Then and now
Fascinating photo gallery: Vertigo then and now. A couple dozen stills from the movie Vertigo, showing various locations in San Francisco in 1958, plus photos of the same locations today. Lots of food for thought about how cities change over the course of 45 years; lots of material for an Intracities story there if someone's inclined to use it. (Only nine days left 'til the antho closes!)
(Note that the main page listing the photo locations probably contains some spoilers for the movie—I haven't seen the movie in years, so I didn't look carefully at the descriptions, just clicked all the links.)
The cars change, of course, and some of the buildings. The colors change a lot, but I suspect that's mostly due to the aging film stock of the stills. (Everything looks a little run-down in the old pictures; I can't tell whether that's some sort of sepia tone from the original film, or the effects of age on the film, or simply that a lot of buildings have been renovated and repainted lately. Certainly several of the roads are more patched and less smooth in the older pictures.)
But the most surprising thing to me is how 45 years of tree growth changes the look of things. Despite all the obvious evidence, I don't tend to think of cities as having many trees in them. But in these comparison photos, in some cases the trees are the biggest change. The captions note that several nice views have been lost as trees grew to cover them.
I've seen old pictures of cities, but rarely side-by-side comparisons like this. Cool stuff.
