New York Public Library’s photos of old New York put on an interactive map

Ah, old New York, the New York that most of us weren’t alive for. There’s nothing like looking stopping all work activities and going through a collection of pictures when men wore hats and trolleys roamed the streets and there was no frozen yogurt anywhere. The game when it comes to going through old black and white pictures has changed though, because some programmers attached the New York Public Library’s 80,000 digitized photos of New York from the 1870s to 1970s to an interactive map called OldNYC. Just click on any dot and you get one or even a series of old pictures from near that location. We’ve got a few of our favorites, but really you should go waste the rest of the day playing with the map. Work can wait.

South 5th Street in Williamsburg, viewed from the Williamsburg Bridge in 1930

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A squatter’s shack in Red Hook, near Van Dyke Street, in 1934

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A lonely hotel near Flatbush Avenue and Floyd Bennett Field, 1931

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Coney Island, 1938

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A man poses jauntily in Prospect Park in 1880

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