Street View of 1980s New York | Hacker News Reader

Street View of 1980s New York

80s.nyc

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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.

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

Speaking as somebody who knows nothing about this tech, I'm curious as to the significance of this!

Does this mean somebody has taken the photos and transferred them to tape, and that is what we're seeing here?

If this _was_ done for archival purposes, what is the likelihood of the original negatives still surviving?

At which stage was the text box added in?

> Does this mean somebody has taken the photos and transferred them to tape, and that is what we're seeing here?

More accurately: Photograph -> Videotape -> Edited Videotape -> Laserdisc

> If this _was_ done for archival purposes, what is the likelihood of the original negatives still surviving?

I'm not sure. I hope they do! 35mm resolves to much greater than HD even on cheap/common film stock.

> At which stage was the text box added in?

Definitely once the footage was on videotape and before being stored on a second "edited" videotape since the box is partially distorted in the image I linked to above.

I remember watching a video by Techmoan or Technology Connections or LGR about a system that stored images as video frames on a video disc.

There seems to be no motion blur on that image (from shooting with portable video camera from a moving car), so maybe part of this archive was shot with said technology.

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?

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.

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

LD video is analog format anyway.

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.

Yes, probably -- before digital cameras, there were still video cameras. They used a CCD to record still video images onto magnetic media such as a video floppy disk. So a lot like a digital camera, but fully analog.

These were pretty cutting-edge tech in the mid 80's and would have made a lot of sense for a project like this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Still_video_camera

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_floppy

A fun video to learn more about the tech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G_1uy_7B5w

Oh yeah, plenty of cameras had a "photo" button, that recorded a single frame to like 2 seconds of VHS tape. You could put the tape into a reader, and project or print the photos later.

I'm not 100% sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if they hacked a telecine.

How do you think video works?

Still better than nothing

Agreed!

Negative is print format.

If you're going to be pointlessly pedantic, at least be correct.

OMG - negative is the format for making prints. And the prints are hardly 35mm, are they? Maybe I was too brief, and I was pedantic, but not pointlessly so.

Some points -

- as it was formulated, you could have assumed they meant positive and negative film

- you make prints from negative film

- plot twist - those images don't reflect the resolution of 35mm at all, or even small prints made from 35mm film. So the text says there are 800 000 35mm film images - but what we see are 800 000 NTSC video stills. Quite the difference.

That's because the digitized images (at minimum, the majority) aren't from the original film. Around 1989, the Municipal Archives Collection started archiving the most recent images on LaserDisc. That process was clearly destructive (to the 'archived' copy; not the original); given that the landscape photos fill the frame, they were clearly cropped. When the MAC went to digitize the images, they "extracted low-resolution tiffs of each frame from the LVDs for viewing in the gallery."[0] Others at that link appear to have been pulled from the original film. Hopefully, that means all of the originals were preserved for future scanning.

Anyhow, according to a separate source quoting a NYC Tax Photos page that's no longer available,[1] the used 35mm film when they originally shot every building in the five boroughs between 1939 and 1941 (~ 720,000 black-and-white 35mm negatives) and when they later updated the photos between 1983 and 1988 (~800,000 negatives and prints). Starting ~1989, they then archived those latest photos on LaserDisc. Presumably because they'd be easier for tax assessors to work with.

The 1939-1941 collection was shot on black-and-white negative film. For the 1983-1988 photos, all of the sources I've found state that they were "in both print and negative formats." Which may or may not be helpful, as it's not uncommon for people to sometimes positive/slide film as "negatives" even though it's...wrong. You'd probably have to contact the archive to verify that.

Given the use case--a massive archive of images that can be quickly referenced by tax assessors--I find that odd if not unlikely. For that kind of massive volume, slides are easier to work with (toss a bunch on a giant light box) and take up much less storage space. Most importantly, slide film was--I believe--generally cheaper to buy and process in the 80s, not to mention it let you skip having to get prints made altogether.

Aside from the DOF tax photos, the MAC has a massive number of other photos and documents online. Assuming you don't die of boredom waiting for the pages to load, it's fascinating.[2]

0. https://robincamille.com/2016-08-09-the-municipal-archives-t...

1. https://macaulay.cuny.edu/eportfolios/napoli13/2013/03/12/ta...

2. http://nycma.lunaimaging.com/luna/servlet/NYCMA~4~4

Wow, thank you so much!

I have an interest in this from several points of view. I like photography, in particular on film, I have a modest Laserdisc collection and I am interested in the history of that format. Presumably the images are in "CAV" format, which means they would be perfect still images on a TV set and also searchable by index. IIRC 9999 images could be searched on a single Laserdisc. (But maybe more, certainly the format is capable of holding many more images per side, IIRC 50 000 images per side, but maybe not in individual indexes.)

Also the Laserdisc existed in a write once, read many format - rather similar to CDR technology, but of course analog and very expensive by today's standards. I imagine that is what they used, although they could have ordered a limited pressing run, but that would have been incredibly expensive if they didn't need many copies of the discs.

Fascinating links.

Watching the quality of your replies improve in this thread is exactly why I love reading the comments on HN. This is a prime example of an effective community.

Watching someone write a well researched and thought out answer to a, let's face it, sketchy (as well as downvoted) comment is another reason to love HN. :)

No, the negative is the photographic film itself, not a print developed from said film. In some cases they lost the film over time and only have prints developed from it remaining.

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.

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...

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.

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

And still, that NY spawned hip-hop, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, the Ramones, Talking Heads, and more incredible movies than I can list... in many ways, it probably was a more “desperately creative” place than its modern gentrified self. Orson Welles said it better with his comparison of Swiss and Italian histories and their consequences.

I lived in Manhattan briefly in the mid-eighties and have been a regular visitor over the years. I think the first time I properly set foot in Brooklyn (I walked on the Brooklyn Bridge a few years prior) was less than a decade ago. Simply never occurred to me there was a reason to.

To quote KRS-One in 1987, "Manhattan keeps on making it, Brooklyn keeps on taking it."

Thank Wall Street, Rudy Giuliani, and gentrification. While the pictures from the 1980s seem desolate, the population of Brooklyn was not that much less in the mid 1980s when these pictures were taken: https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=ScGoR6.... There were people there, they were just too poor to support a robust ecosystem of gyms, cafes, and restaurants. The growth of finance and its satellite industries provided the money to support satellite businesses like restaurants and cafes. Meanwhile, in the mid-1980s, the city was overrun with crime. In 1985, there was a mob hit at 5:30 pm on 46th and 3rd in Midtown, outside a popular steakhouse. The area looks like this today: https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=ScGoR6.... Guiliani's aggressive prosecution efforts decimated the mob in the city.

That's the unfortunate mechanics of a society where there has been no income growth for the bottom half in decades. If a place was sketchy before and now it's nice, it's because yuppies moved in and pushed the previous residents out. In Brooklyn the percentage of low-income residents plummeted from 45% to 15%, while the percentage of upper-income residents jumped from 5% to 25%: https://www.nytimes.com/1982/09/20/nyregion/census-traces-ra....

But where did the poor people end up? Has New Jersey and other surrounding areas seen an increase in people under harsh conditions?

Old school Brooklynites were often VERY anti-tree.

They buckle the sidewalk, can damage expensive water piping, and "muggers hide behind them."

Believe it or not.

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

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.

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

Discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16085603

The quality is amazing. It's better than a ton of HD devices that came out in the 2000's, and even some from the 2010's.

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!

If you’re in NYC you can also go to the municipal building to view these photos

Can you please share how you ordered it?

> 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

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

http://files.80s.nyc/photos/1/00189/0035.jpg

Ghostbusters!

Whoa!

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...

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

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

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.

Photos of the birthplace of hiphop: http://80s.nyc/#show/40.8340/-73.8763

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.

My 4GB Celery box with Ubuntu/Gnome+Chrome runs it, but slowly.

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

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.

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.

It's definitely sourced from NTSC video. Checkout: 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.

In a comment below it is stated that they were archived on Laserdisc. I can imagine the images were written to a tape master first, then the tape used to write the (probably write-once) Laserdiscs.

The tape could have been U-matic, but maybe it was digital video tape, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-2_(video) which was released in 1989. If so, the whole project would have been at the very bleeding edge technology wise.

In addition to NTSC artifacts each frame shows a very distinct kind of distortion consistent with storage on an analog videotape medium. D-2 doesn't introduce this kind of distortion.

Cool, thanks.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composite_video#Demodulation_l...

http://www.cockam.com/vidcomb.htm

Yep, NTSC + Laserdisc. From the site:

"...Because the Department of Finance originally recorded each 1980s print as one frame on Laser Video Disks (LVDs), using analog video capture, the low-resolution images were able to be extracted for the Municipal Archives online gallery."

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

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" :)

Interesting to see where things head for sure. It's also very impactful to me to realize that some of the most iconic things in NYC have already surpassed the 70 year mark or much more (empire state building, BK bridge, statue of liberty, city hall, grand central, countless others). Makes me excited about how much longer structures can exist utilizing the tactics we have learned as humans.

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!)

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

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.

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!

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.

I'm amazed that that McDonald's is still there. I guess the taxis are keeping it alive.

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 these empty lots often contained dead animals and people.

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

Good ol' CBGB, http://80s.nyc/#show/40.7250/-73.9919

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.

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?

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/ You can flick between the aerial photography and the modern satellite imagery, or overlay the maps and fade between them. Fantastic stuff.

Not as high fidelity as a photo, but the Sanborn fire insurance maps are a great record of many US cities and towns, and how they changed throughout the late 19th and early/mid 20th century.

Wow, Williamsburg was bleak back then.

navigate up to the bronx

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

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!

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/

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.

What is the name of the tech used to do this. Also, what is the name of the tech (or open source implementations) that makes data like this explorable with drill-down? I'm looking into projects like this.

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

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

But a nice undertaking.

Cheers

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

Dev here, what browser are you on?

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

Same. I just refresh it and it's fixed.

Feels weird about the amount of data and nostalgia today.

Very cool! Is there anything similar for other cities?

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

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