What is a great American city but an industrial gallery, alive with people and machines? Sometimes these images are bleak, as in the often circulated photo essays of the magnificent ruins of Detroit; sometimes they are provocative and hopeful, as in the images of New Orleans’ revival; and sometimes they are almost impossibly monumental, as in the images of 20th-century New York presented here. The online gallery features large-scale photographs of the human, such as the sea of bathers above; the man-made, such as the vaulted and cavernous City Hall Underground Station below; and the fusion of the two, such as artists posing on the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge below. In the New York City Archives’ online gallery, you can see more than 900,000 images from nearly a century of New York City’s indomitable grandeur. Better yet, browse the New York City Archives online gallery here. Still, the gallery is a remarkable collection of photographs to get lost in for hours, and is an important resource for historians and researchers of 20th-century American urbanism.