Recreating history: how the Tribeca has changed since early 20th century (in 29 photographs).

I’ve been a resident of Tribeca for three years only but I’ve grown to love this neighborhood. Even in this short period of time a lot of changes have happened: old buildings have been demolished, new buildings kept rising. I have always been a big fan of before and after photos, especially with architecture. And I think that in the US such photographs are especially interesting: it’s a young country, where everything is constantly changing, particularly in New York. I found a bunch of interesting before and after photo series,—in New York Post, for example ,—but there were only a few of them, and they all captured the same old landmarks. Not much to get excited about.

So I decided to make one myself, limiting it to one small but flavorful neighborhood. I would do regular buildings and street corners, and use the oldest photographs I could find.

Fortunately for me NYPL has digitized a lot of pictures from their archives: some of them made in the days before my Grandma was born. I tried using all of them, but quite a few were not scanned separately—they came, rather, as whole sheets, and the resolution was too low to try cropping snapshots out.

Thankfully, guys from oldnyc.org put all of them on the map. It’s an easy to use and clear map…