New York City History

N-YHS holds 66,000 unique subway construction photographs that provide a wealth of information on the built environment of the city, including buildings that had to be demolished to dig the routes and the public spaces that were forever altered. The New York City subway system is the largest subway network in the country, and its construction – in three separate phases – constitutes one of the largest infrastructure projects ever undertaken by any U.S. metropolitan area. The photographs capture streetscapes and the rhythms of daily life in the city; document engineering technologies during a transitional era in which manual and animal labor coexisted with new, mechanized approaches; and depict the growth of the modern city and its ever more diverse population.

As described by one photography expert, the collection is “a major archive of aesthetically and historically important images ... They show the excavation, with pick-axe, spade, steam shovel and TNT, of Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn; the framing of tunnels and laying of tracks; the exact sites of stations above and below ground prior to their being built; and aspects of their original fine design. The pictures illustrate hundreds of little known facts of one of the world’s largest transportation networks.” Digitizing these 66,000 images and linking them to rich metadata will open up myriad research opportunities for urban historians, historians of science and engineering, photography historians, architectural historians and historic preservation scholars, transportation history scholars, historians of immigration and labor, and even contemporary urban and transportation