New Jersey historic aerial photos

[ArtMan]

Perhaps old news to Garden State benchmarkers, but I just noticed that New Jersey's Dept. of Environmental Protection has added a layer of 1930s aerial photos to its GIS service. New Jersey is fortunate to have statewide coverage in Google Maps/Earth of high resolution aerial photos, but in dealing with descriptions of old benchmarks in a state that has seen dramatic changes in the last 70 years, this dataset may be very helpful to some users.

 

For an idea of the resolution, here's a screen shot of Ellis Island:

(You'll note that some features were labeled on the original images.)

 

Here's their description of this layer:

"Aerial Photos 1930: This data shows historical images of New Jersey from the early 1930's, which are a mosaic of black and white photography. The source imagery was hand cut to produce 261 mosaicked tile prints on linen backed paper. This data set was produced by scanning these mosaicked tile prints at 400 dpi and saving as Tagged Image File Format (tiff) images. The scanned tiffs had an approximate pixel resolution of 6.5 feet. The tiffs were georeferenced image to image against the 1995/97 CIR DOQQ. The geotiffs were clipped and merged into a single raster image for reference purposes only. The digital product has not been corrected for distortion or vertical displacement. This data does not meet National Standard for Spatial Data Accuracy (NSSDA), but can be used for general point and time reference."

There are also layers for newer photos, if you wish to compare.

 

The GIS application is pretty standard. To go to a particular area, use the "Find Location of Interest" tool in the upper right corner. (You can enter DMS coordinates, but the program seems to only display state plane coordinates.)

 

The program can be launched from this page (click on the yellow "Launch i-Map NJ DEP" button on the left). You will need to have your popup blocker off, and annoyingly it seems to work only in Internet Explorer, not Firefox. (It may be that I have some security setting in Firefox that prevents it from working.)

 

-ArtMan-

[AZcachemeister]

I could get lost in there just comparing the old photos with the new ones!