Sewer History

1. Tracking Down the Roots of Our Sanitary Sewers
   A large site, still expanding, spearheaded by Jon Schladweiler, a deputy director of wastewater management in Tucson, Arizona and historian of the Arizona Water & Pollution Control Association.
2. Down the Drain: Chicago's Sewers, The Historic Development of an Urban Infrastructure
   One of the Chicago Public Library's digital collections.
3. Hidden Beneath Our Feet: The Story of Sewerage in Leeds
   A comprehensive on-line history of this English city's sewerage, by David Sellers.

Sinking Homes

1. Army Corps of Engineers and US Geological Service (USGS) Sinking Homes Studies
   Fascinating surveys of several Philadelphia neighborhoods that grew up around two buried streams, Wingohocking Creek and Wissinoming Creek. This report, which included many photographs of the neighborhoods in question, is no longer available on the Web, so I have posted two PDF files related to the study directly on this site. The files can be downloaded by clicking the links below:
   
   Mapping Buried Stream Valleys in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
   USGS Fact Sheet FS–117–00. 2000
   
   Geographic Information System Analysis of Topographic Change in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, During the Last Century
   By Peter G. Chirico and Jack B. Epstein. USGS Open File Report 00-224. 2000
   PLEASE NOTE: This is a large file: 21 Mb

I've found that the key to conveying my story of topographical change is having wonderful "before" illustrations to match the current images, the comparison showing the changes far more clearly and convincingly than I could manage to do in thousands of words. I still have to do much of this research in libraries and archives, but Web-based resources are becoming more and more available and extensive. The following are among the most useful that I've found, with a focus on those relating to Philadelphia and vicinity:

1. Philadelphia Geohistory Web Site
   A wonderful and growing source of Philadelphia maps and atlases, searchable City Directories from 1856 and 1861, and a searchable database of the Hexamer General Surveys, amazingly detailed 19th-century surveys of industrial sites, most of them in Philadelphia and vicinity. From the Website: "The Greater Philadelphia GeoHistory Network (GPGN) is a pilot project of the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL) to develop a web-based repository of geographically organized historical information about Philadelphia, its geography, its buildings, and its people." New items are added on occasion, most recently several 19th-century Philadelphia maps (by Ellet, Barnes and Dripps) that I had scanned for PWD.
2. City Archives of Philadelphia, , and PhillyHistory.org
   As the main repository for the records of the City government, City Archives has an almost unfathomable collection of graphic and primary source material. The online catalogue provides a good starting point for researchers; clicking the "Browse Philadelphia government agencies by name" link will access a finding aid for a major portion of the so-called "record groups" in the archives. Not online is a Photographic Inventory, available at the Archives, that indexes thousands of photographs (dating back to the 1870s) by subject and by street address. The associated website, PhillyHistory.org, includes an expanding selection of the roughly 2 million City photographs (51,577 as of february 6, 2008), with small watermarked images available online and prints for sale through the City Department of Records. Images are searchable in a number of ways, either by clking on a map or by street address or other keywords. Searches can also be viewed in Google Earth (see above), showing the location of each photograph in relation to others.
3. Aerial Photography through Google Earth
   It requires a free program to work, but Google Earth is becoming an indispensible resource for many mapping and research projects. The Google Earth community is a vast and growing network of folks who are using this resource in a number of innovative ways. Images called onto your screen via Google Earth (and via its companion, the excellent Google Maps) can easily be saved using a free program called ScreenPrint32, which easily saves whatever is on the screen as a jpeg, gif, bitmap, or png file.
4. Pennsylvania Spatial Data Access (PASDA)
   Pennsylvania's official public access geospatial information clearinghouse, PASDA has high-resolution aerial photography, topographic maps, GIS data, and other mapping data available for free download. Included are georeferenced histiric topographical maps (see below for link and more information). A description of PASDA from its homepage: "PASDA was developed as a service to the citizens, governments, and businesses of the Commonwealth. PASDA is a cooperative project of the Governor's Office of Administration, Office for Information Technology, Geospatial Technologies Office and Penn State Institutes of Energy and the Environment of the Pennsylvania State University. Funding and support is provided by the Pennsylvania Office for Information Technology, Geospatial Technologies Office.PASDA serves as the the Commonwealth's node on the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI), Geospatial One Stop, and the National Biological Information Infrastructure. PASDA is also a member of the Geography Network. The data made available through PASDA is provided by our data partners to encourage the widespread sharing of geospatial data, eliminate the creation of redundant data sets, and to further build an inventory (through the development and hosting of metadata) of available data relevant to the Commonwealth. PASDA serves as a resource for locating data throughout the Commonwealth through its data storage, interactive mapping/webgis applications, and metadata/documentation efforts.
5. Historical USGS Topographical Maps
   Maptech, a commercial mapping services provider, also hosts on its Web site this collection of historical topographic maps from the United States Geological Survey. Each map has been scanned in four pieces, and although the segments do not exactly match up, they still are a wonderful resource for anyone interested in historic streams, place names, and other topographical features. An image stitching program such as Panavue Image Assembler will quickly and seamless stitch together the four pieces into a coherent whole map; I did this recently with maps in the Philadelphia region and the results were excellent. As it turned out, I was reinventing the wheel, so to speak: this had already been done, with the results posted on the PASDA Web site (see more information on PASDA above). Downloadable versions of the stitched and georeferenced historic topo maps can be found at this link. A fuller description from this Web site follows: "A newly revised version of the historic USGS 15 minute topographic maps for Pennsylvania as collected from the MapTech Historical Map Collection at 'http://historical.maptech.com'. As an improvement to the initial version, the original scanned images from MapTech were downloaded, assembled with mosaicing software, and georeferenced to the statewide Albers NAD83 projection."
6. My Library in Google Books and other digital library projects
   In a somewhat controversial project, Google has been creating an online library of digitized, searchable versions of books. I have to say that as an author, I had mixed feelings about this when I first heard about it. But after seen what Google has made available, I have become a believer in this project. Books that I could never afford to buy and that are only available in a few libraries are now online for all the world to peruse. Text can be searched by keyword, and many can even be downloaded as PDF files and printed out, making them even more useful, since I am one of those folks who find it hard to read a lot of text online. I have created a personal "digital library" of books posted by Google, many of them related to Philadelphia-area history and others related to sewers and other such topics. You can view my library selections -- and then the books themselves -- by clicking on the link above. Cornell University and the University of Michigan also have excellent digital libraries, collectively called the "Making of American" project. Please contact me if you find other such collections online.
   
7. City of Philadelphia Maps Homepage
   The City of Philadelphia has a searchable database of aerial photography, and will even create a PDF of the image resulting from the search. Unfortunately, the address for which you are searching ends up printed right on top of the location, obscuring the details. Perhaps the city will fix this by simply putting a transparent dot at the location, or something less obtrusive. Until then, one solution might be to search for an address a few blocks from the one you really want...
   
8. Places in Time: Historical Documentation of Place in Greater Philadelphia
   A team led by architectural historian Jeffrey A. Cohen at Bryn Mawr College has compiled this simple, easy-to-navigate and quick-to-load site. Don't be fooled by the site's plain-looking face: "Places in Time" is deep, rich in catalogue indexes and actual scans of Philadelphia-area graphic material. From the site's introduction: "This project is an effort to bring together some resources--images, documents, tools, and links--for pursuing historical information about place in the five-county Philadelphia area: Bucks, Chester, Delaware. Montgomery, and Philadelphia counties. The overarching idea is to use new media to more effectively disseminate information about place, to enhance cross-institutional access to documentary materials of this sort, to better connect people with the history of their environment, and to thus enrich their lives here."
   To search both PhillyH2O and Places in Time, use the Google Search Box below:
   
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9. Temple University Libraries Urban Archives
   Besides a providing a description of its own holdings of photographs from Philadelphia newspapers (1929-1982), the Philadelphia Housing Association (1897-1972), and some 50 other organizations (more than 5 million images total), the site also includes the PACSL Photograph Directory, which describes the photographic holdings of more than 280 Philadelphia-area institutions. The Urban Archives collection also includes the George D. McDowell Philadelphia Evening Bulletin Newsclipping Collection, which is the entire clippings library of the Philadelphia Bulletin (ca. 1910-1982).
10. Library Company of Philadelphia
    Using WOLFPAC, the LCOP online catalogue, you can search their extensive collection of visual resources. Through this link, it is also possible (by changing the "Use Database" menu at the top of the search page), to search the catalogues of other area historical institutions.
    
11. Library of Congress American Memory Project
    I have downloaded some wonderful, high-resolution maps from this site, which includes video and audio files as well as images. Most maps come in MrSid format, which requires a viewer that can be downloaded free. With a full version of MrSid software, the images can be exported to high-resolution .tif files that are much more versatile and can be cropped and edited just like any other image. HABS/HAER (an awkward acronym for the Historic American Building Survey and the Historic American Engineering Record) have their own section of this site which is well worth visiting. An excerpt from the HABS/HAER description: "The collections document achievements in architecture, engineering, and design in the United States and its territories through a comprehensive range of building types and engineering technologies including examples as diverse as the Pueblo of Acoma, houses, windmills, one-room schools, the Golden Gate Bridge, and buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Administered since 1933 through cooperative agreements with the National Park Service, the Library of Congress, and the private sector, ongoing programs of the National Park Service have recorded America's built environment in multiformat surveys comprising more than 350,000 measured drawings, large-format photographs, and written histories for more than 37,000 historic structures and sites dating from Pre-Columbian times to the twentieth century. This online presentation of the HABS/HAER collections includes digitized images of measured drawings, black-and-white photographs, color transparencies, photo captions, data pages including written histories, and supplemental materials. Since the National Park Service's HABS and HAER programs create new documentation each year, digital images will continue to be added to the online collections."
12. NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) Historical Maps and Charts
    Beautiful high resolution charts in MrSid format, with a viewer that can be downloaded free. With a full version of MrSid software, the images can be exported to high-resolution .tif files that are much more versatile and can be cropped and edited just like any other image. The following is from the Web site description: "The Office of Coast Survey's Historical Map & Chart Collection contains over 20,000 maps and charts from the late 1700s to present day. The Collection includes some of the nation's earliest nautical charts, hydrographic surveys, topographic surveys, geodetic surveys, city plans and Civil War battle maps. The Collection is a rich primary historical archive and a testament to the artistry of copper plate engraving technology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Historical Map & Chart Project scans each map or chart and offers the images free to the public via the Coast Survey web site. The Project is managed by the Cartographic & Geospatial Technology Program of the Coast Survey Development Laboratory. Notable offerings include maps of Vancouver's explorations; the "Wilkes Atlas" of the US Exploring Expedition; James Whistler's Anacapa Island chart; an extensive Civil War collection; a large scale topographic series of Washington, DC; city plans; the re-engraving of the famous 1792 L'Enfant and Ellicott plan for Washington DC; artistic landscape perspective sketches that were an integral part of hydrographic surveys and published charts; historical maps and charts from the Mississippi, Tennessee, and Columbia Rivers; topographic maps of Cincinnati; and early 1920 charts of the Erie Barge Canal."