I’ve been a resident of Tribeca for three years only but I’ve grown to love this neighborhood. Even in this short period of time a lot of changes have happened: old buildings have been demolished, new buildings kept rising. I have always been a big fan of before and after photos, especially with architecture. And I think that in the US such photographs are especially interesting: it’s a young country, where everything is constantly changing, particularly in New York. I found a bunch of interesting before and after photo series,—in New York Post, for example ,—but there were only a few of them, and they all captured the same old landmarks. Not much to get excited about.

So I decided to make one myself, limiting it to one small but flavorful neighborhood. I would do regular buildings and street corners, and use the oldest photographs I could find.

Fortunately for me NYPL has digitized a lot of pictures from their archives: some of them made in the days before my Grandma was born. I tried using all of them, but quite a few were not scanned separately—they came, rather, as whole sheets, and the resolution was too low to try cropping snapshots out.

Thankfully, guys from oldnyc.org put all of them on the map. It’s an easy to use and clear map with thousands of photographs, which allows anyone to see their building—or its predecessors—in a completely different light. It’s a huge amount of work, which the Old NYC’ers accomplished by writing code for a script that reads photo descriptions on the sheets and crops them. As a lover of all things tech, I admire this. And just a general shout out to team Old NYC: thanks, guys, I couldn’t have made this project without you.

As I began digging through hundreds of photographs to choose ones to recreate I came up with a few rules—to make the job easier and the material more uniform.

Here are these rules:

At lest one of the buildings on the old photo should still exist so that the area remains recognizable, and the comparison is more striking.

It should still be possible to take a picture from the same angle as in the old photograph, at least approximately,—so no aerial shots, or pictures taken from the Ninth Avenue elevated line, for example, as it doesn’t exist today.

The quality of the old photo should be as close to modern as possible (no overexposed or damaged photos)

I should not edit my photos. Contrast, saturation, white balance should stay the same as when I took them. I should just take some nice (not overexposed) pictures and that’s it from the editorial standpoint. My pictures should be complimentary and not the stars of the project. There’s also an appreciation for the old technique of editing pictures with their limited resources for editing. And to be honest, I’m just too lazy to make them pretty. #nofilter

I should use only the tools that I already have. I own a Canon 70D with a 28–135mm f/3.5–5.6 lens (I used it for approximately 1/3 of the pictures) and iPhone 7.

This should be a “walkable” project. To accomplish that, I arranged the photographs in a consequential walking tour, where you could go from City Hall 4/5/6/J/Z/R/W subway to Canal Street 1/A/C and see all of the buildings on your way.

Having looked through all the chosen pictures, I picked out the loveliest spots in Tribeca, an area full of great restaurants, piers, paved streets, and the most picturesque canopied ex-warehouses and whole sale stores.

Here is the link to the map with photo descriptions:

1. Broadway, west side, between Warren and Chambers streets (Percy Loomis Sperr, 1928)