Cornell University Library's Social Welfare Digital Collection brings together manuscripts, early journals, narratives, reports, letters, photographs, prints, and much more that document the history of social welfare in the United States. The two foci here include the historical development of social welfare services in New York and the history of social welfare provisions by and for African...

Like many urban areas throughout the world, New York has experienced numerous transformations during its storied past, with certain elements of the built environment existing as mere palimpsests amidst more modern surroundings. Kevin Walsh, a lifelong New Yorker, has fashioned this fun and informative tribute to the various elements of the city's compelling past. The sections featured on the site...

The majority of National Trust Park properties commemorate the lives of famous politicians and other well-known Americans, but the Lower East Side Tenement Museum commemorates the everyday (and in some cases extraordinary) lives of some of the 7,000 immigrants who lived at 97 Orchard Street from 1863 to 1935. At the site, visitors can take virtual tours of immigrant family apartments, including...

Part of NYPL's evolving Digital Library, the Picture Collection Online is a collection of 30,000 public domain digital images from books and periodicals, original photographs, prints, and postcards. Primarily dated pre-1923, the Picture Collections includes some of the most popular images in the NYPL collection. The physical collection is housed in folders by broad subject headings, which can be...

The New York Historical Society is home to some of the most fascinating and extensive archives of photographs of the Boroughs and their surroundings on the web. Starting with street scenes, portraits, and landscapes from the late 1830’s, documentary images progress throughout the decades and culminate with the end of World War II. Scroll through the photographs on the landing page for some...

The New York Public Library's Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy boasts a collection of over 80,000 original photographs of New York taken between the 1870s and 1970. This site gathers many of those images together into a dynamic online map outfitted with red dots. Readers may zoom in, zoom out, and click on the dots to find photographs drawn from...

New York City has a hundred stories in every block and thousands of tales within each borough. Some of these stories can be told simply by looking closely at the built environment and this digital collection from the New York Public Library strives to do just that. The offerings in this collection include views of Washington Irving's home in the 1860s, street views by noted photographer Alice...