This incredible map that lets New Yorkers see vintage photos of their street corners
Old photos have an uncanny way of connecting us to our past and creating a window to see back in time. And fortunately for a city like New York, with such a rich history, there are a lot of vintage photographs that capture days gone by.
But never before have they been visualized like this.
The New York Public Library, along with some history buff developers, recently launched OldNYC.org, which features an interactive map that plots thousands of photos to the location they depict. Each location is marked by a red dot. As you can see below, there's a lot of photos - one or more for nearly every street corner.
Once you click on a red dot, you're presented with one or more photos of that street and specific street corner. The photos come from the New York Public Library's Milstein Collection and date from the 1870s to the 1970s, with a many of them taken during the 1920s to the 1940s by photographer Percy Loomis Sperr.