80s.NYC, An Online Collection of Street View Photos Taken in All Five Boroughs During the 1980s

642 Park Ave

Programmer Brandon Liu and researcher Jeremy Lechtzin have created 80s.NYC, a really wonderful online collection of photos that show what all five boroughs of New York City looked like during the 1980s. The photos were taken as part of a bureaucratic process to ensure taxes were assessed properly. Liu and Letctzin organized these photos into an easily readable map that’s fun to explore.

Over 5 years in the mid-1980s, the City of New York photographed every property in the five boroughs. …The city-owned imagery is publicly accessible from the Municipal Archives website but the viewing format is limited. The default organizing principle there is the city’s Borough-Block-Lot (BBL) numbering scheme, which alone or together with address searching is useful for retrieving images of individual buildings, but there is no map-based search…

High resolution prints of these photos are available for purchase via the Municipal Archives.

113 Berry Street W29

City Hall Park Row

Lori Dorn
Lori Dorn

Lori is a Laughing Squid Contributing Editor based in New York City who has been writing blog posts for over a decade. She also enjoys making jewelry, playing guitar, taking photos and mixing craft cocktails.

Recent Posts