In the early part of the 20th century, a team of cameramen with the Swedish company Svenska Biografteatern were sent around the world to take footage of well-known places. They ended up with a priceless document of New York City in 1911 with A Trip Through New York City. The video opens and closes with shots of the Statue Of Liberty, but you can also catch the brand-new Manhattan Bridge, Battery Park, the Flatiron Building, Madison Avenue, the elevated railway lines at Bowery and Worth Streets, different parts of Broadway, and more.
The original 9-minute footage was restored by the Museum Of Modern Art for an exhibit in 2018 featuring all of Svenska Biografteatern's travelogue series. But now, video editor Denis Shiryaev has done another restoration of the video, colorizing the footage and upscaling it to 60 FPS and 4K resolution using neural networks. Get transported back over a hundred years ago in the video below.
You can check out the original MoMA version of the video below. (There's a third version which serves as something of the missing link between the MoMA version and colorized one as well.)
If that has got you in the mood to look at other old videos of the city, we have some recs: you're not going to want to miss out on the two videos considered the oldest recorded documents of NYC. Step back into the 1920s via a classic silent film. You can get a splitscreen look at the 1930s city vs. today. You can spend nine minutes in the 1940s subway system. Watch some incredible footage of the 1970s here. The NYPD has tons of surveillance footage from the '60s, '70s and '80s that's only recently been digitized. You can watch home videos recorded in the '70s and '80s, or look at the "creepy" subway of the '80s. And of course, you gotta watch this classic HD video of Manhattan from 1993.
[h/t Digg]
