Maps

Travel Before Flight

Posted on by jccarlton

It’s hard to understand how commercial air travel has changed things until you see maps like this that show how long it took to travel from place to place.

View post on imgur.com

This map is just 100 years old, yet look how long it took to go from London to anyplace beyond Europe.  Any trip outside Europe and maybe the east coast of the US was a serious voyage and one wouldn’t undertake it unless one expected to spend months and perhaps years at their destinations.  There is a reason that steamer trunks are so large. You weren’t packing for an overnight, you packing for living at the other end.

My Neighborhood In 1934

Posted on by jccarlton

In 1934 the State Of Connecticut commissioned an arial survey of the state.  The pictures are online, here.

http://cdm15019.contentdm.oclc.org/ui/custom/default/collection/coll_p4005coll10/resources/custompages/indexes/indexpage_map_state_1934.php

I though I would look at my neighborhood to see what’s the same since 1934.  The 1934 arial is here.

http://cslib.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/p4005coll10/id/7372

The current Google Map for the same area is here.

https://www.google.com/maps/@41.1567754,-73.4201184,4514m/data=!3m1!1e3

It’s interesting to see what the area looked like before suburbanization took hold.  You can see that suburbanization is starting as well as the pattern of large lot zoning.  Which was not a problem when the area was mostly fruit orchards.

Aerial_survey_of_Connecticut_1934_photograph_05423

Looking at the Google map, the big thing is the Merritt parkway which went through just after the above picture was taken being put through in 1938.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merritt_Parkway

The other Highway, coming from the South is the Route 7 connector, which was supposed to continue North as the new RTE 7, but local pressure has blocked it since the late 1960’s.

google norwalk

Suburbanization has brought retail and offices as well as the Perkin Elmer Corp which came and went between the period when the two maps were done. The houses and streets that went in the late 1950’s and 1960’s which replaced most of the apple orchards and crawled over the hills are pretty obvious.  How things changed in 70 odd years.