By Web, a detailed look at our past
By Andrew Ryan, Globe Staff | March 24, 2007
Examining the 1855 plan for Back Bay that included a three-block lake in the middle of Commonwealth Avenue would once have required a by-appointment-only trip to the bowels of the Boston Public Library.
It could have taken a few days to schedule time to peek at a loyalist map of Boston showing British artillery positions in 1776 along the original shoreline of the Shawmut peninsula.
But now, through the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center's new website, it takes only a few clicks to discover that State Street was named King and Queen Street before the Revolutionary War; that for 100 years mapmakers thought California was an island; or that a 1482 reproduction of an ancient Greek map was so wrong that Christopher Columbus sailed west in search of the Orient and mistakenly discovered the New World.
Access to the collection of 200,000 maps and 5,000 atlases at the library's main branch in Copley Square used to be limited to six to eight researchers a week.
"Now you can just click, and you are there," said Roni Pick, director of the map center. The website, which is partially funded by The Boston Globe Foundation, launched in October. Last month, the site drew more than 8,500 unique visitors, Pick said.
While many map collections are being digitized for the Web, Boston officials say their online viewer makes the library site unique, offering an ultra-high-resolution look into the past.
Visitors can zoom in and inspect details of an 1845 map of the United States. Each of the 26 states is represented by a star smaller than a man's pinkie nail, yet contain intricate drawings. In the Massachusetts star, a coastal cliff supports the state crest, a five-pointed star above an Algonquin Indian dressed in shirt and moccasins, holding a bow in his right hand and an arrow in his left.
To achieve that level of resolution, the maps and atlases are laid out on a sort of reverse air-hockey table that sucks air instead of blowing it, pulling the documents flat, said Thomas Blake, director of the library's digital imaging lab. Technicians then focus a digital camera 10-times more powerful than most consumer models and capture an 88 megapixel image.
"There are so many hidden treasures here," Blake said. "We are trying to make them unhidden."
To visit the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center website, go to
maps.bpl.org.
