At a glance, New York City has comprehensive coverage of city streets in three of the boroughs, but it isn’t as comprehensive as it could be time-wise. From what I can tell, @jjmmzz @MrMap and others have mostly traced the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn from Sanborn maps and other old maps and tagged them with the dates of those maps. Meanwhile, @jeffmeyer imported a comprehensive modern city dataset of streets in Staten Island and tagged them all with an arbitrary start date of 1875.
I wonder if we can achieve more rigor, especially for the dates. Chris Whong pointed me to the NYC Street Map, which pulls together various layers from the official City Map. The Digital City Map includes layers of street name changes and city map alterations that include precise dates on every feature. The alterations layer links to planimetric maps that could be georectified and traced from, though most changes should be more self-explanatory.
(While we’re at it, the city’s zoning and land use map, ZoLa, includes a “Year Built” field that could enrich any building import in the city.)
Unfortunately, the datasets seem to be copyright-encumbered. Besides the standard disclaimer, the Copyright Text field is set to “NYC Department of City Planning”, and they’re hosted on the NYC Planning site, which is All Rights Reserved. However, the datasets are based on scanned maps that come with no such notices. Most of them are either out of copyright or didn’t follow the copyright formalities (see the Hirtle chart). So we might still be able to use the dataset as a tool for looking up these maps, and the maps themselves as source material.
agree with Minh’s call for improved accuracy for