YOUR BROOKLYN BROWNSTONE – IN THE ’80s
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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Do you know if that drive-way was recently installed at your house?
Do you lie awake at nights wondering when your iron gate was stolen?
All of these answers to the riddles and mysteries of your Brooklyn Brownstone may lie at the NYC Department of Records.
TAX PHOTOS
Sometime in the 1980s city government workers went around the city snapping photographs of every house, building, and lot to update or establish a baseline for the Department of Finance’s tax records. They were known then – and now – as “tax photos.”
According to the department’s website, 262,624 images exist in their online gallery:
“By the early 1980s, the Department of Finance determined that the 1939/40 photographs were too out-dated for property tax appraisal purposes.
“From 1983 to 1988, using 35mm cameras, they photographed every property in the five boroughs, including vacant lots and tax-exempt buildings. They used color film stock producing over 800,000 photographs in both print and negative formats.
“Taking advantage of then-new technology ca. 1989, they recorded each print as a single frame on Laser Video Disks (LVDs), using analog video capture. The Archives extracted low-resolution tiffs of each frame from the LVDs for viewing in the gallery. High-resolution scans or prints can be ordered from the original negatives.”
HOW TO GET YOUR OWN FRAMEABLE TAX PHOTOS
This was one of the first things that I did after buying my house. And it is easy to do.
Check their website. Punch in your address. And your “tax photo” should pop up. Look up in the top right corner of the page and you’ll see a button labelled “Buy Print.” Click that button and you are on your way.
It’s really that simple.
If you want to also purchase your 1940s tax photo – in brilliant black and white! – just go to this form (where you can actually order both).
If you are lucky, when your photo(s) arrive, you may notice a person sitting on your stoop or standing on the sidewalk in front of the house – was this a former owner? a former tenant?
This, then, becomes your next mystery to solve…
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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.
