Over 800,000 Photos of Old New York City Are Posted Online

Painters on the Brooklyn Bridge circa 1914. OSHA would have a coronary.

The two men were discovered dead at the bottom of an elevator shaft in a 12-story Manhattan building, as if dumped there, one man sprawled on top of the other.

The rare crime scene photograph from Nov. 24, 1915, is one of 870,000 images of New York City and its municipal operations now available to the public on the Internet for the first time. The city Department of Records officially announced the debut of the photo database Tuesday. A previously unpublicized link to the images has been live for about two weeks.

Culled from the Municipal Archives collection of more than 2.2 million images going back to the mid-1800s, the photographs feature all manner of city oversight — from stately ports and bridges to grisly gangland killings.

The project was four years in the making, part of the department's mission to make city records accessible to everyone, said department assistant commissioner Kenneth Cobb.

"We all knew that we had fantastic photograph collections that no one would even guess that we had," Cobb said.

Read the rest here.

Here is the link to photo archive.  Unfortunately the publicity has caused so many hits that the site has semi crashed.