28th District School

I was thankful for this comment on a recent post:
"You were correct about the large institutional building at the Klotter Park. It was the location for the old 28th District School.Built in 1880 with an addition in 1887. There is a book "A History Of The Schools Of Cincinnati" by John Brough Shotwell.Look it up on Google books. It has a pic on pg 308. It was on Browne St.(guess it was a street back then,not an alley) west of Baymiller."

So I looked up the book, and for the public record here is the sketch and description:

18 rooms x 55 pupils each = 990 students!

And here is a Sanborn Map showing the School:

Cincy Ethnicity Map

A guy named Bill Rankin produced a series of interesting maps of various American cities using demographic data from the 2000 census. Cincinnati's map is pretty simple, but some of the bigger cities like San Francisco and New York have more colors and more striking settlement patterns. Each dot represents 25 people:
 

Organic Walking Paths of Brasilia

It is amazing how many people are using Google Maps to make interesting studies or articles, and how many artists are using Google Streetview for photography projects. Here, a blogger notices the footpaths that have evolved in a city designed to have no pedestrians:

 

previous post on Brasilia.

Maps from 1904

This is a really cool find, thanks to @GeekJames on Twitter (who also tweets as @TakeTheCakeCafe). It is the two volume set Insurance Maps of Cincinnati, Ohio.

First off, I love the cover design. The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County offers both volumes in their Virtual Library. This was printed in 1904. But looks like it was updated through about 1930. They are very high-resolution scans, therefore each page is a separate PDF (2-4 MB in size). Both volumes have indexes, and it is easy to find the correct plate from those.

Here is plate 100 from Volume 2, which is a guide to volume 2:

I also loved the plate that had the old Fountain Square. You can also see the Albee Theatre and the Hotel Gibson. It is Volume 2, plate 115:
I forsee lots of time spent looking through these old maps. Be sure to check out the full-sized PDFs of these plates. I resisted the temptation to link directly to the PDFs, but you can find them easily starting at the link above.