The OldNYC website maps 80,000 images from the 1870s to the 1970s drawn from the New York Public Library to their location on the city’s street plan

A new website gives New Yorkers a chance to see what their apartment building, neighborhood bar or favorite coffee shop looked like more than a century ago.

The website, OldNYC, which launched on Thursday, maps historical photographs from the New York Public Library’s extensive Milstein Collection.

The map includes more than 80,000 original, black and white and sepia-colored photographs of New York City – with their captioned versos – taken during the century between the 1870s and the 1970s. Though the images are taken by a variety of photographers, the majority are the work of Percy Loomis Sperr, who documented changes to the city from the late 1920s to the early 1940s.

The site was built by Dan Vanderkam, a software engineer at Mount Sinai’s Hammer Lab, in collaboration with the public library.

Vanderkam said he helped build a similar site in San Francisco using archived photographs from the San Francisco Public Library, but had already moved to New York by the time the project was completed.

He said the idea came to him when he began searching for an old photograph of his San Francisco apartment building. He eventually found a photograph that he believed had been taken from the building’s rooftop 80 years earlier. He recalled his excitement at finding the photograph, but was discouraged by the fact that had it not been for a captioning error, he wouldn’t have found the image. So he started geocoding the public library’s photographs and eventually created OldSF.

“I think it helps people connect to the place where they live and work,” Vanderkam said. “It gives [people] a better appreciation of what things were like before, to see what buildings have been there forever and what’s new to the area.”

Vanderkam approached the library in early 2013 with his idea for OldNYC. He said after about 18 months of on-again off-again effort, the site was ready for launch.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Vanderkam said building the site took about 18 months. Photograph: oldnyc

Vanderkam, who previously worked for Google, said one of his favorite photographs on OldNYC is of workers laying the foundation for 111 Eighth Avenue, a sprawling art deco style building that once housed the Port Authority and is now home to the search giant’s Manhattan campus.

“I like thinking about explaining to those guys with the steam shovels what’s in that office now,” Vanderkam said. “I think it would blow their minds.”

The interactive map of New York’s boroughs is marked with hundreds of dots denoting the locations for which the collection has photographs. To find photographs of a certain area, locate a street and click on the nearest red dot, which will bring up all the available photographs related to that location.

Among the most popular photos are a street view of the corner of Fifth Avenue, and W 42nd St, taken around 1910, and another of a young girl feeding birds in Central Park, taken in 1938.

The site’s creators encourage viewers to leave comments on the photos from their area reporting what has changed and what’s stayed the same.

