A guide to the lost place names and geographies of San Francisco Spring Valley was an outlying suburb of early San Francisco that developed along the western slopes of Russian Hill in the 1840s and 1850s. Located in what would today be the Cow Hollow neighborhood, Spring Valley was comprised of two distinct settlements: Washerwoman’s Lagoon, a small spring-fed body of water known as far…
Read More »
North Beach Burial Ground c.1846-c.1855 Also known as the Powell Street Cemetery, the North Beach Burial Ground was one of the city’s first unofficial burial grounds. Around the mid-1840s people began using the block bounded by Chestnut, Stockton, Lombard, and Powell streets as a burial ground for the early pioneers and Argonauts of San Francisco. According to the Annals of San Francisco…
Read More »
Source: Historical Atlases Rescued from the Trash Could be a Boon to Historians Greg Miller from National Geographic recently wrote a nice article (3/3/2017) about the Geography Map Library’s Sanborn Fire Insurance Atlas Collection. Follow the link above to find the full article.
Read More »
A guide to the lost place names and geographies of San Francisco. Today’s entry of lost place names and geographies is Cannon Hill, a hill of about 370 feet that is located at the southeast corner of today’s Presidio. Cannon Hill is the location of the original survey point that outlined the United States claim to the military reservation known as the…
Read More »
Beginning March 30, 2015 I will be starting a new position as the Map Curator in the Department of Geography at California State University, Northridge (CSUN). As Map Curator I will be responsible for managing a collection of historical maps, atlases, photographs, and reference materials related to maps, cartography, and geographic information systems. As part of my responsibilities, I will…
Read More »
The neatline on a map is: “A border drawn around a map to enclose the legend, scale, title, geographic features, and any other information pertinent to the map, often showing tick marks that indicate intervals of distance. On a standard quadrangle map, the neatlines are the meridians and parallels delimiting the quadrangle.” Citation The ERSI Press dictionary of GIS terminology…
Read More »