In old New York.

Hat tip to Jon, fellow Bleatnik on the Great Lileks's site, for this amazing time suck for all of us who grew up in New York City, or the nearby area, or just like New York:

Street View of 1940s New York

Between 1939 and 1941, the Works Progress Administration collaborated with the New York City Tax Department to collect photographs of every building in the five boroughs of New York City. In 2018, the NYC Municipal Archives completed the digitization and tagging of these photos. This website places them on a map.

As Jon pointed out, what this essentially does is turn a map of New York City c. 1940 into a Google Street View. I found it to be a delightful time suck on a busy week. (There's also a 1980s version available, but I didn't find it to be as complete.)

Here are some photos of New York locations found through this "Street View," to give you a taste. The watermarks are unavoidable; the signs in front were some location or tax code used by the photographers and not a clear indicator to the streets.

Columbus Circle. The Majestic Theatre had become the Park in 1911.

Near the Lincoln Tunnel (less than five years old at the time)

West side downtown, near what would be the World Trade Center . Streets downtown were paved
with ballast stones from ships, some of which are still visible at the South Street Seaport.  

South Ferry area, where a man in a hat is immortalized unawares 80 years later, along with a few palookas

The Porto Rico line sailed between Manhattan and Puerto Rico for 75 years; more at this link if you're curious

These are not pictures of all the great, well known structures, the Penn Stations and Ebbets Fields. These are the places where people lived and worked, from a time when New York had just started replacing so many old walk-ups with the glass towers that line its streets today.

And yet so many things look familiar to me, even though they were gone long before I came on the scene. It may have been shorter, but it was still the New York I once loved.