Sanborn Maps

It's been requested that I include the Sanborn map that includes Huntington Avenue Grounds on the blog. Here it is. It's not a Sanborn map though, it's a Bromley map. From 1908. For those who are confused, much old building research is conducting by browsing through old Fire Insurance maps. These maps had most of the information that insurance companies needed to assess the risk of the building being destroyed by fire (access to water mains and running water, number of floors of building, window location, construction materials, etc.). Sanborn was the leader in this field, so they are generically called Sanborn maps. Bromley was a lesser known insurance map maker of the time (maybe someone else has more details on this issue). There are some online resources (Proquest comes to mind) that are "pay to play" to access these maps. That makes Marc Okkonen's research all the more remarkable, for I'm pretty sure he traveled to all of the different cities to study their newspaper and map collections.