DepotHack: Those cannons mark the entrance to the Portsmouth Athenaeum, and were "taken from the British by Commodore Perry at the Battle of Lake Erie, September 10, 1813." See this page.

Well done, TimB, on that fabulous transformation of the then/now views. Isn't technology wonderful, that we can almost step into a time-machine, with the help of skilled and meticulous artists? Fascinating!

At the extreme right and about two doors down on the sidewalk are what look like two cannon barrels. Wonder if they have some particular use of if they are just purely decorative? Also wonder if they are Civil War or Revolutionary War cannons?

Nice job TimB

... here and, in the distance, here.

TimB, the large-ish building down the street (to the right of the church) is National Block. I linked to some interesting history of its ground-floor occupant, the Granite State Fire Insurance Company, in an earlier Shorpy comment.

I live in the next town over. Portsmouth is the mecca of the NH seacoast now. This view is known as Market Square. Basically the hub of modern downtown Portsmouth. The church is still there, and is lit up at night.

Notable worshippers during its long history: General William Whipple, signer of the Declaration of Independence, John Langdon, signer of the U.S. Constitution, Daniel Webster, John Paul Jones, and President George Washington.

Google was unusually cooperative with the angle for this one, though I still had to do some compositing. I didn't do much with the right side, since I didn't have a good angle on it, and the original pic didn't give us much building detail anyway. You can compare the sidewalks, though. One interesting aspect is that the sidewalks seem to be bigger these days, which is unusual.

That one large-ish building down the street is the same, but I got tired of trying to align it without breaking the alignment of the church and that one chimney further down I was using as a reference. :) So sorry about that flaw.

Click here for larger version (4.4 MB)

One of these days I want to do one of these where I pull out the old citizens and carriages and "ghost" them into a modern shot.

Edit: I just noticed the time in the old pic and Google are only 15 minutes apart, and the shadows seem to be about the same angle, so might be around the same of time of year as well.