Every Building on Every Block: A Time Capsule of 1930s New York | Hacker News Reader

Every Building on Every Block: A Time Capsule of 1930s New York

nytimes.com

83 pointspseudolus13 comments

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.

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

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...

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.

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.

The Plaza Hotel was designed a protected landmark by the city in 1969, which probably helped. (The original report by the Landmarks Preservation Commission on the reasons for protecting the Plaza can be read here: http://s-media.nyc.gov/agencies/lpc/lp/0265.pdf)

Yes, my home was built in the XII century (I’m from Europe).

Anyone who enjoys this may also enjoy 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

Backstory on the NYT photo archive's digitization: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/h...

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

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?

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

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

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