If you’re a fan of old photos, you’ll love a recent post at TheAtlantic.com called “Historic Photos From the NYC Municipal Archives“.

Apparently, the Archives — which are part of the city’s Department of Records and Information Services — “just released a database of over 870,000 photos from its collection of more than 2.2 million images of New York throughout the 20th century” and TheAtlantic.com selected 53 of its favorites which you can see here.

Here are two of my favorites from their list of 53.  First, is a view from the Williamsburg Bridge looking west on Delancey Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side — exactly the area that’s being contemplated for the Low Line Park that I mentioned in my last post.  This photo is from January 29, 1923:

Second, is the famed Sheep’s Meadow in Central Park which, based on this photo, was I guess at one time actually a meadow for sheep (circa 1900-1910:

If you’d like to see the entire catalog of the Archive’s photos, you can visit here.  The browsing functionality isn’t that great, but they have added some categories to help which you can visit here.