New York City

The New York in this archive is not yet the New York in your head. It is a city in the middle of an argument about how tall a building should be, whether a bridge could cross the East River, and what to do with the people arriving at a rate no city had absorbed before.

The Brooklyn Bridge opened in 1883 after fourteen years, and photographs of it from the following decade have a quality that is hard to describe and easy to see: people are looking at it. Not crossing it, looking at it. It was the tallest structure on the continent and the first steel-wire suspension bridge, and the wire was made on site because nobody trusted a supplier after the first contractor sold the project fraudulent cable.

Brooklyn itself was a separate city until 1898 — the third largest in the country. A great many photographs catalogued as New York are actually of an independent municipality with its own mayor, and the 1897 bird's-eye views were drawn while that was still true.

Ellis Island opened in 1892 and processed twelve million people before it closed. The photographs from it are quieter than the story suggests. Families on benches. A doctor examining eyes with a buttonhook. Numbered tags. Whatever a person expects an immigration photograph to look like, these are usually more ordinary and more affecting than that.

The skyline arrived suddenly. The Flatiron in 1902, the Singer Building in 1908, the Woolworth in 1913 — each briefly the tallest in the world, each photographed obsessively while it was. Photographers stood at the same corners repeatedly, and the sequence of images from one intersection over fifteen years shows a city growing vertically in something close to time-lapse.

Coney Island belongs in any account of the period. Luna Park, Dreamland, Steeplechase — three competing amusement parks running simultaneously, lit by more electric bulbs than most American cities possessed. Dreamland burned in 1911 in a fire that started in the Hell Gate ride, which is the kind of detail no novelist would risk.

Central Park is thirty years old in the earliest of these photographs and already looks eternal, which was the intention. Olmsted and Vaux designed it to appear as though the city had been built around a landscape rather than the reverse. The photographs show how thoroughly that worked, and how young the trees actually were.

Over seven thousand images in the archive name New York, and the panoramic photographs alone run to more than two hundred and fifty — the largest panoramic group of any state.

The City That Burned and Photographed Itself Rebuilding