NYC Historical Streets

This repository contains shapefiles with street centerlines, traced with QGIS, from a selection of historical map layers of New York City from NYPL’s Map Warper.

The shapefiles from this repository are used by various parts of the NYC Space/Time Directory project.

Note: if you're interested in only using the data in this repository (instead of also editing and improving the Shapefiles), it might be easier to use the data published on the website of the NYC Space/Time Directory.

Coverage Map

To see which parts of New York City are covered by the shapefiles in this repository, please see this map.

Contributing

You can contribute by tracing streets from one of the unfinished layers in the table below, or by adding a new layer from Map Warper. A detailed tutorial is available on how to use QGIS to trace historical maps from Map Warper.

To contribute, fork this repository, and make a pull request when you're finished. If you’re adding a new layer, don’t forget to also add the layer to layers.json.

Status

Layer	Status	Map Warper
859	✅	Manhattan - Maps of the city of New York, 1857
860	✅	Brooklyn - Maps of the city of Brooklyn, 1855
867	In progress	Brooklyn - Robinson's atlas of the city of Brooklyn, 1886
883	In progress	The Bronx - Atlas of borough of the Bronx (1921)
1035	In progress	Staten Island - Atlas of the city of New York, borough of Richmond (1917)
1046	In progress	Queens - Atlas of the borough of Queens, 1912
1130	In progress	Brooklyn - Insurance Maps of New York (1887)
1138	In progress	Manhattan - Atlas 107. Vol. 1, 1894
1142	✅	Manhattan - Atlas 110. Vol. 2, 1903
1157	In progress	Manhattan - Insurance maps of the City of New York, Washington Heights (1893)
1162	✅	Queens - Atlas 134. Vol. 2, 1915

See Also

• Mauricio Giraldo’s animation of tracing historical streets