FIND A PHOTO OF YOUR HOME FROM THE 1980s
Between 1939-41 & again in the mid-80s, for the purposes of appraising property for taxes, NYC’s Department of Finance photographed every house & building in the five boroughs. The photos taken in the 80s are online. To find your building/home, you’ll need your borough number (5= Staten Island, 4 = Queens, 3 = Brooklyn, 2 = Bronx, 1= Manhattan) and your tax block/tax lot numbers. (To find your block & lot numbers, input your address here.)
Once you have those, you’ll need to put together a kind of code that looks like this: dof_1_02031_0020. (That’s the code for my apartment building.) To break it down:
dof is for department of finance
1 is my borough number
02031 is my block number (technically, my block # is 2031. I added one zero because a block number needs to be five numerals for search purposes. So if your block number is, say, 800, you’d change it to 00800, etc.)
0020 is my lot number. (Again, my lot number is technically 20–but for this search a lot number needs to be four numerals; hence “0020.”)
I put all the above together like so, dof_1_02031_0020, & searched for that here, in the NYC Municipal Archives Gallery. (I just used their regular search box, top right corner. )
Once you have those, you’ll need to put together a kind of code that looks like this: dof_1_02031_0020. (That’s the code for my apartment building.) To break it down:
dof is for department of finance
1 is my borough number
02031 is my block number (technically, my block # is 2031. I added one zero because a block number needs to be five numerals for search purposes. So if your block number is, say, 800, you’d change it to 00800, etc.)
0020 is my lot number. (Again, my lot number is technically 20–but for this search a lot number needs to be four numerals; hence “0020.”)
I put all the above together like so, dof_1_02031_0020, & searched for that here, in the NYC Municipal Archives Gallery. (I just used their regular search box, top right corner. )
