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“It reveals things that essentially nobody ever saw before, because nobody would look at it in that way,” said Mike Evangelist, a historic-photo enthusiast who created a version of the panorama. “It’s so immersive.”

Most photos of this magnitude were commissioned to celebrate the completion of a building, or capture a postcard view. This panorama didn’t cater to a client. It didn’t aim for a flattering angle. It simply recorded the world as it was.

When the light hit the plate that day in 1907, it engraved unvarnished details no one ever thought to capture, because they seemed unimportant — laundry drying on a rooftop, men mingling outside a bar, horses lined up in a stable.

The photographers captured all that detail because they shot the images with a large-format camera onto 8-by-10-inch glass negatives. Compare that with the 35 millimeter (1.3 inch) negatives that became prevalent later in the 20th century. The lens of the camera also could be tilted so both far and near objects were in focus.

The photograph was made by the Detroit Publishing Co., a photographic powerhouse of the era that earned its reputation by shooting postcards and panoramas of scenes across America.

“They were selling those panoramas to anybody who wanted it,” said Cynthia Read Miller, a former curator at the Henry Ford Museum, which once owned the glass negatives and still maintains a large Detroit Publishing collection. “I’m sure they locally were trying to sell it to the city of Minneapolis.”

It is unclear if this panorama was widely viewed again before the 10 glass negatives were digitized by the Library of Congress. There is no record of it being reproduced or displayed.