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NEW YORK CITY

Old Photos of NYC and San Francisco Put History on the Map

Put on your sepia-colored lenses and catch a glimpse of city history with OldSF and OldNYC.
Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy, The New York Public Library. "Bridges - Brooklyn Bridge - Pier 21 - Pennsylvania Railroad." The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1937.

On OldSF and OldNYC, century-old views of your favorite haunts are a few clicks away. Since the launch of OldNYC last summer, over 40,000 historical photos from the shelves of the New York Public Library have found new audiences, with hundreds of thousands of users eager to compare their experience of the five boroughs with the days of yore. OldSF’s map of 13,000 photos from the San Francisco Public Library came out four years earlier, in 2011. Both are side projects of Brooklyn-based software developer Dan Vanderkam, a Google alum who now works on genome visualizations at Mount Sinai’s Hammer Lab.

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“I love the way [historical photos] capture incidental details that you'd never think to write about,” says Vanderkam. The most popular images, nonetheless, are of iconic landmarks: The Brooklyn Bridge and Central Park are the most clicked on locations on the OldNYC map. Users, first and foremost, seek out the familiar. Yet any random click of the map will lead to a story—like this evidence of prison escape on Yerba Buena Island. Roaring 20s fashion, vintage automobiles and lost architectural marvels all spring back to life in these ancient photographs.

Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy, The New York Public Library. "Brooklyn: 4th Street (North) - Roebling Avenue" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1941.

The project started with a single find. While living in San Francisco, Vanderkam came across an old snapshot taken from his building rooftop in the SFPL’s online collection. He decided to compare his modern-day view to the 1945 photograph, realizing that not much had changed—aside from the absence of trolleys and the happy addition of many street trees. What stood out, however, was the way he happened upon the photograph: by typing in cross streets in the search bar. It seemed like there should be a simpler, more elegant method. “The right way to present this information is not through keyword search,” he explained in a talk at the NYPL last June. “The way to present it is through a map.”

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Both websites use geocoding to place photographs on the city grid. The text data attached to the photos, such as cross streets, is converted into latitudes and longitudes, so that photos automatically land in the right intersection on the map.

Early iteration of OldSF as a geocoding game

OldSF was originally conceived as an image mapping game, and later evolved into its current iteration with mechanical geocoding. “I built out OldSF with zero interaction with the SFPL until the very end, when I asked for their permission to launch it,” recalls the engineer. “In retrospect, this was a risky thing to do! I'm glad they said ‘yes!’” Once Vanderkam relocated to the East Coast and decided to tackle OldNYC, he took a different approach, working closely with NYPL Labs from the start. The New York photo archive presented a new set of engineering challenges: sheer volume, for one, with far more photos and distinct locations. Lengthy image processing was also required, in order to single out photos that were pasted together like photo albums.

“In both cases, it's really admirable that the libraries were comfortable letting an external developer make creative use of their data,” concludes Vanderkam. “I hope this can be a lesson that institutions take from these two projects: if you're liberal with your data, good things can happen. (Like a software developer spending countless hours volunteering for you!)”

Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy, The New York Public Library. "Manhattan: Central Park - The Mall." The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1892.

Learn more about Dan Vanderkam’s other projects here.

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