Lost Buildings and How to Find Them
Location, location, location, goes the real estate saying.
For Urban Archive, location is paramount; it is the single most important data point for any historical photograph published in the app. Urban Archive anchors app content around the basic unit of the historical image: images are tied to a single location, making the city map the app’s primary navigation tool. Urban Archive’s map-based navigation creates a browsing experience, similar to Google Maps, placing the historical images in conversation with the present-day urban environment.
For an image to be published on Urban Archive, it must first be located.
Sometimes, this is simple. Well-known buildings make locating quick work. Our location process largely relies on descriptive metadata created by collections staff or photographers themselves. When this information is lacking, helpful hints within the photos aid in locating: unique architectural features, corner street signs, and recognizable (or research-able) clues like infrastructure and advertisements.
At times, locating a photograph is not quite so effortless. It requires dogged persistence, a willingness to be frustrated, considerable time, and knowledge that even with all your hard work, map searching, and New York Times Archive combing, you still might not be able to pin down the location close enough for inclusion in the app. For an example of this zeal to find the location and, happily, a success story, look no further than my colleague’s research into this ca. 1888 photograph.
Occasionally, the locating of an image is impossible and, more importantly, unrewarding. In the photograph at left, the buildings have no distinguishing architectural features or visible addresses, and the background is of no help. Would it be excellent to discover the location of these buildings? Of course. But is it worth the time? Probably not. We have access to thousands of other photographs that are more easily located. Our goal is a substantial mapping of photographs that illuminate the richly contextual architecture and culture of the city.
In all of the aforementioned examples, the ability to locate is most often dependent upon the quantity and quality of metadata attached to the photograph. Metadata is just that: a set of data about other data; the information used to describe, understand, and organize artifacts, books, or archival documents. While standards for metadata collection and creation exist, museums, libraries, and archives have access to differing amounts of information. Certain descriptive metadata is recorded contemporaneously. In the case of some photographs, like those in the Subway Construction collection at the New York Transit Museum, the photographer detailed the time of the exposure down to the very minute, “The image was taken at 10:37 am”, and noted the extremely specific location “Camera [is]3 feet north of south curb of 11th Street and 6 feet west of west cub of Ely Avenue looking south.” We are not always so fortunate. Sometimes a photograph is accessioned (taken in) to a collection with no information beyond what can be gleaned from the subject: no year taken, no title, and no idea of the creator.
Much of the metadata displayed on a digital collection portal has been created by the repository. Through the cataloguing process archivists input fields for their own record keeping and additional fields for data such as provenance (the history of the document before it became a part of the institution’s collection), format, and importantly, keywords that aid in sorting and searching for photographs. The metadata added by collections staff is important for understanding the document as a museum asset; it highlights information about the photograph and its subject which was likely not available or consequential before it was accessioned.
Here is the catch: Sometimes, metadata is INCORRECT! I know, I know, the horror. And it can be wrong for any number of reasons. (You cannot imagine how similar the words east and west can look, while squinting at a low resolution scan of an already blurry 90-year-old verso!)
The following examples illuminate how incorrect metadata can confuse researchers and lead to erroneous locations. And more importantly, this scarce or mistaken metadata can impede the nuanced understanding of a building’s or neighborhood’s place in the continuum of New York City urban development. Urban Archive is committed to (you might say obsessed with) properly placing these photographs in their rightful, historically contextual locations.
Lost Building #1
This photograph is titled on the institution’s collections portal as “Nathan Hale Apartments, 181st St. & Washington Ave.” As such the keywords attached to the photo include: Bronx, East Tremont, and Washington Avenue (Bronx). The keywords are based on the location, which is included on the negative itself. In this case, the location metadata is taken from a text annotation on the photographic print, itself.
Using Google Street View (an invaluable resource for this project) we see that the corner of 181st Street and Washington Avenue in the Bronx looks like this —
Here though, the topography does not match the historic photograph, particularly the considerable drop of a hill on the street to the left of the historic structure. Google Street View navigation of the surrounding neighborhood reveals this area is populated with small and low-rise apartment houses, residential homes that look to date to the late 19th or very early 20th century, and a handful of contemporary buildings (such as the green-roofed one at left). Clearly, this photograph does not depict this corner.
In this case of erroneous metadata, the building is not lost for long. A quick search of “Nathan Hale Apartments, 181st Street & Washington Avenue” returns a number of results that properly place the building at 181st Street and Fort Washington Avenue in the Fort George neighborhood of upper Manhattan.
Lost Building(s) #2
The descriptive metadata for this photograph includes the title “Mathews Model Houses, Ridgewood, Queens, undated (ca. 1920). Photographed for Parkes.” Mathews Model Houses or Mathews Flats, as they were often called, were a new type of tenement built by speculative developer Gustave X. Mathews and designed by Louis Allmendinger in the first decades of the 20th century. The three-story apartment buildings were inexpensively constructed, and featured simple designs distinguished by distinctive brickwork patterns. They were developed in various working-class neighborhoods of Queens and many remain extant.
Ridgewood has rows of Mathew Flats on a number of streets, including this lovely landmarked row on Palmetto Street. While giving the metadata the benefit of the doubt, we compared, in agonizing detail and using all the zoom functions, the fenestration (placement of windows), cornices, and doors of Ridgewood’s Mathews Flats and the buildings in the historic photograph. And they just did not match. This is where being a lifelong Queens resident comes in handy. I knew that I had seen these buildings before. So I searched for the Mathew Flats in Woodside and Elmhurst, once again comparing windows, doors, and cornices, helpfully pictured in Street View and on blogs such as ForgottenNY . Still nothing. But then I remembered where I had seen this type of apartment; they were just off of Northern Boulevard in Astoria, on one of the blocks I bike down occasionally. And using Street View once again, I found them.
Erroneous metadata is not the norm, we want to make that clear. In most instances, the information recorded about historic photographs (however sparse or rich) is clear and accurate. While historic photographs are literal representations of the state of the city (though architectural photography isn’t exempt from issues of bias, that is a topic for another day), those people who are involved in the creation, storage, and organization of the photographs are not infallible. From the photographer, assistant or printer who might write down the location, omitting an important word in the address to archives and museum staff who might misread an illegible verso or conflate similar buildings, these mistaken identities happen. Because Urban Archive is (literally) built on precise location data, our team validates each photo location to make sure the images published are pinned correctly. And in the instances where metadata is wrong we are happy to put on our detective hats and do what all New Yorkers love to do: prove our knowledge of the city!
