Tax Photographs

New York City has been so built up for so long that for all the development that goes on here, it’s common to live in, work in, or visit buildings with a colorful history of use and reuse and reinvention that can stretch back for decades. It’s usually cheaper and speedier to fix up an old building than go through the hassle and expense of tearing it down and building another on the lot, so even in the years since I’ve returned here I’ve seen places almost completely transformed yet still retain some sense of their past. As Luc Sante (who went to my high school, which has its own 90-year-old building) writes in the introduction to one of my all-time favorite books, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, this is a city of ghosts where the old is always showing up among the new.

So I’m totally giddy about a new program that I read about on Gothamist yesterday: the city is selling reproductions of archival photographs of old buildings around the city. Between 1939 and 1941, the city photographed every building in New York City to help with tax appraisal, and now they making prints made from the microfilms of those records available to the public. You need to know the official block and lot number of the property when you order a photograph, but for a 5-buck extra fee they’ll even research that for you. This kicks so much ass I can hardly stand it!

I wish the house I grew up in had been around then, but there are still a few buildings I’d consider ordering:

• 29 Whitney Ave., in Staten Island

• 55 East 84th St.

• 356 West 58th St.

• 884 Targee St., in Staten Island

• 1055 Targee St., in Staten Island

• 82 East 4th St.

• 87 Clermont Ave., in Brooklyn

• 222 Varet St., in Brooklyn