It is a wonder.
"Just follow these simple instructions: At the NYCityMap Web site, click on the camera at the top of the page and move the slider beneath it back to 1924. The interactive city of 2010 fades away to reveal an aerial view of the five boroughs assembled from photographs that have been digitally stitched together.
"The effect is not as simple as it sounds. The old city doesn’t merely replace the new one. It seems to resurface from within it. Gone are Manhattan’s perimeter highways — the F.D.R. and the West Side Highway. On the east, the blocks run right up to the water’s edge, and on the west, they terminate in a hardworking dockside, with ships at berth where Battery Park City now stands.
"But the real fun begins as you zoom in, descending to a helicopter’s height above the streets. Begin in the now — zooming in to the block-level view on Madison Square Garden — and then slide back to 1924. Out of the rubble of its own destruction rises the old Penn Station, only 14 years old, just coming into its stride.
"Alas, we cannot zoom any closer than that rooftop view, or we might be able to look down onto the sidewalks themselves and catch a glimpse of those former New Yorkers, all caught up in the vividness, the newness of their vanished present."
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