FINDING HISTORICAL PICS OF YOUR NYC BLOCK
Brownstone Detectives investigates the history of our clients’ homes.
The story you are about to read was composed from research conducted in the course of one of those investigations.
Do you know the history of YOUR house?
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Have you ever wondered what your block looked like 100 years ago?
Well, now’s your chance to find out!
Using a new website called OLDNYC, the opportunity is yours to try and locate historic New York City photos by location.
The project, created by Dan Vanderkam in collaboration with the New York Public Library (NYPL), makes historic photographs (all pre-loaded and locate-able by an interactive map of the city) accessible by using a map.
To find pics from your neighborhood, simply locate your neighborhood or street on the map and look for the red dots – which indicate that there are pictures available for these locations.
The top right snapshot is one that we found of a row of houses near the intersection of Saratoga Avenue and Decatur Street, in the Ocean Hill section of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Below that is what this stretch of block looks like today.
Vanderkam describes his site as “an alternative way of browsing the NYPL’s incredible Photographic Views of New York City, 1870s-1970s collection.”
“Its goal,” he continues “is to help you discover the history behind the places you see every day.”
Quite an admirable offering and a great way to access NYPL’s extensive collection of old photographs. This is going to be a valuable website for the armchair historian as well as for the casual historical researcher.
The images all originate from the New York Public Library’s Milstein Collection. Vanderkam is “a Software Engineer at Mt. Sinai’s hammerlab,” according to Vanderkam’s website.
Now, if all of this fails – or if you are just looking for more history about your old Brooklyn home – drop us a line and we’ll point you in the proper direction.
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Brownstone Detectives is an historic property research agency. Our mission is to document and save the histories of our clients’ homes. From our research, we produce our celebrated House History Books and House History Reports. Contact us today to begin discovering the history of your home.
