wires on the Brooklyn Bridge October 7, 1914 -- 31 years after it first opened

Genesis of a icon: In this June 5, 1908 photo, the Manhattan Bridge is less than a shell, seen from Washington Street. It wouldn't be opened for another 18 months and wouldn't be completed for another four years

The main concourse of Grand Central Terminal, in New York, is seen from the Campbell apartment in this 1937 photo. The posh apartment, in one of America's grandest train stations, was the playground of financier John Campbell in the roaring 1920.

The project was four years in the making, part of the department's mission to make city records accessible to everyone, said assistant commissioner Kenneth Cobb.

'We all knew that we had fantastic photograph collections that no one would'Lucky' Luciano. Luciano is considered the father of organized crime in New York and was the first to divide the city sections controlled by five mob families

Murder most foul: A detective took this crime scene photo in 1918 after children found the body of Gaspare Candella stuffed in a drum and dumped in a field in Brooklyn, New York

The gallery includes images from the largest collection of criminal justice evidence in the English-speaking world, a repository that holds glass-plate photographs taken by the New York City Police Department.

It also features more than 800,000 color photographs taken with 35mm cameras of every city building in the mid-1980s to update the municipal records, and includes more than 1,300 rarely seen images taken by local photographers of the Depression-era Works Progress