Research Guides: Urban Design and Architecture Studies: Picturing New York: Image Resources

Picturing New York: Image Resources

Atlases of New York City (NYPL Digital Gallery)
Over 2,000 maps of New York City showing streets, blocks, tax lots, natural and manmade features, etc.
New-York Historical Society, Photographs of New York City and Beyond
The extensive photograph collections at the New-York Historical Society are particularly strong in portraits and documentary images of New York-area buildings and street scenes from 1839 to 1945, although contemporary photography continues to be collected. This website presents photographic prints and negatives depicting New York City in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
OldNYC: Mapping Historical Photographs of New York City
"This site provides an alternative way of browsing the NYPL's incredible Photographic Views of New York City, 1870s-1970s collection. Its goal is to help you discover the history behind the places you see every day."
New York City Municipal Archives Online Gallery
Gives research access to over 900,000 items digitized from the Municipal Archives' vast holdings, including photographs, maps, motion-pictures and audio recordings. Some of the images in the Online Gallery may be subject to third-party rights such as copyright and/or rights of privacy/publicity.
Seymour B. Durst Old York Library collection at the Avery Fine Arts & Architecture Library
The Seymour B. Durst Old York Library collection at the Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library consists of more than 40,000 objects including historic photographs, maps, pamphlets, postcards, books, and New York City memorabilia from the 18th century to the 1980s.
Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) Collections Portal
Digital images New York’s past through photographs, drawings, and maps from the collection of the Museum of the City of New York.
Digital Sanborn Maps of NY 1867-1970
Sanborn maps were created to assist fire insurance companies assess the risks associated with insuring a particular property. The maps list street blocks and building numbers including numbers in use at the time the map was made and previous numbers.

NY-Sky-line for the masque ball! Beaux Arts fête features novel architectural costumes!

Architects dressed as their buildings, January 23, 1931. From left to right A. Stewart Walker as the Fuller Building, Leonard Schultze as the Waldorf-Astoria, Ely Jacques Kahn as the Squibb Building, William Van Alen as the Chrysler Building, Ralph Walker as the Wall Street Building and Joseph Freedlander as the Museum of the City of New York. Source: Still from Universal News Volume 3, Release 7 #1-10, January 19, 1931, National Archives and Records administration. View a clip from the National Archives of the 1931 Beaux-Arts Ball.

On January 13, 1931, the Society of Beaux-Arts Architects held a ball at the Hotel Astor in New York City. According to an advertisement for the event, anyone who paid $15 per ticket (big money during the Depression) could see a “hilarious modern art exhibition” and things “modernistic, futuristic, cubistic, altruistic, mystic, architistic and feministic.” Attendees also got to witness more than 20 famous architects dressed as buildings they had designed, some of them now fixtures of the New York City skyline.