Clickable city history
A look at some of the digtization going on at the Philadelphia City Archives.

The City Archives near 30th Street Station house more than two million images of every part of Philadelphia, dating from about 1860. In thousands of cardboard boxes, the city’s visual memory resides, untinted by nostalgia or grief or innumerable other transient human colorings.

Here, preserved on paper prints and on glass and plastic negatives, are images of the thriving tanneries and workshops of Northern Liberties and Kensington, the spiffy rowhouses, the old neighborhoods, the building projects, the public gatherings and celebrations.

And now the city is steadily putting it all on the Internet – everything from shots of the creation of City Hall’s exalted William Penn statue right down to images of sidewalk cracks – and making it available for anyone to view at www.phillyhistory.org.

Source: Philadelphia Inquirer
Thanks to D.R. for the tip.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 12th, 2007 and is filed under Archives and Special Collections, Databases, Directories, and Guides, Digitization Projects, Search News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.