----------------------------Original message----------------------------
 
               State University of New York at Stony Brook
                       Stony Brook, NY 11794-3331
 
                                            David Y Allen
                                            Library-Reference
                                            516 632-7110
                                            25-Mar-1994 05:37pm EDT
FROM:  DYALLEN
TO:    Remote Addressee                     ( [log in to unmask] )
 
Subject: Property maps or fire insurance maps?
 
        Many thanks to those who responded to my inquiry about recent Sanborn
maps.  I found the answers interesting and useful, and expect that others did
as well.
 
        Alice Hudson's comment that we should stop using the term insurance
maps and refer to them as property maps raises another question.  At one point
there clearly was a valid distinction between property maps and insurance maps.
 Property maps showed property ownership and sometimes property boundaries.
Insurance maps also showed such things as what a building was constructed of
(which would affect the likelyhood of its burning down) and the proximity of
fire hydrants and water pipes.  However, the distinction between these two
types of maps is not always all that clear--as is revealed by the strange case
of E. Belcher Hyde and Company.
 
        Hyde and Company (presumably including Dr. Jekell) was an important
publisher of property maps of the New York metropolitan area between 1890 and
1940.  Their publications included a wide range of materials ranging from
single-sheet maps that identified homeowners in rural and suburban areas to
multi-volume atlases that look like scaled-down Sanborn atlases.  These Hyde
atlases do show such things as what a building was constructed of, but they are
 
not called insurance atlases and there is not a clue in the atlases as to who
was expected to buy them.  There are two articles that are relevant to any
consideration of these atlases.  One is by W.W. Ristow, "United State Fire
Insurance and Underwirters Maps, 1852-1968," first published in the Quarterly
Journal of the Library of Congress 25 (1968), 194-218.  The other is Michael P.
Conzen, "The County Landownership Map in America," Imago Mundi 36 (1984), 9-31.
 
        Conzen makes the important point that property atlases published after
ca. 1880 were directed more at a readership of professionals than the "mass
market novelty" items published in the years after the Civil War.  This is
clearly the case with the Hyde atlases (although not the sheet maps, which were
obviously aimed at a broader group of users).  But what group of professionals
would want to buy an expensive multi-volume Hyde atlas?  Government
employees?--maybe.  Real-estate salesmen?--probably not, they would have little
use for so much detail.  Insurance underwriters--maybe, but Ristow gives the
impression that Sanborn had a virtual monopoly at least after 1920.  I suspect
that Hyde and Company was attempting to undercut Sanborn by offering a cheaper
alternative.  Or was there some other market that made it profitable to produce
these detailed property atlases?
 
        I suspect that the Hyde atlases are not an anomaly and that similar
atlases were produced for other areas of the country.  Were these publishers
primarily aiming at the fire insurance market or were they primarily targeting
a different market?  Why was it profitable to publish these elaborate atlases
at all?  Many questions.  Any answers?