Image used with permission of the copyright holder Memory Lane is now a destination accessible to you via Google Street View (or something similar). The painstaking work of two programmers — Dan Vanderkam and Raven Keller — gave birth to the time machine; or at least the internet equivalent. By retrieving all the old images from San Francisco’s historic photo collection and layering them on top of an interactive map, similar to Google Street View, the duo brought San Francisco to life around the 19th century.
Called OldSF, this new project allows you to zoom in on certain parts of the City by the Bay, after which you’ll be able to access photos from as far back as 1850 and as recent as 2000. In total, Vanderkam and Keller geocoded some 13,000 images.
And that was no easy feat — if you look at the Collection’s website, you’ll see that finding its vast database takes considerable effort (although it’s well organized). The site states: “Residential buildings are not digitized. The companies are arranged according to the name of the company, and the churches according to the denomination. In addition, all transport lines are digitized — a building could be in the background of a transport photo.”
Although the city is now known as the tech capital of the US, these old photos show that wasn’t always the case. Streets now famous for Google shuttles and hipster cafes are steeped in nostalgia — you can check out views from City Hall, the Baldwin Hotel at its peak (now permanently closed), and various views of Central Park.
And apparently people can’t get enough of this new project. Good luck actually visiting OldSF online — most eager history buffs are met with a message that reads: “This app has temporarily exceeded its serving quota. Please try again later.” Because apparently a lot of people want to see what San Francisco looked like before it was… well, San Francisco.
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Source: newstars.edu.vn