As of October 2024, Street View, Then & Now: New York City's Fifth Avenue will no longer be updated by NYPL and will soon be archived. Source code for the site can be viewed here: https://github.com/nypl-publicdomain/fifth-avenue and the digitized Fifth Avenue, New York, From Start to Finish collection can be viewed here: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/fifth-avenue-new-york-from-start-to-finish.
Take me to 1911! Visit http://publicdomain.nypl.org/fifth-avenue/
Street View, Then & Now: New York City's Fifth Avenue is a public domain remix by Bert Spaan of NYPL Labs, using the Fifth Avenue from Start to Finish collection from 1911, it lets you compare the photos from this collection with 2015's Google Street View.
The locations and fields-of-view of each photo are loaded from a single GeoJSON file: data/fields-of-view.json (view this file on geojson.io).
This data comes from the Space/Time Directory Digital Collections dataset, in Histograph's NDJSON format: digital-collections.pits.ndjson.
Each line in this NDJSON file represents a Digital Collection item, and contains it's UUID, as well as additional information about the photo's location and field of view:
{
"id": "510d47dc-9a46-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99",
"type": "st:Photo",
"data": {
"imageId": "1113225",
"direction": "west",
"bearing": 298,
"distance": 19,
"collection": "66614620-c6ca-012f-0a98-58d385a7bc34"
},
"validSince": 1911,
"validUntil": 1911,
"geometry": {
"type": "Point",
"coordinates": [-73.996396, 40.732277]
}
}With Space/Time's field-of-view module, we can convert this dataset to a GeoJSON file containing field-of-view geometries.
NYPL is no longer maintaining this project, which relies on Gulp, a deprecated version of node-sass, and other packages that are only compatible with Python version 2 and Node version 14.
To run locally, we suggest using pyenv and nvm to create a compatible environment.
Or, you can run the site locally using a PHP server:
$ php -S localhost:8888 -t .and go to localhost:8888 in a browser.
On January 6, 2016, The New York Public Library enhanced access to public domain items in Digital Collections so that everyone has the freedom to enjoy and reuse these materials in almost limitless ways. For all such items the Library now makes it possible to download the highest resolution images available directly from the Digital Collections website.
That means more than 187,000 items free to use without restriction! But we know that 180K of anything is a lot to get your head around — so as a way to introduce you to these collections and inspire new works, NYPL Labs developed a suite of projects and tools to help you explore the vast collections and dive deep into specific ones.
Go forth, reuse, and let us know what you made with the #nyplremix hashtag! For more information:
See license.