Cities and landscapes are living archives. Streets widen, buildings vanish, bridges become icons, immigrant districts change character, and marketplaces become memories. The articles in this section use photographs to visit places as they once appeared: crowded avenues, old hotels, frontier settlements, European markets, Asian streets, American neighbourhoods, and urban spaces on the edge of transformation. These images reward careful attention. A storefront sign, a horse in the street, a line of pedestrians, or a half-finished building can tell a story about commerce, migration, technology, class, and the daily choreography of public life.
What as San Francisco like just before the Great Earthquake of 1906? There are few surviving photographic records from before the devastating earthquake, both because photography and motion pictures were still rare, but also because many…
The saloon or watering hole has come to epitomize the Old West. Every town had one, and this is where everything happened: where the corrupt local boss held court, where the mysterious stranger from out of town confronted the local bully,…
Dutch Children The following pictures of Holland were taken from a book written in Dutch called De Aarde en haar volken (“The Earth and Its People”) written in 1906 . The photos show daily life in various parts of the world and offers a…
This remarkable video shot on the streets of Tokyo, Japan shows daily life in the Imperial Japanese Capital in 1913. The original film was in black and white and soundless. This video has been upscaled and colorized using a neural network.…
This beautiful photograph of Dublin’s Sackville Street and O’Connol Bridge was taken in 1890 using the photochrom process. The photochrom process was an early method of printing color photographs which relied on detailed note taking by the…
Below is a famous color photograph of Mulberry Street, in New York City taken in 1900 at the heart of the city’s Little Italy district. It shows a moment in time in a busy ethnic neighborhood. You can imagine the sounds of kids playing,…
wpsso pinterest pin it image added on 2021-06-20T17:36:19+00:00 .wpsso-pinterest-pin-it-image The San Francisco Earthquake and its Aftermath The San Francisco Earthquake: a view of the ruined city. The San Francisco Earthquake: a view of…
The Ansonia Hotel on the corner of Broadway and 73rd Street in New York, billed itself as “Fireproof in Every Sense of the Word.” I am not sure how many types of fire proof there are! Here is their advertisement from around 1900.…
These scenes of a busy Paris market were photographed by Eugène Atget (12 February 1857 – 4 August 1927), a noted early documentary photographer. Though now regarded as one of the pioneers of photography, Atget did not enjoy commercial…
Walking on Brooklyn Bridge Put on your Sunday best and join us for a morning walk over the Brooklyn Bridge this fine day in 1905 New York. Men and women can be seen walking in both directions. Two purposeful men, businessmen perhaps,…
