NEW YORK —The two men had been found dead at the bottom of an elevator shaft in a 12-story Manhattan building, as if dumped there, one man sprawled on top of the other.
The rare crime-scene photo from Nov. 24, 1915, is one of 870,000 images of New York City and its municipal operations now available to the public on the Internet.
The city Department of Records on Tuesday officially announced the debut of the photo database at . A previously unpublicized link to the images has been live for about two weeks.
Culled from the Municipal Archives collection of more than 2.2 million images going back to the mid-1800s, the photographs feature all manner of city oversight — from stately ports and bridges to grisly gangland killings.
The project was four years in the making, part of the department’s mission to make city records accessible to everyone, said department assistant commissioner Kenneth Cobb.
“We all knew that we had fantastic photograph collections that no one would even guess that we had,” Cobb said.
The Associated Press
