How the Big Apple grew, block by block

Almost a million images of New York and its municipal operations have been made public on an internet photo database, launched by the city’s Department of Records.

Culled from the Municipal Archives collection of more than 2.2 million images going back to the mid-1800s, the 870,000 photographs feature everything from stately ports and bridges to local neighbourhoods, community events and grisly gangland killings.

Assistant commissioner Kenneth Cobb said: “We all knew that we had fantastic photograph collections that no-one would even guess that we had.”

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. And the gallery includes 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 colour photos taken with 35mm cameras of every city building in the mid-1980s and includes more than 1,300 rarely seen images taken by local photographers of the Depression-era Works Progress Administration.

A picture taken in 1914 by Eugene de Salignac shows more than a half-dozen painters lounging on wires on the Brooklyn Bridge.

“A lot of other photographers who worked for the city were pretty talented but did not produce such a large body of work or a distinct body of work,” said Michael Lorenzini, curator of photography at the Municipal Archives and author of New York Rises which showcases Salignac images.

The archive is online at: New York City Department of Records www.nyc.gov/records