Bringing Past, Present and Future Into Focus

Perhaps the most obvious use of a smartphone app is to tell you what is nearby. But a number of apps will also tell you what used to be nearby, or even what might have been nearby — less practical but often thoroughly satisfying experiences.

WhatWasThere, a project that includes a Web site and a free iPhone app, allows people to post historical photographs, along with their location and date, and then browse what other people have posted on city maps. Since the project was started in February, about 12,000 images have been uploaded, 500 or so in New York City. Many come from institutional archives. But the developers of the project also urge people to post photographs from family collections as a way to put them in context before they are lost to history.

The most ambitious part of WhatWasThere is its attempt to fuse the historical photographs with their present locations. When users hold up phones to a location, they can overlay the app’s historic photo, and then fade between the two, seeing more of the present or more of the past. (Users of the Web site can do the same thing, using Google’s Street View.) The results are spotty, because you have to match your location to that of the photograph, something that is not always possible. But when it works, the effect is haunting.

The project is still expanding as the developers solicit photographs from more institutions and build new features. One problem has been pinpointing exact locations. Some lost structures are not in quite the right places. The Fifth Avenue residence of William K. Vanderbilt, for instance, is listed as across the street from where it once stood, so I realized later I was looking at the wrong spot. Some of the work of locating images will be outsourced to users in later versions, which will include a game in which users will be shown a photograph and earn points if they can find out where it was taken.

Android and iPad versions are due out later this year.

Another play on this idea is It Happened Here, an app that places descriptions of historic events on a map. Guides are available for a number of cities, including New York. The chosen events are amusingly random (Celebrity Photography Gets Its Start, Alexander Hamilton Is Buried After Duel, Tupac’s Stepfather Goes Into Hiding). Each comes with a photograph and a short description of what happened. There are also links to Web sites with more information, which range from helpful to useless. The entry for the site of the original Bloomingdale’s store, for instance, links to the current store’s Web site, as though a little historical context might inspire you to browse for shoes.

Instead of focusing on the past, the Museum of the Phantom City, free for the iPhone, focuses on alternative views of the future. The app offers users a chance to “see the city as fantasized by architects and other visionaries through history.” Like the other apps, it presents a map with locations to click on, but in this case they are descriptions and drawings of domes over Midtown, a New York of elevated walkways or a city rebuilt after melting ice caps inundated the streets with saltwater.

The app intentionally sacrifices ease of use for ambience, but the eerie intro starts to feel like a waste of time after you have watched it once or twice, and a clearer map might have looked less distinctive but would have been easier to follow. Some users will also be annoyed by the feature that allows you to look at a node on the map only if you are actually nearby; I liked it. And for those who have never read the prose of architects explaining conceptual ideas, prepare yourself.


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