NYC Maps, Buildings, and Addresses: Using and combining historic data

The rich history of NYC can be found in the stories of its neighborhoods; historic maps and building records hold evidence of these stories.
Join us to hear more about the city's historic maps and data sets, how NYPL is working to make them more accessible, and how these rich resources can be used to learn about the city's past.

In this event, we will focus two neighborhoods in New York City: Brooklyn Heights and the Lower East Side. We will talk about using and combining data from the NYC Space/Time Directory, historical maps, building footprints and other datasets to make new digital maps of NYC’s history. For more information about these datasets, see http://spacetime.nypl.org/#data .

Schedule:

6:30PM: Doors
7:00PM: Speakers

• Kate Cordes
• Jeremy Lechtzin
• Bert Spaan

Speakers:

Kate Cordes: NYPL Assistant Director, Maps, Local History and Genealogy
Kate Cordes will tell us more about the Library's rich collection of materials on the Lower East Side.

Jeremy Lechtzin is an architectural historian and technology lawyer. He focuses on old Brooklyn, currently writing a data-driven analysis of every house built in Brooklyn Heights and mapping the lost streetscape of the Village of Brooklyn as it existed in 1816. For many years he was the General Counsel of XO Group (parent company of TheKnot.com) and now advises several start-ups in NYC and Madrid.

Bert Spaan is software engineer on NYPL’s NYC Space/Time Directory (http://spacetime.nypl.org) project, and he will present datasets from this project (historical maps, building footprints, historical addresses) and a tutorial on how to use and visualize those datasets.

Important: this event will take place at Meetup's office on 632 Broadway (9th floor), not in the New York Public Library.

Example dataset that we will use in event, outlines of georectified historical maps from Map Warper (http://maps.nypl.org/warper), displayed in QGIS:

https://a248.e.akamai.net/secure.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/a/a/1/c/600_457663548.jpeg