Your Free Guide to Lower Manhattan

What is Twenty-Four Dollar Island?
People who live or work in Lower Manhattan or who visit here usually learn about it from guide books or websites. Information in guide books is often stale, not updated, and organized in linear structure. Websites about Lower Manhattan are frequently corporate, or city-run. The goal of this project is to create free, complete, up-to-date and reliable material about Lower Manhattan and to give everybody the chance to share their stories, their histories, or tourist information.

Anyone can add information about museums, communities, schools or news about the rebuilding process. You can add stories of personal encounters, information about communities, inexpensive places to sleep, secret locations, images and stories of demonstrations, local histories or narratives of your experiences in Lower Manhattan. In a few simple steps you can contribute to the map and tell your friends. The project started in April 2004 and now contains several hundred entries.

How do you deal with issues of intellectual property when people upload images or texts?
Be aware of copyright issues when you upload a file. Never use materials that infringe the copyrights of others. In the text that you add to the image describe the copyright situation. Should you find a fascinating story about Lower Manhattan in a book or newspaper article it is important to know that they are copyrighted. But, it is the creative expression of ideas that is copyrighted, not the ideas themselves. It is perfectly legal to write about these ideas in your own words.
Submissions to Twenty-Four Dollar Island may include images, and text quotes used under the U.S. Copyright law "fair use" doctrine. We prefer the use of images with the most free license such as GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) or public domain. Along with the GFDL all material on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Documents (images and texts) can be copied and distributed as long as the source is stated and non-commercial, free access to the information remains intact. This principle is called copyleft.

What about images from ".gov" or ".mil" websites?
The general rule is that images which were taken by a government employee as part of his/her job are public domain. There may however be exceptions to this rule. Always check.

How do you protect my privacy when I submit my name and email address to this site?
Participants in this site do not have to create an account. The site is open to anyone's submission without trace. You may feel authorship pride and have an interest to include your name. Your email address is not displayed and only kept to get in touch with you shopuld there be questions about copyright issues or if we have to remove your submission for other reasons.

If you suspect copyright infringement...
Twenty-Four Dollar Island does not police materials before participants upload them. We cannot determine if the correct ownership is stated in a given submission. We will immediately remove any material that has infringed the rights of others. If you believe that a particular submission infringes another's copyright, please send us a comment to info@24dollarisland.net. To request removal you must be either the owner of the copyright or a person to act on behalf of the copyright owner. We will email you our fax details so that you can provide us with a statement of claim.

Is this project open source?
You bet it is. It is built with php and mysql.

Which file image file formats do you support for upload?

The site currently supports ".jpg," ".jpeg," and ".png"
Width and height need 280 pixels;
Ideal image file size is between 35KB and a max of 70KB
Examination of copyright as it applies to images is required.
A no-porn rule is strictly examined.

Where does the title "Twenty-Four Dollar Island" originate?
The title was inspired by a short film of Lower Manhattan by documentary pioneer Robert Flaherty, shot in 1927.

If you would like to help develop this site or if you have infrequently asked questions -- send them to info at 24dollarisland dot net.