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Almost a million images of New York and its municipal operations have been made public for the first time on the internet.

The city's Department of Recordsofficially announced the debut of the photo database.

Culled from the Municipal Archives collection of more than 2.2 million images going back to the mid-1800s, the 870,000 photographs feature all manner of city oversight -- from stately ports and bridges to grisly gangland killings.

Always moving: Workers dig in Delancy Street on New York's Lower East Side in this photo dated July 29, 1908. The historical pictures released online for the first time show New York in the late 19th and early 20th centuries

A bridge too far? Painters hang from suspended 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 even guess that we had,' he said.