Over 870,000 photos of New York City available online for 1st time
Source: Agencies |
April 25, 2012, Wednesday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
THE two men were discovered dead at the bottom of an elevator shaft in a 12-story Manhattan building, as if dumped there, one man sprawled on top of the other.
The rare crime scene photograph from November 24, 1915, is one of 870,000 images of New York City and its municipal operations now available to the public on the Internet for the first time.
The city's Department of Records officially announced the debut of the photo database yesterday. A previously unpublicized link to the images has been live for about two weeks.
Culled from the Municipal Archives collection of more than 2.2 million images going back to the mid-1800s, the photographs feature all manner of city oversight - from stately ports and bridges to grisly gangland killings.
The project was four years in the making, part of the department's mission to make city records accessible to everyone, said department assistant commissioner Kenneth Cobb.
"We all knew that we had fantastic photograph collections that no one would even guess that we had," Cobb said.
Taken mostly by anonymous municipal workers, some of the images have appeared in publications but most were accessible only by visiting the archive offices in lower Manhattan over the past few years.
Researchers, history buffs, filmmakers, genealogists and preservationists in particular will find the digitized collection helpful. But anyone can search the images, share them through social media or purchase them as prints.
The gallery includes images from the largest collection of criminal justice evidence in the English-speaking world, a repository that holds glass-plate photographs taken by the New York City Police Department.
It also features more than 800,000 color photographs taken with 35mm cameras of every city building in the mid-1980s to update the municipal records, and includes more than 1,300 rarely seen images taken by local photographers of the Depression-era Works Progress Administration.
Because of technological and financial constraints, the digitized gallery does not include the city's prized collection of 720,000 photographs of every city building from 1939 to 1941. But the database is still growing, and the department plans to add more images.
Among the known contributors to the collection was Eugene de Salignac, the official photographer for the Department of Bridges/Plant & Structures from 1906 to 1934.
An iconic Salignac photograph, taken on October 7, 1914, and now online, shows more than a half-dozen painters lounging on wires on the Brooklyn Bridge.
The rare crime scene photograph from November 24, 1915, is one of 870,000 images of New York City and its municipal operations now available to the public on the Internet for the first time.
The city's Department of Records officially announced the debut of the photo database yesterday. A previously unpublicized link to the images has been live for about two weeks.
Culled from the Municipal Archives collection of more than 2.2 million images going back to the mid-1800s, the photographs feature all manner of city oversight - from stately ports and bridges to grisly gangland killings.
The project was four years in the making, part of the department's mission to make city records accessible to everyone, said department assistant commissioner Kenneth Cobb.
"We all knew that we had fantastic photograph collections that no one would even guess that we had," Cobb said.
Taken mostly by anonymous municipal workers, some of the images have appeared in publications but most were accessible only by visiting the archive offices in lower Manhattan over the past few years.
Researchers, history buffs, filmmakers, genealogists and preservationists in particular will find the digitized collection helpful. But anyone can search the images, share them through social media or purchase them as prints.
The gallery includes images from the largest collection of criminal justice evidence in the English-speaking world, a repository that holds glass-plate photographs taken by the New York City Police Department.
It also features more than 800,000 color photographs taken with 35mm cameras of every city building in the mid-1980s to update the municipal records, and includes more than 1,300 rarely seen images taken by local photographers of the Depression-era Works Progress Administration.
Because of technological and financial constraints, the digitized gallery does not include the city's prized collection of 720,000 photographs of every city building from 1939 to 1941. But the database is still growing, and the department plans to add more images.
Among the known contributors to the collection was Eugene de Salignac, the official photographer for the Department of Bridges/Plant & Structures from 1906 to 1934.
An iconic Salignac photograph, taken on October 7, 1914, and now online, shows more than a half-dozen painters lounging on wires on the Brooklyn Bridge.
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