Last week, the New York Public Library released twenty thousand maps from its extensive collection, which includes more than four hundred thousand sheets and twenty thousand books and atlases, as free, high-resolution digital downloads. In announcing the newly accessible maps, the N.Y.P.L. explained that the holding includes more than a thousand maps of New York City from the seventeenth century to the twentieth century, “which detail transportation, vice, real estate development, urban renewal, industrial development and pollution, political geography among many, many other things.” Maps like these can be used to help historians visualize phenomena that have shaped the city. For example, they show how ethnic enclaves shifted as Italian, Jewish, and Chinese immigrants traded places in lower Manhattan or how Manhattan’s shoreline has grown outward, as a result of infill and real-estate speculation, creating new parts of the city where before there was only water.
From NewYorker
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