Panoramic Views of American Cities
I recently discovered that during the late 1800’s and early 1900’s it was common to draw large panoramic views of cities. The Library of Congress has a huge collection of them available on their website. Some of these maps are incredibly detailed. They show each house on every street, sometimes with enough detail to recognize certain homes.
Here is a close up of Kalamazoo’s downtown in 1883. In the full view available from the LoC you can see that my neighborhood didn’t even exist yet. The only roads in the area are Riverview, Gull, and East Main. They are all major roads now, but they aren’t even labeled on this map.
