The city has changed drastically over the past 40 years, yet the MTA map designed in 1979 has largely endured. This New York subway map animation is the best thing you’ll see all day.
Miscellaneous
Brooklyn Streets Originally Native American Trails
While we take for granted the paths and roads we use on a daily basis, it’s interesting to find out how they came to be. It’s not a new concept that paths worn by the comings and goings of early dwellers and subsequent settlers in a particular area became roads, streets and thoroughfares, often with names that reflect their beginnings. Brooklyn Heights Blog (via Viewing NYC) shares some insight into Brooklyn’s familiar roads that began as Native American trails on a 1946 map titled “Indian Villages, Paths, Ponds and Places in Kings County.”
The map, which comes to us courtesy of the Brooklyn Historical Society, was published in 1946 by James A. Kelly, who was the Brooklyn Borough Historian at the time. It’s noted that “some of the trails that exist today as major thoroughfares, like Fulton Street, Flatbush Avenue and part of Atlantic Avenue.”
Logofonts, by Emanuele Abrate
Emanuele Abrate illustrates the typefaces used in some of the most famous brands.
Vintage New York Blizzards, by The New York Times
Early New York Times photographs of snowstorms really capture the havoc, misery and peril a blizzard could visit on the city in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The Blizzard of 1888, for example, dumped 21 inches of snow on the city and killed an estimated 200 New Yorkers. But even a garden-variety snowstorm in those days would menace New York’s main form of transit — horses — and impose human suffering of all kinds, while posing the immense logistical challenge of clearing an entire metropolis of snow.
Everything Ages Fast, Part II
Per my previous post from August 2010, here are some more ingenious vintage advertisements for modern day products.
New York City in 1911, by Svenska Biografteatern
Originally filmed by the Swedish company, Svenska Biografteatern, on a trip to America, the footage has been speed corrected (slowed down), with sound added by videographer Guy Jones. Read more
The Literal World Map
Take a look at this interesting world map with the literal names of countries, commissioned by Credit Card Compare (which I think is something like NerdWallet).