compare the 1930s to the 1980s to today.

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new_guy
This is amazing, thanks for sharing!

We have Google street view now, but I think one of the charms of photos like
this is you can actually see peoples faces and styles of dress etc.

We're (rightly) very privacy conscious now but in 100 years will people be
missing out because we cover up all the faces?

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jonas21
Google presumably has the original, unblurred images. After enough time has
passed, it might be acceptable to release them.

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Simulacra
WOW. THANK YOU. This is so unbelievably helpful for my research.

