For my final project, I will be working on the mapping portion of my senior thesis. For my senior thesis I am mapping gas lamps in Manhattan during the early 19th century (approximately 1827-1850). The principal dataset I will be using for this project is one that I made myself. I am in the process of going through New York City records and compiling information about when and where gas lights were first installed in Manhattan. For my final project in this class specifically, I am planning on mapping early gas lights in Manhattan. Most likely, I will map gas lamps that were installed on city streets between the years 1827-1831. I am using documents called “Minutes of the Common council of the city of New York, 1784-1831” to reconstruct street lighting for this time period. I am focusing on a narrow timeframe for this project, because this is the data that I have compiled so far. After 1831, the city documents that I need are not all digitalized, and so I will likely not have the information in time for this project.
In addition to mapping gas lamps, I am planning to use a data set called “Land Use before the Civil War [1827-1849]” from Jason Barr’s “Building the Skyline.” One problem I’ve run into when looking for potential datasets is that my time period of focus is relatively early. Consequently, I have found more data available for the late 19th century than for the early to mid 19th century.