Virtual New York City continues to grow in size, and will be launching its second “Disaster” exhibit– “The Great Blizzard of 1888″– in December 2002. Nineteenth-century New York’s reaction to the Great Blizzard provides great insight into the city’s process of modernization. This natural disaster paralyzed the city for a week in March, and in the process of digging themselves out, New Yorkers realized some of the shortcomings of the city’s infrastructure. “The Great Blizzard of 1888″ features nearly one hundred fully-contextualized primary sources, including nearly seventy images and thirty documents from the Old York Library.

Virtual New York City has also recently added a search function that allows visitors to find all the documents and images scanned for use on the site, which numbers close to 400 items, and is growing. Once “The Great Blizzard of 1888″ is launched, researchers from the New Media Lab will begin work on the next two nineteenth century disasters that will appear on the site: “The Fire of 1835″ and “Cholera.” These two exhibits are scheduled to be completed by Spring 2003.