What's wild to me as how little has changed. I lived on Mulberry at Canal for a long time, the builds for all intents and purposes are exactly same buildings. After that I lived on Ainslie at Lorimer in Brooklyn, again, buildings are for the most part, the same. Then I moved to Union and Ainslie, this is the only area that has changed substantially, most of the buildings at this intersection have been totally demolished to make way for new condos, but the buildings between the condos and on the smaller side streets are pretty much the same. I always knew this when I lived in New York, but looking at it this way is quite visceral.
I looked up my neighborhood and it’s literally the same. In fact, the place where a supermarket used to be is exactly where the supermarket is now.
I guess from a community perspective, the defaults for where to place the town church, market, park are pretty easy to figure out and needs little changing.
Side note:
If someone’s bored, would love to just hold up my phone and see the historical pictures of a building, seems like this api could allow for it.
This was on HN previously, and one stood out to me, there was a single family house (Either New York or Kings county), it had a small yard, the only change was one of the corners was converted from a bathroom to an entrance I think. All else has remained the same.
The freestanding house I grew up in (in Fieldston in the Bronx) looks just like it did when I was a kid. And it looked the same in Google Streetview until the pictures of that neighborhood were pulled (presumably at the request of the neighborhood association).
Governors Island (at least the only photo they have of it) seems to be wildly different to when I visited recently. I don't know the full history of the island, but that seems to be one of the places where it's actually less populated than it was in the past.
Interestingly there's no pictures of the Rockefeller University or Weill-Cornell Hospital, though they are both clearly there in the aerial photos. The big apartment building Rockefeller housed me in at 63rd and York is a rundown factory at that time.
I think the photographs are all of properties on which property tax is paid. Also, I loved in that building too, when my ex-wife was doing her medical internship at the Animal Medical Center.
It seems like a market failure that there has been no incentive to tear down and upgrade any of these old buildings as the land has become more valuable. Or maybe it's a regulatory failure.
I would've thought in an ideal world you would do things sufficiently well the first time so that you don't have to tear down the old work and redo it again. Not the opposite.
I guess we're saying the same thing then, because my point wasn't that you'd never build anything new, but that your old stuff would remain just as useful and you wouldn't need to destroy any part of it.
I have to respectfully disagree. Tearing down and rebuilding is not a universal good, and I wish we were more careful about building well in the first place and preserving the history and context of the people who came before us. To me this means that the initial build was well-conceived and a good long term investment as that capital and labor expenditure has lasted a long time. Tearing down and rebuilding is wasteful.
Property developers have to buy up the section of a block to demo(lish) and build something worthwhile. Many of the buildings are individually/family owned, with little incentive to change/think about change or some pride in passing the building down generationally. If you have an annuity (rents) sitting on top of appreciating land value and you're old or a son/daughter (usually living elsewhere collecting a rent cheque), why bother/how can you convince your neighbors to as well? That's why the section around Ainslie and Union I mentioned was able to be converted, they're all business/warehouses, a condo there now was in the 1940 picture an auto repair garage with the same footprint as the condo, but the house next to it still stands as is.
Not in the UK. I'd be very confused by that usage. "Demo" means "demonstration" or "demonstrate". Maybe builders might use it that way but I've not ever heard it.
Native-born bi-coastal boomer American here. Never heard this usage until my house was remodeled and the general contractor used it. I had to stop him and ask what he meant. (I didn’t feel too stupid since the vowels and syllable stress are different.)
This is an economic failure, but not a market failure. The failure is precisely because of rising land-use restrictions obstructing the market, especially in key centers of the economy, like New York, and especially since the 1960s:
There's a purely logistical reason for that. Most stuff you could buy didn't come wrapped in plastic or paper and most people didn't snack as much as we do now. You can't litter what you don't have.
Ehh I don't know. It makes sense to me. A banana peel and an orange are biodegradable and back them, at least according to my late grandmother, they actually did use as much as they could of the extra biomass from foods (probably because of the Great Depression). A banana peel on the ground is also a lot less unsightly than a bunch of plastic wrappers or cups from McDonalds, at least in my opinion.
I found my apartment. The building looks identical to its state today, but the neighborhood feels a lot different. The 1940s version is a barren landscape of street, sidewalk, building. Today we have trees taking up most of the sidewalk. It really changes the character of the neighborhood and I didn't appreciate it as much until I saw the "before" picture.
The other thing I noticed was that the diner on the corner used to be a grandiose church. I have no idea who let them tear that down to build apartments. It probably wouldn't happen today.
> I have no idea who let them tear that down to build apartments.
Because you didn't need the government's permission. You just had to give the existing owner enough money to make it yours. Someone bought the church and developed the land.
I will join other commentators in saying that this is super neat.
I am surprised that there's such clear and methodical street-level records of basically every address in such a large area from this point in history.
I shouldn't be so surprised though, it's not like humans were any less intelligent, organised, and resourceful. I guess it's just the sheer effort needed by the teams and the required assets (film, cameras, development, filing, etc) to pull this off. You can see that some blocks were photographed in summer, some in winter, and some in between, so it was clearly a large exercise.
Also, the fact these records still exist and weren't destroyed by accident or oversight over the past 80 years is fortunate.
I wonder if now the photos are digitised with GPS coordinates, given current photo-stitching technology, whether it would be possible to process these and stitch together into a more seamless virtual walkthrough of the streets? Sure there'd be gaps, but it would be cool to be able to put myself at ground level and meander among the streets of days gone by...
> stitch together into a more seamless virtual walkthrough
Presumably changes in perspective would ruin everything—though I don't know if panorama software today does any Blade Runner-ish magic to correct that.
You can sometimes see changes in the perspective on satellite maps, when parts of a building are taken from different fly-bys. Doesn't look too neat.
I love projects like this! Someone, in this case a municipal body, decided that something like this is worthwhile and funded it. Not only funded it but shepherded it to a delightful end product. In the din of CAC and conversion metrics, projects such as this is a breath of fresh air, and joy and wonderment, and renews my hope in tech.
Others have written on how things have mostly remained the same. I love old movies for this reason; Holly Golightly could hail a cab here today, Valentine and Winthorpe could buy a soy dog at the same cart, Mike Corleone could pick up a broadsheet except they don't sell newspapers from carts the way they used to (or do they?) I don't know if Romans see their city the way New Yorkers see theirs, but for me it's NYC that's the Eternal City.
It would be cool for someone to build an interactive app with a slider - slide left and you see the same location as it stands now on Google Maps and slide right and it would show what it used to be
A big mistake, in my opinion. If anything good can come of COVID, it's taking back this incredibly expensive real estate that we give out for free. Yes, free. No permits needed.
I have no opinion on the value of permits, but people may misinterpret the meaning of "free" in this context. There is no where in manhattan you can park for free for any duration greater than a day or two:
You absolutely can and a large majority of Manhattan car owners do. As another commenter said, you just have to respect alternate-side-parking and cleaning rules. Typically either once or twice a week.
> There is no where in manhattan you can park for free for any duration greater than a day or two:
Most blocks in NYC have street sweeping twice a week. Some people move their cars to another block the night before. Some sit in their car, move it when the sweeper comes, then put it right back. Both groups are getting permanent parking that costs some amount of time but no money.
Don't forget people with M.D. license plates, construction vehicles, and transit workers. I've had the unfortunate luck assuming all parking was treated the same, tickets have taught me otherwise.
If you're on mobile, zoom in to see the photos. If you zoom out, or (in my case) the default zoom is too far, you won't see the dots and boops will have no effect.
I remember a gallery from the 70s or early 80s being posted on Reddit, but it might've been some photographer's endeavor or a survey of just one borough—because it was mostly rather run-down parts.
I recall looking up a picture of the apartment building I live in in this same photo set, but from (I think) the official NYC source. It was a clunky, multi-step process. I'm glad somebody made a really easy way to do it quick.
Really fascinating looking at the block my office building is on and it looking nearly identical to today. Its an interesting thought that people have had a similar experience walking down that block for the past 70-80 years.
The book “How Buildings Learn” by Stewart Brand used the approach to showing buildings over time and talked about how they were adapted to the needs of people.
