The Sanborn Map Company of New York holds a unique place in American urban historical research . Their atlases of American cities were originally created to inform fire insurance companies of risks in urban areas but ended up tracing the subtle change from an agrarian society to a nation of cities. The hefty atlases produced by D.A. Sanborn from the 1880s to 1970 show changes from block to block like no other cartographic resource and open up our knowledge of what our cities looked like before this modern age.
The original sheets of the atlases changed with the times as clerks pasted strips of paper over sites that changed in any way and streets or neighborhoods transformed the landscape. In the case of our own Los Angeles, the Sanborn maps show us a booming city which grew from two volumes, 36 square miles and 43,000 people in 1888 to forty-two volumes, 466 square miles and roughly 3 million people by 1970.
As the Sanborn company informed the insurance companies about the quality of buildings they also left a permanent impression of the shapes of communities in certain time frames. In many ways these maps trace the footprints of development in Los Angeles. The atlases are both practical and beautiful in their original format of color renderings showing building materials, structural qualities and special features that are coded by the hue. Adobe is evident alongside codes for apartments, family dwellings, fire hydrants, chimneys, car-houses and such. The importance of such detail is vital today for present day planners finding materials that might cause environmental problems in the here and now.
Urban planners, developers, conservationists, students and architects study these atlases to determine if an oil well, sewer outlet, slaughterhouse, refinery or waste dump may have occupied their site in a past time. Indeed, the city requires builders to check Sanborn atlases before they build on their sites. However, some folks just like to look and learn about the old neighborhoods. There is great aesthetic pleasure in scanning the old sheets and allowing the imagination to take over. Beverly Park and its pony ride are there, likewise the old zoo where kids fed the elephants and the Normal school standing where Central Library is today are all part of the Sanborn lore.
The original 1888 volume on Los Angeles shows the locations of the Pony Livery Stables, the Panorama of the Battle of Gettysburg, the Philadelphia brewery, the Home Ice company, the Los Angeles Electric Light Company and the Atlas Feed Mill. It may seem hard to imagine the Los Angeles of dusty roads and hoofbeats but here it is frozen in time on the Sanborn sheets. The city of the angels was small and diversified with cracker Companies, flour mills, wineries, stock brokerages and baseball fields all rubbing shoulders in the Sanborn's domain.
Unfamiliar streets criss-cross the metro area: for example Fort street, New High, Rock, Walters, Teed , Sainseven and others now faded from memory. Churches, hotels, orphan asylums, old Chinatown and even U.S.C. are identified on the original Sanborn as is Angelino Heights, the very first suburb.
Central Library owns the collection of Sanborn Fire Insurance Atlases in the Library of Congress on microfilm which extends up and down the entire state of California giving us views of everything from old gold camps to our home towns in the 1950s. Not all time frames are included on the film but in an optimal example of coverage in downtown Los Angeles we can see the old burg in 1888, 1894, 1906, 1929, 1950, 1960, 1960, 1962, 1963, 1967 and 1970. Although Sanborn atlases do not identify owners of homes or businesses they do name most public buildings, show all structures on the lots and present streets in exact dimensions.
At Central library, patrons can view Sanborn atlases on microfilm or use the on-line Sanborn atlas resource or be referred to Sanborn's parent company EDR for reproductions.. In the History Department, Sanborn Atlases, historic photographs , city directories and citations from the California Subject Index can help patrons unlock the secret treasures of Los Angeles neighborhoods and bring back to life a time gone by.
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