- New York Public Library: digital collections
These old pictures are from the NYPL archive and pretty much in there were photographs and pictures of a few old records. They had very few files about Jackson heights which made it a bit difficult to actually get some information. Most of them are pictures of the neighborhood and buildings of the area which lets us see how Jackson Heights was in the 1800 and 1900s and see how it has changed over the years. With this source, we can mainly observe some scenarios of the neighborhood and recognize changes over the years but it doesn’t let us know more about it. With primary sources, you can look and make your own assessments and reflections about the information you’re seeing but since it’s a picture it’s hard to get a lot of information out of it and you don’t have a base of information that another person is giving you to work with.
2. Old NYC
This source only has old pictures of the city distributed by location on a map so you can actually see where the objects in the pictures were located in a certain neighborhood. I really liked this source, I think it’s very useful and informative to be able to know where the picture was taken in order to compare the place to different times and to the present. This source shows that there were a lot of farms in Jackson Heights and that there were not many people living there in the beginning since the residential houses were very few. However, as the years go by you can start to see more and more houses being built and also big apartment buildings that show that a lot of people are living there. Primary sources like this are like time traveling to the past and place yourself in a particular street that you can find in the present. It lets you experience how things were in a way but at the same time, the experience is very restricted to the sense of sight and to the quantity and quality of the pictures.
3. NYC Department of Records & Information center
The third source I looked at was the NYC department of records. This source has fewer pictures of buildings and more pictures of people interacting in public spaces and of changes in the neighborhood being made. It has pictures of events, pieces of radio talks and public constructions. With this source, we can see how people interacted, for example, kids in parks, libraries or playgrounds or people in construction sites. It also reinforces the idea that the neighborhood changed rapidly over the years because of the increase in apartment buildings and people coming to live in them. Also, we can see that the space dedicated to green areas was much bigger than now but the playground is very small considering the amount of space that they had, which is still a problem now, except that now they don’t have any space to make bigger playgrounds.
