Tax Photo Time Warp (TP:TW NYC) was developed to provide a new way to experience the history of Manhattan south of 14th Street through New York City tax photos representative of two eras of the city's history, the 1940s and 1980s. Click on a 3D building to see its tax photo and switch between the 40s and 80s by using the 'Time Warp' switch at the top right of the screen. Find an address by clicking on 'Search'.

TP:TW was developed with Vite, Bootstrap, the ArcGIS Maps SDK for Javascript 4.x, the Luna Imaging API, anime.js, 2014 3D NYC building models provided by NYC OTI through the NYC Open Data Portal, 3D buildings built after 2014 were created by the author using ArcGIS CityEngine and models of ships and planes created by the author using Asset Forge. Passenger plane and blimp model courtesy of Poly by Google [CC-BY] via Poly Pizza.

During the years 1939-1941 the New York City Department of Taxation and the Federal Government's Works Progress Administration teamed up to photograph every building in New York City. The purpose of the project was to streamline the task of determining real property values across the five boroughs. What resulted was a unique collection of more than 700,000 photographs that provide an invaluable record of New York City's built environment at a time just before the city was radically changed through the massive public works projects of the 1950s and 60s.

In the 1980s, the New York City Department of Finance, having decided that the 1939-41 tax photos were too old to be useful, again set out to produce a similar series of building level tax photographs. However, instead of using 35mm cameras the agency set out to utilize a new technology, Laser Video Disks, which were used to capture each building as a single video frame. The series of photos produced are evocative of the era yet lower in quality than the images taken some forty years prior.

All NYC tax photos copyright © New York City Municipal Archives.

Application copyright © 2023 Daniel H. Watts