Daily Archives: 04/24/2012

Eugene de Salignac, Dept. of Bridges, NYC Municipal Archives via AP

If you’re a history buff or a NYC’ophile get ready to start pinching yourself. The Department of Archives announced today that they are launching a digital collection of city photographs containing nearly 900,000 photos of New York City some photos as old as the mid-1800′s.

This is a result of a 4-year project where the New York City Municipal Archives combed over 2 million photographs, digitizing a good number of them for public access.

Eugene de Salignac, Dept. of Bridges, NYC Municipal Archives via AP

According to the Associated Press:

The gallery includes images from the largest collection of criminal justice evidence in the English-speaking world, a repository that holds glass-plate photographs taken by the New York City Police Department.

It also features more than 800,000 color photographs taken with 35mm cameras of every city building in the mid-1980s to update the municipal records, and includes more than 1,300 rarely seen images taken by local photographers of the Depression-era Works Progress Administration.

Most of the photos were taken by anonymous municipal workers and until today were available for viewing only by going down the archive offices in Lower Manhattan.

Because of overwhelming demand at the moment, the website is having some technical difficulty, but eventually you will be able to view this amazing offering here. 

Borough President Manhattan, NYC Municipal Archives via AP

[via Associated Press]