This is an amazing map of Yosemite and the mid-Sierras. It’s from 1947, and the detail of the terrain and the hillshading is gorgeous. I repaired and restored this old map…it was creased, stamped and stained.
Get a high-quality reproduction on archival paper.
…that is, Husky Stadium before it was Husky Stadium. Here are plans and drawings for the University of Washington Associated Students Stadium, by Bebb & Gould, 1920. I love the narrow, languidly curvy Montlake Boulevard.
Bebb and Gould designed many of the iconic buildings on the UW campus, including the first wing of the Suzzallo Library and many of the buildings around the Liberal Arts Quad.
Here is the 1920 birds-eye sketch of the proposed stadium. The Montlake Cut & Bridge, in the background, were also shiny and new.
“Morphogenesis of a Philadelphia City Block”
The first time I mapped out a historical geography was as a young SFSU undergrad. I recently came across this project while looking for old photos in my boxes of personal archaeology. I was thrilled to find it; I thought I had lost it long ago. I was ridiculously proud of this at the time–even though it only took a few hours to put together. When I researched this project, I hadn’t yet learned GIS, so the maps are hand-drawn.
This project was the first of many historical geographies I’ve explored, the last of which was the University of Washington campus.
I’ve never even been to Philadelphia.
Here is my original graphic:
The Bebb & Gould plan for the University of Washington–updated nine times between 1915-1945. North is left.
This plan is a great display of both what was built and what wasn’t. A few roundabouts remain from the AYPE. Campus Parkway never had the grand plaza envisioned here. The South Campus golf links were replaced by the UW Medical Center, but never made it to East Campus (except, I suppose, for the driving range).
They seemed to care about maintaining a connection from the main campus to the South Campus waterfront–this was forgotten by the next generation, but has been recently made a priority again.
I’m glad they never enclosed the Liberal Arts Quad as shown here. In the way it was eventually developed, the elevation change as you move to the northeast gives a good sense of enclosure, and allows for an axis from the northeast dormitories into the central campus.
Denny Yard would be a much more interesting space if they had actually enclosed it as shown here. The energy of the Yard is sapped by a poor sense of definition. The tighter, defined plaza shown here would be a place to gather and be seen.
I love watching things change over time.
Buildings, landscapes, street grids–everything morphs with changing technologies and cultural priorities, and time-enabled mapping can help us visualize and understand the changes that have occurred.
When I started this project for the University of Washington, we had just celebrated the centennial of the 1909 Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition. John Stamets, who teaches photography at the UW College of Built Environments, had co-authored a book about the 1909 event, documenting with maps and then-and-now photos. He had aligned a number of historical AYPE plans in Photoshop, transforming each until they all lined up with a modern map. Using this method, he was able to pinpoint the locations of the historical photographs, and take photos of the current conditions from the same location and angle.
He gave me his collection of digitized AYPE plans, which I took and georeferenced. Using the plans as a guide, I then digitized the building footprints and created links between the new geometry and the existing historical database. Once the 1909 buildings were digitized, I researched plans and maps of other eras, looking forward and back from the year of the Exposition. Where there were additions to buildings over the years, I georeferenced old construction plans that enabled me to show the evolution of the building shapes over time. Over the course of several months I was able to put together a spatial database of nearly all the UW buildings that ever existed, tied in with a rich historical database. The timeline features of ArcGIS allowed me to create a 4d map, showing any of the buildings at any specific time between 1885 and 2015.
This timeline video is a distillation of the information collected and created.
The Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition was the single most profound influence on the layout of the University. Although most of the AYPE buildings were demolished shortly after 1909, the landscape retains much of the physical form of that event. Rainier Vista is the most obvious remnant, but the influence can also be seen in the layout of much of the central campus. The HUB Yard area had a circle with a band stand. Frosh Pond/Drumheller Fountain was larger in 1909, but was in the same location. Stevens Way is essentially the same route as the parkway in the 1909 layout. Some of the AYPE structures were put to use as institutional buildings for years or decades–the Forestry Building, at the site where the HUB now stands, was used until 1930, when its rustic timbers were deemed too rotted to save. The Washington building was used first as a library and then as the High Energy Physics Lab until demolished in 1961. Its foundation survived as a landscape element (not shown) until the construction of the Allen Library. Gradually, over the years, most of the surviving Exposition buildings were torn down. Now, only three remain.
Five years after the AYPE, the Lake Washington Ship Canal was completed, and Lake Washington dropped by eight feet.
At the end of and just after WWI, from 1917-1922, barracks stood briefly where Guggenheim Hall is now. The post-WWII (1946–mid 50s) era saw a tremendous construction boom, including the erection of temporary barracks all across the UW to house returning soldiers. Located in the center of campus, in the north campus where Dempsey Hall and Paccar Hall now stand, and especially in the eastern campus, at the site of Center for Urban Horticulture–none of the barracks remain.
The original Lander and Terry halls were built on the site that is now the Sound Transit University of Washington Station (at Husky Stadium). These were built in 1917 and demolished in 1928.
Some buildings morph over time–watch Suzzallo Library, the Art Building, the power plant, and the Applied Physics Lab.
in 1937, 15th Ave NE was widened to the east. This necessitated the construction of the retaining wall along the west edge of the UW campus. I was surprised to learn that this wall was designed by Bebb & Gould.
Watch the changes in the Southwest and West Campus. In 1937, the University’s grand boulevard to and from nowhere, Campus Parkway, was cut through what was a neighborhood of modest single-family homes, removing scores of houses. The era of urban renewal hastened the change. Properties were condemned by the city and deeded to the University, allowing the consolidation of lots, the re-routing of streets, and the construction of most of the University-owned structures in the area. in 1962, I-5 was completed. NE Pacific Street was re-routed in the 1970’s. The UW’s suburban office-park buildings along Boat Street were completed in the 80’s and 90’s. 15th Ave NE was re-routed in the late 90’s, in between the construction of the first nasty Portage Bay Garage that cut The Ave off from the waterfront and the second nasty Portage Bay Garage addition that was ironically LEED-certified. All of these changes altered the street patterns, destroyed old neighborhoods, and cut the University District off from surrounding communities.
The building data should be pretty accurate–I spent a lot of time and did a lot of research to create it.
The original downtown Seattle campus is not included in this project.
The campus landscape, paths and roads are accurate at several points along the timeline, but they aren’t coded year-by-year as the buildings are. Really, they’re only accurate from 1895–>1930 or so. After that, the 1930 landscape stretches out to 1960, and the 2013 landscape stretches back to 1980. Between 1960 and 1980 there is a very noticeable lack of landscape.
The roads, modified from Seattle right-of-way GIS data, are approximate. Again, they aren’t coded year-by-year. I did a snapshot for about every decade starting in the 1900s.
For all layers, there will be points when two things exist in the same place at the same time. This is a result of the coarseness of the time data. For buildings, this will mean that a building was demolished and a new building was erected in the same place within a single year.
The thing to remember about this early 20th-century Portland map is FORESHADOWING…
What stands out for me when I look at this map are the lack of freeways (always the case with maps older than 50 years or so), the lack of suburban sprawl on the Washington side, and the relative lack of outer neighborhoods in Portland. The only Columbia River crossing is a ferry at the approximate location of the current I-5 bridge. Where there are now marinas and the airport there were wetlands. Electric railroads linked the local cities and towns (again, often striking to see, especially considering how we are returning to an updated version of this transportation mode).
And remember, with FORESHADOWING, you know you’re getting a quality blogging experience.
As with the others, the high-resolution, restored version of this map is available for purchase…
This one’s for all my LA folks…
One of the things about being between jobs is that you get to find little projects to obsess over. I’ve been enjoying combing through old archives, finding these cool old maps, and restoring them (while still maintaining the vintage patina). This 1928 map of downtown Los Angeles was torn, stamped and stained when I found it.
Los Angeles at this time had one of the most extensive streetcar networks in the world. There were no freeways in LA in 1928. There were very few anywhere–the first proto-autobahn was built in Germany in 1922. If you look at this area now, there are freeways in every direction. Here’s the modern view.
Order full-sized prints, or wrapped canvas maps here…
Every once in a while, here at Spatialities world headquarters, our research department (me) runs into an old archived map that our marketing department (also me) thinks would look great on someone’s wall.
I found this 1908 USGS quad while researching the former location of the Lake Washington shoreline. It’s from an important time in Seattle’s history. The the Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition was about to happen, which would shape the University of Washington campus for the next century and beyond. Because the Ship Canal had not been built, Lake Washington was eight feet higher. The Duwamish River still meandered, and South Park and Georgetown were towns in their own right. People were still waiting for the interurban. Rail travel within and between cities was still the best way to get around. Freeways hadn’t been invented.
I did a considerable amount of clean-up to this map–removing old rubber-stamps and imperfections. It’s now ready for your wall.
You can order hard-copy prints of the files I’ve cleaned up here…
