Matt Knutzen's blog

Over the years, as we push more and more of our maps onto the web, such as Pieter Goos' Zee-Atlas, 1672, from which the below image was taken, we ask…
...what do we do with all this stuff?
...how do we make digital maps meaningful?

One approach is through our blog, where we highlight various places and themes depicted. Often there is much more to read between the contours, about, among other things the social, geographic and cultural mix from where the maps were generated; something we, in future posts, will take the time to illuminate.

Another approach to extend the reach, utility and meaningfulness of our maps is through digital geographic indexing. Our staff has thus far created map indexes for close to 1/3 of our 10,000 digitized maps, which you can read about here and download here, in effect opening an opportunity for readers to access our collections geographically.

And while schematic and geographic indexes serve a much needed function, they merely point to the next logical steps in the presentation and re-purposing of map images in a web context.

The first step is placing the maps themselves (as opposed to outlines of the map coverages) into geographic context, or put another way, turning pictures of maps into digital geospatial information, where a pixel can be read by a computer as a pair of coordinates, as latitude and longitude.

These images can then, in turn, be rendered using tools such as web map servers and the ubiquitous Google Earth. The image below is Plate 1 from William Perris' Maps of the City of New York, 1852, georectified and then rendered in Google Earth.

Stay tuned. In my next post I'll go the details about how we "stretch" maps for web presentation. We will also explain how you too can participate.

Staff of the New York Public Library recently hand picked a set of nearly 500 images, collected from across our Digital Gallery, composing them as a curated set of images at the Commons on Flickr. They represent the Hudson River Valley through several hundred years of history and complement Mapping New York's Shoreline, 1609-2009, now up in the Gottesman Exhibition Hall at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.

The images depict landscape scenes in stereoscopic vision, a popular 19th century format; everyday and commemorative menus from restaurants and catering halls; postcards of scenic places and buildings; and engravings of important estates, prominent citizens and dramatic turning points in historical events. These images have been geocoded and are part of map-based bibliography, The Storied River, coming soon to the NYPL. Stay tuned, the launch will be posted on the NYPL's map blog...

In the meantime, enjoy the same photos at the Commons on Flickr, perused as a gallery of images... Mapping New York's Shoreline: The Storied River

...or, my favorite, pinned to a map on the Flickr website.

Learn more about the NYPL Map Division.

You might remember from previous posts, that the Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division has been busy digitizing our historical map collections, with a strong focus on New York City fire insurance maps. We’ve added some excellent new titles (about 500 maps total) to that collection in recent months detailing Queens and Brooklyn from the early 20th century. The example below is from E. Belcher Hyde’s Atlas of the Borough of Brooklyn, Vol. 7., 1907. This map shows an early Luna Park, Coney Island’s famous amusement park, just four years after it opened to the public, which itself was built on the site of the former Sea Lion Park, home of the world’s first looping roller coaster. And you thought the Cyclone was scary.

We've updated the Map Division's Google Earth index to digitized NYC map collections to include more than 2000 maps from 32 titles, organized chronologically and geographically (by borough), all published between 1852 and 1923. The map index requires installation of Google Earth on your computer.

There are three recommended ways to search for maps using this tool.

1. Select a borough and vintage using the folders from the list on the left sidebar.

2. Double click the map to fly to your chosen location, then use the time slider at the top left of the map frame to narrow the chronological search scope.

3. Enter a street address in the "fly to" search box, then use the time slider.

Once you've located a historical map coverage, scroll your mouse over the area and click. A popup window will allow you to access bibliographic information and a digital copy of the historical map. Happy surfing.

In a previous post, we looked at maps of Brooklyn from the 19th and early 20th centuries of the neighborhood once called Weeksville, centered on Hunterfly Road. It was there, in 1969, according to The Weeksville Society, that researchers rediscovered the "Hunterfly Road houses," the neighborhood's only remaining residential structures from the period. I'm curious to know if those same researchers used the Photographic Views of New York City, 1870s-1970s, located in The Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy, particularly the photograph below, shot by Percy Loomis Sperr in 1940, in their reports. Click the link at the bottom of this post to see what the Hunterfly Road houses look like today.

Google Maps Streetview

On today's map you wouldn't have a clue as to where the Crystal Palace at Reservoir Square was located. Looking at a William Perris' fire insurance map from 1853 however reveals that, where now stands our magnificent central library on the corner of 5th Avenue & 42nd Street, once stood the huge Croton distributing reservoir, gravity feeding the thirsty city from near the top of Murray Hill and a spectacular Crystal Palace, seen here as the large purple shape on the top left.

You can see both the reservoir and the Crystal Palace here.

An even closer look reveals a handwritten note reading "50,000". This is a fire insurance map which probably means that the fire insurance policy taken out for the Crystal Palace was $50,000 or about $1.5 million in today's dollars.

That seems like a shockingly low price for such a spectacular building.

Especially considering the fact that in 1858 it burned to the ground.

The story goes that the morning after the fire, in typical New York City fashion, street hawkers were selling still warm pieces of the melted Crystal Palace.

We've digitized more historical maps documenting the changing New York City landscape. Follow the link to a comprehensive listing of close to 2,700 maps showing buildings, old streets, farm lines, streetcar routes historical shorelines and more.

Here's a small section from G.M. Hopkins' 1880 Farm Line Atlas of Brooklyn.

Weeksville was a community of African Americans founded in 1838 by a freed slave named James Weeks in an area straddling modern day Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights in Brooklyn. By the 1860s, according to Weeksville Society, it had become a cultural nexus and a draft riot safe haven for New York City's growing African American population. While much has been written about its people, both today, as in this NY Times article from 2005 and in the past, as in The Freedman's Torchlight, one of the first African American newspapers, not all that much geographic information remains about this historical landscape. There are traces that surface today, from the Hunterfly Road Houses to Weeksville Park, commemorating a landscape swallowed up by Brooklyn's street grid. One of the remaining pieces of the streetscape is Hunterfly Place.

This one block section of street was once part of the larger Hunterfly Road, the main thoroughfare of Weeksville that ran north to south from what is now Fulton Street to East New York Avenue. The following is a time series of maps of the area published between 1880 and 1908 from the NYPL Digital Gallery that document the physical changes to this community. These maps are part of the larger series of property mapping from the collections of The Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division here at the NYPL.

Hopkins, G.M.
Detailed estate and old farm line atlas of the city of Brooklyn
1880

 read more »

A popular collection in the NYPL's Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, and one of my personal favorites, is the county atlas series, most of which was published following the passage of a federal law commemorating the centennial of the United States. We have recently digitized 43 atlases covering New York and New Jersey from our collection of more than 420 titles printed before 1900. See this page for a list of digital holdings from this series.

Their pages are filled not only with wonderfully detailed maps on the national, state, county, township and city level, but also with interesting, flat perspective engravings depicting local business districts, prominent estates and farms. Business directories sometimes accompany the map pages that, along with the drawings, provide a glimpse into local social and economic geography of the 19th century. They also give us an idea of who provided funding for the production of these subscription based publications.

I've always been fascinated with landscapes changing through time as seen though the lens of the map. Shorelines, especially where there are lots of waves and tides, are particularly interesting things in that they are so clearly dynamic. These fire insurance maps of Coney Island, created between 1880 and 1907 document those changes beautifully. In addition to those covering Coney Island, the NYPL has digitized close to 2000 maps at this level of detail for all five boroughs of New York City.

G.W. Bromley, Atlas of the entire City of Brooklyn, 1880, Plate 35

E. Robinson, Robinson's atlas of Kings County, New York, 1890, Plate 20

G.W. Bromley, Atlas of the Borough of Brooklyn, 1907, Plate 28