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.
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.
The captions remind me all the stories you accumulate when you hang around with poor people that are completely unbelievable and unrelatable to more well off people.
A lot of this has to be earlier than the 80s. There's a lot of pictures of blacks with guns in public and semi-public places sprinkled in there. After they passed all sorts of gun control nobody was gonna stand around and let a white man, from Denmark or not, take pictures of them with their piece. There's a lot of pictures that look like they might be from late 60s anti-war protests as well.
I think the photographer didn't like the cold. None of his pictures are in poor areas in northern states in the winter.
Edit: I think most of these pics are late 60s to early 70s but some definitely go up to the late 80s and early 90s
That's the unfortunate mechanics of a society where there has been no income growth for the bottom half in decades. If a place was sketchy before and now it's nice, it's because yuppies moved in and pushed the previous residents out. In Brooklyn the percentage of low-income residents plummeted from 45% to 15%, while the percentage of upper-income residents jumped from 5% to 25%: https://www.nytimes.com/1982/09/20/nyregion/census-traces-ra....
They buckle the sidewalk, can damage expensive water piping, and "muggers hide behind them."
Believe it or not.
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.
Checkout this uncropped frame: http://files.80s.nyc/photos/3/05338/0023.jpg
Does this mean somebody has taken the photos and transferred them to tape, and that is what we're seeing here?
If this _was_ done for archival purposes, what is the likelihood of the original negatives still surviving?
At which stage was the text box added in?
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.
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.
The tape could have been U-matic, but maybe it was digital video tape, 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.
"...Because the Department of Finance originally recorded each 1980s print as one frame on Laser Video Disks (LVDs), using analog video capture, the low-resolution images were able to be extracted for the Municipal Archives online gallery."
Here’s a sample clip from 1993 of NYC: 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.
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!
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.
Considering that Firefox 62.x seems to be a popular web browser I thought it prudent to warn others before they open the site.
Also, I can't believe that McDonald's on 125th and Broadway has been there since the 80s!
Probably not a whole lot of value, but a damn interesting exercise!
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.
Ghostbusters!
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.
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
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.
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.
Living in nyc in the 80’s was tough on children.
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
But a nice undertaking.
Cheers
