All My Love To Long Ago

"I might have to wait. I'll never give up. I guess it's half timing and the other half's luck. Wherever you are, whenever it's right, you'll come out of nowhere and into my life... I just haven't met you yet." -- Michael Buble

Old things fascinate me and I've spent most of my life trying to figure out why. Is it the byproduct of growing up in a disposable culture? Is it sentimental? Is it part of the engineering mindset to appreciate things designed to withstand the test of time? Is it a consequence of always wondering "why?" Am I just an old soul? Whatever it is, I can't walk around an antique structure without thinking of people treading the same path a century earlier, and I spent far too much of my childhood and adolescence poring through Historical Society records, microfilm, and old photographs to learn about the origins of some of my favorite pieces of New York City.

Imagine my excitement, then, when I discovered that the aerial map on New York City's official website gained a new layer last week. You can now type in any address, district, or place of interest in the five boroughs to see what it looked like in 2008, 2006... or 1924.

Sure, I know when all the city's major landmarks were built -- most self-respecting history buffs have a general idea of timelines -- but it's still difficult to envision the way things looked without them. Well, it's all there in black and white on the NYC.gov website. I spent hours of my Friday poring over every inch of Jazz Age New York City, and the ways in which it's changed since then blew my mind. Half of the city's bridges didn't exist in 1924. (How the hell did people get to Staten Island?!) My place of employment looks like a row of tenements. Flushing Meadows Park, site of two World's Fairs and one of my favorite places to think myself back into the past, looks like F. Scott Fitzgerald's valley of ashes -- a barren wasteland covered in cinder. The Metropolitan Museum of Art was half its current size. And the location of my favorite building on the planet, Eero Saarinen's TWA Flight Center at JFK International Airport, was completely undeveloped:

I then decided to punch in the addresses of three places I've called home. First was my high school, situated at the intersection of four major highways in one of the busiest parts of Queens:

Next came the Seeley W. Mudd building, which houses my college's engineering department:

Last was the apartment house where I grew up:

The building's current foundations are outlined on each map in red... but the outline is merely a hint of what's to come. I've spent most of my life inhabiting those three places, and only eighty-five years ago, they were someone's backyard, an empty lot, and the middle of the freaking wilderness. It certainly puts my surroundings into perspective -- and makes me wonder what New York City will look like when I'm eighty-five years old.