and a fun way to navigate some of them:
https://maap.columbia.edu/place/then.html
That was a project I worked on in ~2006 when Google Maps was more 'new'. At the time I was very proud because Google Maps still had a 'jumpy' zoom interface and I wanted it to feel immersive to 'enter' the maps by 'falling' into them.
Later that year, Google Maps added the same feature, which I don't attribute at all to this project, but it was cool to do it before them.
A similar thing for the former Habsburg Empire and then for Austro-Hungary can be found at this link [1], zooming in/out, panning and clicking on the different red circles should give one a general idea of the available old maps.
As christmas presents, i got paper maps of the area where i live from the late 19th century to the early 20th century. Over that period, it went from farmland with a few roads through it to a dense suburb. There are some fascinating details, like a tile kiln which presumably supplied a lot of the neighbourhood (there are very distinctive tiles in some estates), and patterns of old land use still present in the shape of the streets today.
and a fun way to navigate some of them: https://maap.columbia.edu/place/then.html That was a project I worked on in ~2006 when Google Maps was more 'new'. At the time I was very proud because Google Maps still had a 'jumpy' zoom interface and I wanted it to feel immersive to 'enter' the maps by 'falling' into them.
Later that year, Google Maps added the same feature, which I don't attribute at all to this project, but it was cool to do it before them.