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.
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.
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.
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....
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"...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."
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!)
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
[+] [-] erikig|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
Checkout this uncropped frame: http://files.80s.nyc/photos/3/05338/0023.jpg
[+] [-] jacobush|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mapgrep|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] toyg|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghaff|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rayiner|7 years ago|reply
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....
[+] [-] whiddershins|7 years ago|reply
They buckle the sidewalk, can damage expensive water piping, and "muggers hide behind them."
Believe it or not.
[+] [-] Bucephalus355|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jrumbut|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsego|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boobsbr|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] millisecond|7 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] ehmorris|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] milemi|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wholemoley|7 years ago|reply
Ghostbusters!
[+] [-] anta40|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leblancfg|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] anoncoward111|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] DINKDINK|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dotancohen|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] infradig|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tinus_hn|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacobush|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] erikig|7 years ago|reply
"...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."
[+] [-] timonoko|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joering2|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phildougherty|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimmy1|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whiddershins|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
Also, I can't believe that McDonald's on 125th and Broadway has been there since the 80s!
[+] [-] pbnjay|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] woodruffw|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joewee|7 years ago|reply
Living in nyc in the 80’s was tough on children.
[+] [-] stevenking86|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phildougherty|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilamont|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PinkMilkshake|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ehmorris|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdpigeon|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] liveoneggs|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] olingern|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
Probably not a whole lot of value, but a damn interesting exercise!
[+] [-] xefer|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ericb|7 years ago|reply