The NYC Department of Records has recently introduced the municipal archive gallery online, with access to over 800,000 photos, maps, audio recordings, and more. It’s so popular that the site is offline as they work on it.
Both The Daily Mail and The Atlantic’s ‘In Focus’ have republished highlights from the archive. It’s amazing to see how much has changed and how some things don’t. The Daily took three photos and posted then-and-now versions.
Note, there are some photos of dead or dying people in the group above. They’re not very graphic, but if you’re very squeamish, you might want to avoid.
Up for auction is a photograph of the iceberg that sank the Titanic.
Racing to the rescue as England’s pride and joy went down on her maiden voyage was the RMS Carpathia, which plucked 705 survivors from lifeboats and ferried them to the Titanic’s destination, the West Side of Manhattan.
It was on board the Carpathia that passenger Mabel Fenwick captured the floating ice mass that took down the great ship. The hull of one of the Titanic’s lifeboats can be seen in the top right corner of the historic image.
The auction is mostly postcards and newspapers related to Titanic, but this deck chair is pretty cool.
The City Hall station of the NYC Subway, the showpiece station of the 1904 subway system, has been closed since 1945, but is being restored and is now open for tours by the Transit Museum. Daniel J. Grinkevich took a tour and posted his photos to Flickr.
It’s almost like stepping back in time.
Any fine, hand-made cigar has two ends, the “cap” at the top which you cut and put in your mouth, and the “foot” at the bottom where you light it. I always take a look at the foot when buying or smoking a cigar, but the other day was the first time that I really sat down and inspected one with a magnifying glass. It was only then that I truly saw the mélange of colors and textures and patterns that are in a fine cigar. It was also then that I knew I wanted to photograph a variety of cigar feet to capture the beauty in them.
Continue reading…
Photographer Stephen Wilkes blended photographs together to depict one day in NYC.
Photographer Stephen Wilkes took pictures of the same spot in Manhattan for 10 hours.
He then blended the thirty to fifty individual images together to make seamless collages showing some of the city’s most famous landmarks from day to night.
I think the Flatiron Building is my favorite.
Newly discovered photos show Niagara Falls without water. Engineers needed to stop the flow of water over the American Falls so they could clean up a rock slide that threatened to stop the water flow permanently.
To achieve this the army had to build a 600ft dam across the Niagara River, which meant that 60,000 gallons of water that flowed ever second was diverted over the larger Horseshoe Falls which flow entirely on the Canadian side of the border.
The dam itself consisted of 27,800 tons of rock, and on June 12, 1969, after flowing continuously for over 12,000 years, the American Falls stopped.
Photographer Mark Pain got a great photo of Tiger Woods’ errant chip shot during the Ryder Cup.
But Woods hit the ground behind the ball and duffed the shot straight at Pain.
The man from The Mail on Sunday didn’t flinch, however, and captured this extraordinary picture just before the ball hit his camera, bounced on to his chest and came to rest at his feet.
Woods was furious about his blunder, but neither he nor caddie Steve Williams objected to Pain’s position.
They don’t mention if the lens was broken by the shot.
(and what’s up with the dude with the cigar on the far right?)
UPDATE: they found who the dude with the cigar is.
A photo taken at Disney World captures a couple together 15 years before they met:
Thirty years ago, when they lived in separate countries long before they met and married, a family shot of little Donna at Walt Disney World captured Alex in a stroller in the background.
What’re the chances?
If you find anything on here useful or interesting, or you just feel sorry for me, you can buy me a beer via PayPal.