For anyone that was as curious as I was:<p>WHERE DO THESE PHOTOS COME FROM?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Apparently VHS came out with an HD format in the early 1990’s.<p>Here’s a sample clip from 1993 of NYC: <a href="https://youtu.be/fT4lDU-QLUY" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/fT4lDU-QLUY</a><p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p><a href="https://maps.googleblog.com/2013/12/create-your-own-street-view.html" rel="nofollow">https://maps.googleblog.com/2013/12/create-your-own-street-v...</a><p>Extrapolating a bit further, I would really want to play the next GTA installment in 80s New York... you'se guys.
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.<p>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!<p>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:
<a href="http://80s.nyc/#show/40.8340/-73.8763" rel="nofollow">http://80s.nyc/#show/40.8340/-73.8763</a>
Warning: Opening the link freezes up my machine reproducibility. I need to hard reset.<p>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?<p>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.
I bicycled there in winter of 1988 with dynamo-powered video camera. <a href="https://youtu.be/8D-S8nYCwjA?t=4m28s" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/8D-S8nYCwjA?t=4m28s</a>
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" :)
I believe there is something awry here.<p>I lived in Brooklyn in the 80s.<p>Most of these buildings had (and have) bars on the windows.<p>I am not seeing the window bars in these photos.<p>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).<p>Also, I can't believe that McDonald's on 125th and Broadway has been there since the 80s!
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... <a href="http://80s.nyc/#show/40.6931/-73.9412" rel="nofollow">http://80s.nyc/#show/40.6931/-73.9412</a> these empty lots often contained dead animals and people.<p>Living in nyc in the 80’s was tough on children.
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?
I lived in NYC for five years, and got to know the city quite well by bike.<p>Things I noticed:<p>- Brooklyn has undergone an incredible amount of change<p>- 14th & 6th midtown area maintains a lot of its image<p>- The amount of change on the west side is uncanny. The Hudson Yards etc.<p>- 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.<p>Probably not a whole lot of value, but a damn interesting exercise!
[2017] comments from a year ago <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15332171" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15332171</a>