Hoping to find the branch of his family that came to America at the turn of the century, Tomas, a Russian immigrant boy, stows away on a freighter and lands in New York Harbor. Armed with a stereopticon (a primitive device for viewing 3D photos) and a collection of stereo pictures taken decades earlier by an ancestor who sent them home to Russia, Tomas encounters the staggering sights and sounds of New York City--not as it was in his old photos, but as it appears today.