By Suzanne Ma
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN — In the 1780s, Eldridge Street, between Rivington and Stanton, was on the site of James Delancey's farm. Today, a public housing complex takes up most of this Lower East Side block.
In a series of animated sketches, computer programmer and amateur historian Zach van Schouwen has illustrated what one block of Eldridge Street would have looked like through eight generations of history.
Users can click on the timeline and find out the individual histories of each building.
The project, which van Schouwen calls "The Block," started in April when he began looking into the genealogy of his mother's side of his family. Those ancestors had emigrated from Ireland around 1855 and settled in a cramped tenement at 218 Eldridge St.
It "was their first American home that I could confirm," van Schouwen, 23, told DNAinfo. "It was built in 1837, meaning it was one of the absolute worst buildings on the block, with very little light and air, and no plumbing."
His research ballooned from there, and he started going through city tax records and photos at the municipal archives. He found property maps at the city's public libraries and the New York Historical Society that helped him determine the shapes and sizes of many of the buildings on the block.
"New York is so built-up that I find it easy to forget that it was ever any other way – that there's dirt under the buildings, that there used to be alleyways and open space," said van Schouwen, who was inspired to animate his findings, much like cartoonist Robert Crumb did in his famous "History of America" sketches.
Van Schouwen said he was fascinated by the fact that the rich and the poor lived directly across from one another in the middle part of the 19th century.
"People on the north side of the block live in 200 square foot apartments with nine or more people inside, and outhouses in the backyard," he said. "Whereas people on the south side [had] servants, gas lighting and running water."
Despite his meticulous research, van Schouwen said there was some guesswork involved "in coming up with a story that makes sense."
He couldn't find complete records between the years of 1802 and 1808, for example, and had to make educated guesses as to the state of construction.
"People talk about the way neighborhoods 'used to be,' but they almost never have any real information," he said. "That's why I wanted to come up with a definitive record."
