The New York City Municipal Archives delivered an early holiday gift this month after putting their 1940s tax photo collection online. (Previously these were only available to view in person via microfilm.)
You can browse for yourself — there are 720,000 digitized photos! — at this link. High-resolution versions of these tax photos — print or digital — are available to purchase online.
Anyway, I spent
Here we go (in no particular order):
The Con Ed power plant on 14th Street and Avenue C...
The Church of the Immaculate Conception on 14th Street at First Avenue...
The Tompkins Square Library branch on 10th Street between Avenue A and Avenue B...
McSorley's on Seventh Street...
East Houston looking southwest at Norfolk and Essex (P.S. 20 the Anna Silver School is on that corner now)...
Astor Place (where Starbucks is now in the retail space)...
Looking toward Stuyvesant Street and 10th Street from Second Avenue...
The southwest corner of Seventh Street and Avenue B... (where 7B/the Horseshoe Bar/Vazac's is)...
The Christodora House on Avenue B at Ninth Street...
St. Brigid's on Avenue B at Eighth Street...
66 Avenue A between Fourth Street and Fifth Street (where Ink on A, Alphabets, Mast, Lancelotti Housewares, etc., are today) ...
313-315 Bowery (315 would become CBGB ... then John Varvatos ... the Palace Hotel was around until 1993, when the Bowery Residents Coalition signed a lease for the upstairs space)...
224-226 Avenue B between 13th Street and 14th Street (Mona's is in one of those spaces now)...
125 E. Seventh St. at Avenue A (currently Miss Lily's 7A Cafe in the retail space)...
106 Avenue C at Seventh Street...
28-30 Second Ave. at Second Street (now the Anthology Film Archives and Manhattan Mini-Storage)...
... and one spot that's not entirely recognizable today — 25 Cooper Square (now the Standard East Village)
