Fifth Avenue Then and Now: A Century of Streetviews in NYC

The New York Public Library has recently released even more digitized images from their vast collection, including more than 180,000 in the public domain. While browsing, one of the first collections I came across was a book published in 1911, titled Fifth Avenue, New York, From Start to Finish, with wide-angle streetview photographs made by photographer Burton Welles more than a century ago. I thought it would be fun to revisit those same locations using Google Maps Streetview images from today, to see what differences are visible. Some views look remarkably unchanged, while others are completely unrecognizable. The images are stacked on top of each other—unfortunately they never quite lined up enough to make use of my then-and-now fader widget. (Adding a note: I just discovered that the NYPL made their own wonderful then-and-now viewer for this same set of images.)

Read more
Hints: View this page full screen. Skip to the next and previous photo by typing j/k or ←/→.

Most Recent

  • © Karsten Mosebach / GDT Nature Photographer of the Year 2025

    Winners of the GDT Nature Photographer of the Year 2025

    A collection of winning and honored images from this year’s nature-photo competition

  • ESA / Hubble & NASA, K. Noll

    The 35th Anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope

    A collection of amazing recent images made with the Hubble Space Telescope

  • Andrew Harnik / Getty

    Photos of the Week: Pony Run, Corgi Race, Rocket War

    Mourners of Pope Francis gathered at the Vatican, scenes from the the second weekend of Coachella 2025, a humanoid-robot half-marathon in China, and much more

  • Olivier Morin / AFP / Getty

    Photographing the Beauty of the North

    Images of the people, animals, and landscapes of the Earth’s arctic and subarctic regions, photographed by Olivier Morin