How we know what we know
This archive is generated by an AI pipeline. Every photograph, every historical claim, and every reconstruction on this site carries a provenance trail — this page is that trail, in plain language.
Real photographs, verified
Every photo in this archive is confirmed as this specific place before it's shown — not just scraped and trusted. A photo that hasn't been confirmed doesn't get a Verified chip, and doesn't anchor a reconstruction.
History, cited or refused
Every historical claim on this site — a tenant's name, a building's past, an era's story — either carries a citation back to its source, or it isn't published at all. A claim with no source stays an operator lead, never a public statement.
Reconstruction, anchored and labeled
Where no historical photograph survives, the archive can reconstruct what a place likely looked like — always anchored to real evidence (an era's known facade, a verified photo of the actual site), and always labeled as a reconstruction, never passed off as a period photograph. Where no photograph of a place exists at all but its written record is rich, the archive may show an imagined rendering — drawn only from cited records, always labeled imagined, and never presented as a photograph.
A human confirms what matters
The pipeline proposes; an operator decides what counts as verified history. Community memories, corrections, and the archive's own research all pass through a human gate before they're marked as confirmed — the one claim class this archive treats as settled fact.
Every dollar on a ledger
AI reconstruction costs real money per image. Generation runs against a hard daily budget — the pipeline cannot spend past it, no matter how much the archive still wants to build. Nothing here runs on an open tab.
The chip vocabulary
A real photograph, confirmed to be of this specific location — not a stock image, not a guess.
An AI reconstruction, anchored to real evidence and always labeled — never presented as an original photograph.
An operator has explicitly confirmed this claim as history.
The pipeline's best-sourced read of what happened, cited but not yet human-confirmed.
A plausible extrapolation into the future — a projection, not a historical claim.