These are undoubtedly aerial photographs, produced throughout the 20th century for local governments to update or correct tax maps used for tax assessment.  The local government would retain the large photographic prints, and sometimes mount them on boards or store them in a post binder.  If you can find them, sets of these photographs made over the years are invaluable in showing changes in the built landscape.  Companies such as Fairchild Aerial Survey would shoot the photos from their own planes with special cameras.  In suburban and rural areas, the photos would be taken in the dead of winter (no foliage) on a bright sunny day, with the sun at an angle to better show off features such as houses and roads.

You might contact the Municipal Archives to see if they have NYC aerial photos.  The State Archives' retention schedule for County government, which does not apply to NYC, lists aerial photographs and negatives for permanent retention.

David W. Palmquist
NY State Museum
518-473-3131

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Can any subscriber give me a better citation to something I can reconstruct
only in my memory?

In the 1970's, when the NYC Municipal Reference Library was still high up in
the Municipal Building, they had a sort of aerial-photograph landmap of
Manhattan (or was it all of New York City)?   It was oblong-bound in green
corduroy, with photographic plates of straight-down aerial views of the city,
about 1" = 200' - roughly the same as the more recent Bromley/Sanborn series
of maps of the city.   I have never seen another one.

I'm looking for one for Queens now, and can't reconstruct the citation (and
thus publisher and coverage) of the one I remember.

Is any other subscriber familiar with a similar series of photographic maps?

Christopher Gray
Office for Metropolitan History
246 West 80th Street, #8, NYC  10024
212-799-0520  fax -0542
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