New York then and now: Astonishing black and white photos from the early 20th Century show NYC neighborhoods with empty streets and vacant plots of land

UK Daily Mail   "A collection of 17,000 black and white photographs stored in the New York Public Library's digital archives offer an illuminating look at how the city appeared almost a century ago.  

"The images were captured by renowned photographer Percy Loomis Sperr, who was contracted by the Library to document the physical appearance of the five boroughs between the late 1920s and the early 1940s. 

"Many of the old photographs highlight how much New York streetscapes have been transformed in the intervening years, with entire areas completely altered by mass development.  

"Queens, in particular, looks strikingly different today than it does in Sperr's snaps, with the borough undergoing a population boom and a building blitz beginning in the 1930s. 

"However, other photos taken by Sperr show that the city still looks strikingly similar in certain areas - something that may come as a surprise to people who associate New York with unending construction and constant aesthetic transformations. 

"While Manhattan's SoHo, West Village and Hell's Kitchen neighborhoods may have been gentrified, many of the their buildings remain in place, proving that the bones of New York City were laid long before the beginning of the 20th Century. " . . .  

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