Places: Atlases, Maps, and Geospatial material.

The atlases, maps and geo-spatial material included in the Boston Streets collection measure and record the growth of the physical landscape of over time and the changing use of space. Atlases from 1874, 1898, and 1928 are available for browsing and searching, both as documents and utilizing a geospatial mapping tool. The atlases contain an overview map of the city and detailed, hand-colored plates of smaller sections of the city. These atlases contain information about property ownership and land use as well as being a record of the streets and addresses in the city. Overview maps of Boston, ranging from 1844 to 1950 are also available in both forms.

Geographic points corresponding to specific addresses in the city that were derived from the atlases became the basis for the linkages between the map points, the directories, and the images. The geospatial access tool has a collection of points that mark addresses from each of the atlases, along with buildings and other areas from the overview maps. To learn more about how the maps and the geospatial information derived from them were created and used, see the project documentation in the Project Details.