Local Knowledge, Part 2: Big Apple Building Photos

Tax photo of building where great-aunt Jennie and
great-uncle Paul lived in 1941-2.

This is part 2 in my series about local knowledge helping me research my Big Apple ancestors. Previously, I wrote about May 1 being Moving Day all over the five boroughs of New York City. This was a factor in understanding the locations of my grandpa Isaac Burk and his siblings who lived in the city.

Google Maps Street View

At this point, I had the address where my great aunt Jennie Birk Salkowitz moved with her husband, Paul Salkowitz, after they left the apartment building on Valentine Avenue in the Bronx where my grandpa Isaac resided.

Jennie's new residence at 276 East 203d Street was a short walk from her brother's apartment, really just a few steps around the corner.

What did this residence on 203d Street look like? Checking the Street View on Google Maps, I saw a building constructed long after World War II was over. In other words, Jennie and Paul's residence had been torn down and replaced some time ago.

I switched to Plan B, using local knowledge to find out what Jennie's residence looked like 80 years ago.

Digitized Municipal Archives Tax Photos

In November of 2018, the New York City Department of Records and Info Services announced it had just posted more than 700,000 photos of buildings all around the five boroughs. The b/w photos were taken between the years of 1939 and 1941, primarily for property tax purposes--very clear and well marked. It was like a visual time capsule being opened eight decades later.

The news spread widely over social media and genealogy groups. When the release originally took place, I looked up several other ancestral residences, so I was familiar with the routine. At the time, Steve Morse had not yet posted his nifty shortcut to finding a New York City building in this tax photo archive.

Not using the shortcut, I first clicked to the main NYC Municipal Archives Online Gallery of 1.6 million images, then to the tax photos. Next, I looked for the Bronx section of the tax photos.

Here, I followed instructions to find the block and lot number of the street address. That search didn't give me a specific page, so I tried again with only the block number and then quickly and easily browsed photo sets until I came to the page shown at top of this post.

Now I could see that Jennie and Paul had moved to a neat three-family home along a side street. It was a quieter street yet still only steps from where Jennie's brother lived.

Isaac had other siblings living in New York City. I needed more info to find them in the early 1940s. Once more, local knowledge came to my rescue, as I'll show in Part 3.