New Features

Visit PhillyHistory.org on your iPhone!

PhillyHistoryTeam — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 20:09:59 GMT

By Deborah Boyer

The PhillyHistory team is excited to announce that PhillyHistory.org is now accessible via iPhone at http://www.phillyhistory.org/i/! While PhillyHistory.org has been available on mobile phones for awhile, we had not yet developed a web application that allowed the website to be easily accessed and searched using an iPhone. To solve this problem, we created an iPhone specific web application that makes PhillyHistory.org easily accessible to iPhone users.

Since the display screen of an iPhone is obviously smaller than the screen on a computer, we chose to emphasize specific search criteria and photo display options to make the application as easy to use as possible. iPhone users have the option of searching for photographs by neighborhood or location or by navigating through a map of the city. The location of a photo is identified on the map by a red flag, and clicking on a flag displays the photograph and more information.

With full maps and geographic search capabilities, PhillyHistory.org on iPhone provides another great way to access historic photographs of the city. So if you’re walking around Philadelphia and want to know what an intersection looked like 60 years ago, pull out your iPhone or cell phone and check out PhillyHistory.org!

PhillyHistory.org Photos Now Available on Flickr!

PhillyHistoryTeam — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 19:24:09 GMT

By Deborah Boyer

We are excited to announce that a select number of images from PhillyHistory.org are now available on Flickr!

Flickr, a popular online photo sharing website, allows users to upload images and share those images with the public. With millions of users from around the world, placing PhillyHistory.org photos on Flickr provides an opportunity to introduce many new people to the fantastic collection of images in the PhillyHistory.org database. Sixty-six photos, including some of the oldest and most popular images from the City Archives, were hand-picked for inclusion on Flickr. The images are organized into four thematic sets that provide a visual history of Philadelphia’s neighborhoods, schools, construction and transportation projects, and public services and celebrations. Each photo is accompanied by information about the image, the address where it was taken (if available), and a link to the photograph on PhillyHistory.org.

One of the most exciting features on the new PhillyHistory.org Flickr photostream is the public commenting and tagging function. Since the PhillyHistory project began, we’ve received some wonderful stories and comments about the photographs from people around the world. Whenever possible, we try to share such feedback through our newsletter and other reports. The new Flickr photostream, however, gives you a chance to immediately comment on the photos, add notes directly to the images, tag the photos with keywords, and respond to comments left by other users. We’re hoping this feature will let the whole PhillyHistory.org community hear many more wonderful stories and remarks about the photos and what they mean to you.

The PhillyHistory.org photos on Flickr are available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/phillyhistory. We encourage people to visit the photostream and add their comments, notes, and tags to the photos. Let us know what you think about the images!

Introducing Google Street View on PhillyHistory.org!

PhillyHistoryTeam — Fri, 15 May 2009 18:47:33 GMT

By Deborah Boyer

Visitors to PhillyHistory.org may have noticed some interesting new features in the last couple weeks. We recently released the latest version of PhillyHistory.org which includes a few additions to the website. One of those additions is the inclusion of Google Street View. You may be familiar with Google Street View if you have experience using Google Maps. Google Street View provides street level photographs of cities and neighborhoods around the world. Using Street View on Google Maps, you can take virtual tours of various cities, including large portions of Philadelphia.

Street View provides a way to see the notable landmarks and general streets of a city without having to physically travel to that city. On PhillyHistory.org we thought that using Street View might be a great way to offer the ability to compare the historic photographs with a present day view of the same location. The historic photographs on PhillyHistory are beautiful, but after looking at them, it’s easy to start wondering if a certain building still exists or how the neighborhood has changed over 50 years. Short of actually going to the physical location where the photo was taken, however, it was difficult to view the modern location and contrast it to the historic photo.

Google Street View gives us a way to solve that problem. Thanks to the work of our software developers, we were able to add a link to Street View to many of the photographs in PhillyHistory.org. To see the Street View for a photograph, click on the small thumbnail of the photograph to load a larger detail view of the image. Below the historic photograph will be two small thumbnails – one of the historic image and one of a white box labeled “Google Street View.” Click on the Google Street View box to load a current view of the same location where the historic photo was taken. You may need to navigate up and down the road or pan the view in order to see the exact location that matches the historic photograph.

The results provide an exciting visual demonstration of how the city has changed and developed over the course of its history. A 1914 photo shows a few people standing outside the Head House Market near 2nd and Pine Streets. The present-day Street View for that location shows the same market house with a few changes. A photo from 1918 of the intersection of Arch Street and 10th Street includes several businesses and a sign stretched across the street proclaiming that “Food Will Win the War.” The same intersection in 2009 is still home to many businesses and restaurants. Instead of a war-time sign, an ornate Chinese gate extends across the street, reflecting the ancestry of many residents of an area which now makes up part of the Chinatown neighborhood.

While not every Philadelphia street is included in Google Street View, many streets are available. We hope you enjoy the opportunity to compare past architecture to the present landscape and learn more of the story of the city’s past. Check out the Street View on PhillyHistory.org, and let us know what you think at info@phillyhistory.org!