These images are from the city’s Department of Records (by way of the Daily Mail); the city released 870,000 unseen photographs earlier this year after four years of digitizing. Anyone can search through them and, from what I’ve seen so far, they’re incredible–everything from Salignac images of painters atop the Brooklyn Bridge to crime scene documents. Some of the tax photos from the 1980s are my favorites. It always astonishes me how much grittier the city looked at what seems so recently. (I still think of the 80s as just twenty years ago, apparently trapped in a Y2K time warp.)
[Above: Astoria in the summer of 1940. Below: the view from the GW Bridge in 1936; the Third Avenue elevated train with City Hall behind, undated; and the start of construction on the Manhattan Bridge in 1908]
Do you have fun plans for the long holiday weekend? Memorial day means summer is truly here! We’re off on vacation next week, but it’s going to be my goal to finally have a travelogue up from our trip to St. Lucia while we’re away.
Have fun!
[Thanks to my friend, Marija for sending the Daily Mail article my way!]
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