Producing this vector data would be a fantastic project. We have aerial photography that would support such an effort, but we don’t have enough labor to spin up such a project.
Using the Sanborns as basemaps would be perfect for the building layers. Airphotos for streets would be good.
But it’s a sizable city. If you wanted a well drawn and attributed street grid, that might cost a few tens-of-thousands of dollars to produce from photos. It would be cheaper, although still quite a project, to vectorize a street map from the same time period. I have a Bekins Moving map from 1935 that would be appropriate (but it’s not scanned yet). Pulling a number totally out of thin air: that’s a 200 hour project. Cheaper still, start with contemporary street data and edit it to down to match an old map. That might cut the time down to under 100 hours.
I’m semi-familiar with what the area looked like in the time period. The Port of LA and Long Beach, aka Terminal Island, changed A LOT during this time period. The end of the LA River is already channelized by the time the 1925 Wilmington topo is produced, but Los Cerritos is still kind of a standalone enclave. And—holy smokes—there’s a racist place name on the 1924 Compton 1:24k quad. What is now called the Dominguez Channel was called, I shit you not, “Gardena Valley and N----- Slough Channel.”
Jon Jablonski
Director, Interdisciplinary Research Collaboratory
Spatial Data Librarian
UC Santa Barbara Library
From: Maps-L: Map Librarians, etc. [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Pamela Enrici
Sent: Tuesday, December 20, 2016 6:55 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: interested in finding GIS dataset showing street grid layout of long beach in 1920 & 30s
We only have the Minnesota Sanborn maps and bought them. The last time I talked to the rep, he said that they were going to turn the data into GIS (that was an awkard sentence but I think you know what I mean). Anyway, they were going to charge extra for it - our Sanborns barely get any use and I never did follow up. I'd check with ProQuest and see what gives.
Pam Enrici
Geography & GIS librarian
Univ. of MN., Duluth (on the now warmer shores of Lake Superior)
P.S. I figured you checked with UCLA but maybe UC Santa Barbara might have done some work (it's been a long time since I worked in California - I was an early member of WAML) and I did my BA and MA in Geography at UCLA and we headed up to Santa Barbara to see what they were doing. Have you contacted ArcGIS?
Anyway, good luck!
On Mon, Dec 19, 2016 at 5:32 PM, Greg Armento <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
I’ve been searching for such data specifically for the city of Long Beach, CA, (street centerlines, building footprints, open areas, etc) in the 1920s & 30s. Anyone have any ideas?
Thanks.
Greg Armento