6 ms·
Street View of 1980s New York
- leblancfg 8y agoI 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. https://maps.googleblog.com/2013/12/create-your-own-street-view.html https://maps.googleblog.com/2013/12/create-your-own-street-v... Extrapolating a bit further, I would really want to play the next GTA installment in 80s New York... you'se guys.
- anoncoward111 8y agoGTA 3 was basically late 80s/early 90s mafioso themed, but I think they were talking more about Philly than Nyc. I too think it would be really cool to map everything directly to how the city is in the real world. Think of all the shady shit happening in Canarsie and Hoboken XD
- millisecond 8y agoThis looks to be a much better interface to a data set the city has and makes available but with a horrible UI. 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. Would love to see the 1940's one online and wrapped up in street view!
- milemi 8y agoCan you please share how you ordered it?
- vesinisa 8y ago> The Archives will be digitizing the 1940s photos in 2018. You can buy high-quality prints of the 1940s and 1980s photos via the "Order Online" link on the Municipal Archives website. https://www1.nyc.gov/dorforms/photoform.htm https://www1.nyc.gov/dorforms/photoform.htm
- toomuchtodo 8y agoI wonder if I could FOIA the archives and get the digital corpus into the Internet Archive.
- ehmorris 8y agoIf you’re in NYC you can also go to the municipal building to view these photos
- erikig 8y agoFor anyone that was as curious as I was: WHERE DO THESE PHOTOS COME FROM? 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.
- jacobush 8y agoNegative is print format.
- CydeWeys 8y agoNo, the negative is the photographic film itself, not a print developed from said film. In some cases they lost the film over time and only have prints developed from it remaining.
- iodiniemetra 8y agoIf you're going to be pointlessly pedantic, at least be correct.
- jacobush 8y agoOMG - negative is the format for making prints. And the prints are hardly 35mm, are they? Maybe I was too brief, and I was pedantic, but not pointlessly so. Some points - - as it was formulated, you could have assumed they meant positive and negative film - you make prints from negative film - plot twist - those images don't reflect the resolution of 35mm at all, or even small prints made from 35mm film. So the text says there are 800 000 35mm film images - but what we see are 800 000 NTSC video stills. Quite the difference.
- deleted 8y ago
- ilamont 8y agoThis 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?
- ehmorris 8y agoNot as high fidelity as a photo, but the Sanborn fire insurance maps are a great record of many US cities and towns, and how they changed throughout the late 19th and early/mid 20th century.
- PinkMilkshake 8y agoIn 1943 a large chunk of Sydney, Australia was photographed from the sky. It's now available on the NSW Government website here: http://maps.six.nsw.gov.au/ http://maps.six.nsw.gov.au/ You can flick between the aerial photography and the modern satellite imagery, or overlay the maps and fade between them. Fantastic stuff.
- mapgrep 8y agoIncredible. I pulled up my neighborhood, a vibrant lovely neighborhood in Brooklyn. I moved here when I arrived in NYC four years ago. 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. 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.
- ghaff 8y agoI lived in Manhattan briefly in the mid-eighties and have been a regular visitor over the years. I think the first time I properly set foot in Brooklyn (I walked on the Brooklyn Bridge a few years prior) was less than a decade ago. Simply never occurred to me there was a reason to.
- digitailor 8y agoTo quote KRS-One in 1987, "Manhattan keeps on making it, Brooklyn keeps on taking it."
- grouseway 8y agoSome of the bleakest and surprising photography I have ever seen has been Jacob Holdt's photo of the American underclass in the 80s. I never imagined that a city like new york was at this level of decay. It gives me hope that we can always turn these kinds of conditions around. I don't know who deserves the credit in the case of NY. http://www.american-pictures.com/gallery/usa/pages/usa-00524.htm http://www.american-pictures.com/gallery/usa/pages/usa-00524... Note: Some of these images are NSFW. That link contains photos from various states - I'm not sure how to link to just the NY/NJ albums.
- canada_dry 8y agoBe 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. Probably not a whole lot of value, but a damn interesting exercise!
- xefer 8y agoThe USGS has historical high resolution aerial photographs for large portions of the country, some places going back to the 1930s: https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/ https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/ The interface is really clunky but some of the data is amazing. On the first tab on the right, select "Search Criteria", select "Coordinates" which allows you to put the points of a polygon on the map. Next, select the "Data Sets" tab. Select "Aerial Photography | "Aerial Photo Single Frames" The "Results". If there are any, thumbnails show up. You can then download the actual images which can be huge. Once you get used to the interface, you can narrow the results down by date, etc.
- ericb 8y agoWhat is the name of the tech used to do this. Also, what is the name of the tech (or open source implementations) that makes data like this explorable with drill-down? I'm looking into projects like this.
- joering2 8y agoIts 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" :)
- jimmy1 8y agoWhats remarkable to me is how this stands in contrast to some historical European cities like in Greece, Italy and Spain where some of the buildings and cities have remained essentially the same for hundreds of years! (In many cases, longer than America has been a country!)
- roywiggins 8y agoAnd in other parts of Europe, entire cities were razed during WWII and rebuilt more or less from scratch.
- phildougherty 8y agoInteresting to see where things head for sure. It's also very impactful to me to realize that some of the most iconic things in NYC have already surpassed the 70 year mark or much more (empire state building, BK bridge, statue of liberty, city hall, grand central, countless others). Makes me excited about how much longer structures can exist utilizing the tactics we have learned as humans.
- ChrisArchitect 8y ago[2017] comments from a year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15332171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15332171
- jdpigeon 8y agoWow, Williamsburg was bleak back then.
- liveoneggs 8y agonavigate up to the bronx
- jacobush 8y agoAm I going crazy or do these images look like NTSC video? 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.
- acuozzo 8y agoIt's definitely sourced from NTSC video. Checkout: http://files.80s.nyc/photos/3/05338/0023.jpg http://files.80s.nyc/photos/3/05338/0023.jpg We've got crosstalk typical of NTSC video being passed through a 2D adaptive comb filter during decoding: cross-chrominance and cross-luminance are both visible in this sample. Based on the appearance I'm assuming these images were stored sequentially on U-matic tape. If they had chosen to repeat each image twice they would have enabled perfect 3D comb filtering (SNR issues aside). Unfortunately, they didn't.
- DINKDINK 8y agoWhere Can I learn more about cross-chrominance and cross-luminance?
- LeoPanthera 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composite_video#Demodulation_loss https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composite_video#Demodulation_l...
- acuozzo 8y agohttp://www.cockam.com/vidcomb.htm http://www.cockam.com/vidcomb.htm
- jacobush 8y agoIn a comment below it is stated that they were archived on Laserdisc. I can imagine the images were written to a tape master first, then the tape used to write the (probably write-once) Laserdiscs. The tape could have been U-matic, but maybe it was digital video tape, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-2_(video) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-2_(video) which was released in 1989. If so, the whole project would have been at the very bleeding edge technology wise.
- electricslpnsld 8y agoWhy 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). Also, I can't believe that McDonald's on 125th and Broadway has been there since the 80s!
- pbnjay 8y agoThey're from tax records, so non-profits didn't need to be recorded. In some cases the Churches and other were photographed "just because" but Columbia is big enough I'm sure they skipped it on purpose.
- woodruffw 8y agoI'm amazed that that McDonald's is still there. I guess the taxis are keeping it alive.
- agumonkey 8y agoFeels weird about the amount of data and nostalgia today.
- stevenking86 8y agoGood ol' CBGB, http://80s.nyc/#show/40.7250/-73.9919 http://80s.nyc/#show/40.7250/-73.9919
- phildougherty 8y agomanaged to get a broken nose there my first week in NYC. way to go me. cool to see some good shows there before it became condos.
- DINKDINK 8y agoPhotos of the birthplace of hiphop: http://80s.nyc/#show/40.8340/-73.8763 http://80s.nyc/#show/40.8340/-73.8763
- gwbas1c 8y agoI just see all black... Anyone else have the same problem?
- dotancohen 8y agoWarning: Opening the link freezes up my machine reproducibility. I need to hard reset. 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.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- infradig 8y agoMy 4GB Celery box with Ubuntu/Gnome+Chrome runs it, but slowly.
- tinus_hn 8y agoIf a website crashes your computer, your browser is broken.
- dotancohen 8y agoI agree. Considering that Firefox 62.x seems to be a popular web browser I thought it prudent to warn others before they open the site.
- JaggerFoo 8y agoOr you can watch old episodes of Kojak for a late 70's perspective. But a nice undertaking. Cheers
- 40acres 8y agoI 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. 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! 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.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Bucephalus355 8y agoApparently VHS came out with an HD format in the early 1990’s. Here’s a sample clip from 1993 of NYC: https://youtu.be/fT4lDU-QLUY https://youtu.be/fT4lDU-QLUY 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.
- dsego 8y agoDiscussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16085603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16085603
- jrumbut 8y agoThanks for sharing this, it's very uncanny to watch, brings back memories of seeing the world when it actually looked this way.
- boobsbr 8y agoThe quality is amazing. It's better than a ton of HD devices that came out in the 2000's, and even some from the 2010's.
- lanius 8y agoVery cool! Is there anything similar for other cities?
- wholemoley 8y agohttp://files.80s.nyc/photos/1/00189/0035.jpg http://files.80s.nyc/photos/1/00189/0035.jpg Ghostbusters!
- anta40 8y agoWhoa!
- phildougherty 8y agojust had a lot of fun with this. thanks for making it.
- whiddershins 8y agoI believe there is something awry here. I lived in Brooklyn in the 80s. Most of these buildings had (and have) bars on the windows. I am not seeing the window bars in these photos. 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.
- joewee 8y agoPeople 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... http://80s.nyc/#show/40.6931/-73.9412 http://80s.nyc/#show/40.6931/-73.9412 these empty lots often contained dead animals and people. Living in nyc in the 80’s was tough on children.
- timonoko 8y agoI bicycled there in winter of 1988 with dynamo-powered video camera. https://youtu.be/8D-S8nYCwjA?t=4m28s https://youtu.be/8D-S8nYCwjA?t=4m28s
- olingern 8y agoI lived in NYC for five years, and got to know the city quite well by bike. Things I noticed: - Brooklyn has undergone an incredible amount of change - 14th & 6th midtown area maintains a lot of its image - The amount of change on the west side is uncanny. The Hudson Yards etc. - Save the Pearl st. area, the financial district still looks like it did