504-506 Broome St. (Berenice Abbott/NYPL)
Now that we live in the future, it's so much easier to travel back to the past. The New York Public Library has done a fantastic job with their digital collections database, and it just grew by 180,000. At least, that's how many images are now part of their easy to navigate hi-res collection—all with no known U.S. copyright restrictions, and all available to you to spend hours and hours clicking through.
The collection, which you can view here, includes Berenice Abbott's iconic documentation of 1930s New York for the Federal Art Project—you've likely seen many of her photos before, spanning all over the city during that decade. Like Abbott's photos, many of these images were available previously, though could only be downloaded at lower resolutions, if at all.
Map of central portions of the cities of New York and Brooklyn, 1873. (NYPL)
There are also Farm Security Administration photographs by Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, and others; manuscripts of American literary masters like Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne; Burton Welles's 1911 wide-angle photos of Fifth Avenue from Washington Square to East 93rd Street; papers and correspondence of founding American political figures like Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison; sheet music for popular American songs at the turn of the 20th century; WPA-era lithographs, etchings, and pastels by African American artists Lewis Hine's photographs of Ellis Island immigrants and social conditions in early 20th century America; Anna Atkins' cyanotypes of British algae, the first recorded photographic work by a woman (1843); handscrolls of the Tale of Genji, created in 1554; Medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscripts from Western Europe; and over 20,000 maps and atlases documenting New York City and the rest of the world.
5th Avenue (Burton Welles/NYPL)
The treasure trove of material is clearly filled with the rare and unique, and the library is encouraging "novel uses of its digital resources." So if you want to go beyond, note that they are now "accepting applications for a new Remix Residency program. Administered by the Library's digitization and innovation team, NYPL Labs, the residency is intended for artists, information designers, software developers, data scientists, journalists, digital researchers, and others to make transformative and creative uses of digital collections and data,and the public domain assets in particular. Two projects will be selected, receiving financial and consultative support from Library curators and technologists."
5th Avenue then and now (NYPL)
They've introduced new projects themselves, as well, including a then-and-now comparison of Fifth Avenue, "juxtaposing 1911 wide angle photographs with Google Street View." You can check that one out here, but don't click through until you have a couple of hours to spare.
