In a previous post I showed you some vintage photographs of New York City which can be found on Wikimedia Commons. Today, I want to show you some more great NYC images you can find in old guide books to the city. As these have been extracted from pdf files they are, of course, not of as high quality / resolution as the Wiki images but there are still some fantastic pictures to be found in vintage e-books. Remember also, that if you find, and make use of such images, it is much less likely that others will be using the same images as they are not available on a google image search (or possibly any other way of searching images you can think of on the web).

Take a look:

This great photo of Wall St (I like the old vehicles shown – a bit more traffic than that in Manhattan today!) is taken from ‘Cue’s Guide to New York City‘ (1940)

This superb illustration depicting the Municipal Office Building in construction is taken from a 1915 book ‘New York: A Series of Wood Engravings In Color‘.

Broadway and the Stock Exchange taken from ‘New York of  Today‘ (1917)

These superb photographs showing a very different Mahattan skyline to that of today, were taken from the obsevation deck the Woolworth Building, which was, at the time, the world’s highest building. There are some amazing illustrations of both the interior and exterior of the Woolworth in this short 1918 book ‘The Cathedral of Commerce‘.

If you would like to see some more photos / illustrations taken from vintage NYC books please click HERE where you can see my New York e-book collection.

The great thing about all the images I have shown you here and the books I have taken them from is that they are all out of copyright. I think that there is a massive amount of material here which has huge potential for public domain product development.