Prints and Plans

You can also order photographs from the 1940’s & 1980’s from

http://www.ci.nyc.ny.us/html/records/html/taxphotos/home.shtml

Although they can take sic weeks to arrive ours only took three.

TAX PHOTOGRAPHS
Between 1939 and 1941, and again in the mid-1980s, the city photographed every house and building in the five boroughs. Photographic prints of these unique images are now available for purchase.

HISTORY OF THIS COLLECTION:
During the 1930s, local governments began to use photography as a tool for appraising real property for taxation purposes. New York City was the largest municipality to adopt this technology. The result was 720,000 35mm black-and-white pictures of every building in the five boroughs. By the time the Municipal Archives accessioned the collection, the original nitrate negatives had begun to deteriorate and exhibit signs of “redox” blemishes (which look like giant snowflakes). With grant funds from federal, state, and private sources, the Archives duplicated the original negatives so that new prints can be produced and copied them to microfilm so that patrons can easily and safely view the entire collection.

By the early 1980s, the City’s Department of Finance, the agency responsible for appraising property for real estate tax purposes, determined that the 1940s photographs needed to be updated. From 1983 to 1988, again using 35mm cameras, their staff fanned out in the five Boroughs photographing every property, including vacant lots and tax-exempt buildings. They used color film stock resulting in over 800,000 photographs in both print and negative formats.