New York’s Herald Square on May 11, 1896. (Library of Congress/Yestervid)

This fascinating video, “Oldest footage of New York City ever,” filmed between 1896 and 1905, has been seen on this blog before. I post it again because, first, it is so amazing, and second, it has a new feature my first post of this lacked: a strip with maps of where the scene being shown was shot and in what direction the camera was pointing.

The scenes are spliced so as to lead the viewer backward in time. What the producers think most people will be most interested in seeing comes last. I would have flipped the sequencing so that some sense of moving forward in time is retained. But there is so much going on in the streets and sidewalks that the order doesn’t really matter. There is a host of personal incidents that take place…