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NYPL: Research Library

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Inspire lifelong learning, advance knowledge, strengthen communities

New York Public Library (unofficial)

These photographs, first published in Fifth Avenue, New York, from start to finish (1911), depict the fashionable thoroughfare of Fifth Avenue. The images, complete with captions indicating addresses and the names of businesses and shops, show us a Fifth Avenue in the years following the height of its popularity as a fashionable residential district and the early stages of its transformation into one of the world's premiere luxury commercial streets.

Flipping through these photographs allows us to take a virtual stroll along Fifth Avenue from Washington Square up to Central Park, passing other pedestrians, carriages, cops, and storefronts long since gone. Among other gems, you'll come across the newly constructed New York Public Library, now the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, in the days before the lions came to guard the entrance.

The original publication and similar collections of historical images of New York City can be found in the collection of the Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History & Genealogy in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on 42nd Street. You can contact the Milstein Division by visiting us in person or by sending us an e-mail at histref@nypl.org.

See more images and information at NYPL.

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Fifth Avenue, New York (1911)

1902-1938. Cadillac - Chrysler - De Soto - Dodge - La Salle - Plymouth. Photographs - Specifications. 

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Chrysler/Dodge models

General Motors Company. Buick 1904-1938 Photographs, Specifications. 

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Buick, 1904-1938

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Egypt and Nubia

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Japan / Kimbei Kusakabe

 G. M. Coach Company 1936. Photographs - Specifications. 

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G.M. Truck Company

These selections are from the visual materials in a much larger holding donated to the Astor Library by the United States Sanitary Commission (USSC) in 1878. They include photographs that seem to have been made specifically to document the work and facilities of the USSC: homes for recuperating soldiers, the agency's headquarters, ambulance design and hospital treatment, figure studies of wounded soldiers and their recovery, and portraits of officials. These items form part of the United States Sanitary Commission Records, 1861-1872.

See more images and information at NYPL.

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Civil War Era Photographs

The great West illustrated in a series of photographic views across the continent taken along the line of the Union Pacific Railroad west from Omaha, Nebraska. / A.J. Russell. (1869) 

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The Great West Illustrated

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Cinema 1915

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G.M. Coach Company

The 2009 World Series brings together two cities uncommonly rich in baseball history... 

Some of the game's earliest years are chronicled in over 500 photographs, prints, drawings, caricatures, and printed illustrations donated in 1921 to the New York Public Library by early baseball player and sporting-goods tycoon A. G. Spalding (whose name to this day is printed across every ball used in the National League).

Though you might guess which team NYPL is rooting for this year, we've posted a selection of images from the Spalding Collection representing a variety of New York and Philadelphia ball clubs of yore. As their contemporary descendants clash on the field, here you'll find Philadelphia Quakers, Athletics and Keystones in a gentlemanly mix with New York Giants, Knickerbockers and Metropolitans, and of course Brooklyn Excelsiors and Atlantics.

Each one of these images of course has an enormous back story, which we hope the baseball history buffs among you will help fill in through comments, links, tags and annotations.

We also invite you to explore the full Spalding Collection on the NYPL Digital Gallery and through this finding aid (PDF) from our Manuscripts and Archives Division.

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NYC-Philly Vintage Baseball

Staff of the New York Public Library has hand picked a set of almost 500 images that represent the Hudson River Valley through several hundred years of history in conjunction with Mapping New York's Shoreline, 1609-2009, now up in the Gottesman Exhibition Hall at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.

The images, drawn from many of the library's divisions, depict landscape scenes in stereoscopic vision, a popular 19th century format; every day and commemorative menus from restaurants and catering halls; postcards of scenic places and buildings; and engravings of important estates, prominent citizens and dramatic turning points in historical events. These images have been geocoded and will become part of map-based bibliography, The Storied River, coming soon to the NYPL. Stay tuned, the launch will be posted on the NYPL's map blog...

Learn more about the NYPL Map Division.

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Mapping New York's Shoreline

Photographer Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) proposed Changing New York, her grand project to document New York City, to the Federal Art Project (FAP) in 1935. The FAP was a Depression-era government program for unemployed artists and workers in related fields such as advertising, graphic design, illustration, photofinishing, and publishing. 

Abbott's efforts resulted in a book in 1939, in advance of the World's Fair in Flushing Meadow NY. At the project's conclusion, the FAP distributed complete sets of Abbott's images to high schools, libraries and other public institutions in the metropolitan area.

These images are a selection of the library's holdings.

See more images and information at NYPL.

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Changing New York, 1935-1938

Depression-era photographs from the Farm Security Administration Collection by Ben Shahn, Jack Delano, Marion Post Wolcott, and others

See more images at NYPL.

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Farm Security Administration Collection

Photographs of British Algae by Anna Atkins (1799-1871) is a landmark in the histories both of photography and of publishing: the first photographic work by a woman, and the first book produced entirely by photographic means. Instantly recognizable today as the blueprint process, the cyanotypes lend themselves beautifully to illustrate objects found in the sea. The Library's copy of British Algae originally belonged to Sir John Herschel (1792-1871), inventor of the blueprint process, among his many other photographic as well as scientific advances. One of thirteen known copies of the title, Photographs of British Algae was acquired by The Library in 1985.

This set contains selections from several parts of this volume.

See more images and information at NYPL

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Cyanotypes of British Algae by Anna Atkins

Collection

A Collection