1950's, 60's and 70's aerials

[Boyd]

Note: I split this from another thread discussing the 1930's aerials since it's going to be a whole new project!

Well, I went down a rabbit hole and apparently ended up in a big cavern! There really are a lot of vintage aerials at DVRPC. This is the coverage of the 1959 aerials, for example (the blue rectangles are individual plates).

They aren't georeferenced, but these "footprints" would make that pretty straightforward (if they are correct). The first number is the flight line and the second number is the plate in this example from Burlington County. You can see they started in the West and flew South for a line, then turned and flew the next line to the North and so forth.

But that's not all, they also have partial coverage from 1965, 1970, 1975, 1980, 1990 and 1995. This is the coverage area for the 1965-1995 imagery, I haven't broken it down by year yet. The DVRPC only represents these 9 counties, so no imagery for Atlantic, Ocean, Cumberland or Cape May. But it's a lot of stuff.

Will take awhile to sort this all out, but there certainly appear to some new maps here.

 

[bobpbx]

I remember when all we had was Terraserver, and I was always dissapointed that the 95 aerials in my neighborhood were mostly black from the 95 fire.

 

[Boyd]

Do you mean this area? We've discussed before and IIRC concluded that terraserver was using this same 1990's NAPP imagery, processed in black and white and highly compressed for the slow internet speeds back then. This map should be higher quality since we don't need to compress so highly now.

 

[Boyd]

Funny how one thing leads to another and sometimes things just fall into place. Atlantic County has some very nice aerials on a county website, we've discussed in the past here. I looked a few years ago and found metadata that said they were public domain but couldn't find any way to download. Didn't spend much time since Atlantic County was just one small area. But now it's an important puzzle piece since DVRPC has Burlington, Camden and Gloucester. And I have just figured out how to download the Atlantic County imagery (they have 1957 and 1963)!

What I haven't yet found is any Ocean County imagery from the 1950's or 60's.

 

[Boyd]

Atsion in 1957. The Atlantic County imagery has some coverage beyond the county line.

 

[Boyd]

Have spent some time on this, and the biggest take-away is that those Atlantic County 1957 aerials are terrific. Really wish other counties had those, but haven't been able to find any more. Have downloaded them all now, coverage goes well beyond Atlantic County, but not as far as I'd like.

Here's Batsto in 1957. Compare with the 1980's aerials where the lake has been filled and parking lots, etc built.

I can use the DVRPC 1959 aerials to cover Camden, Gloucester, Burlington, etc. but unfortunately those are mostly suburban areas and very little of Wharton and other forests. They also need georeferencing. I still haven't found anything for Ocean County (aside from what is shown on the Atlantic County aerials). But there's definitely a map of 1950's aerials to be made here, subject to these limitations.

The 1963 Atlantic County aerials also look great and the coverage is very similar to 1957 (have not downloaded yet, but will soon). Should be able to make a 1960's map from these with the same limitations as the 50's aerials.

The 1970's look more promising however. Looks like complete coverage of Burlington County in the DVRPC aerials, here's Chatsworth in 1970, for example. Not too terribly different from the 1980's aerials.

Atlantic County has 1968 aerials that look good, but I haven't downloaded yet. And a big plus is that I can use the wetlands and tidelands aerials from the 1970's too. These will provide a lot of coverage for Ocean County and other places. So, this all looks good but georeferencing the DVRPC aerials will be a big job. Had a look at the index files and they're helpful but don't actually do anything for georeferencing. I think the rectangles on the indexes (see my posts above) represented what the pilots were supposed to photograph and not the actual photos that were taken. The actual photos are much larger than those rectangles and need to be cropped to fit after georeferencing.

Here's the full plate from the 1970 Chatsworth photo above after georeferencing. It needs to be cropped to the blue rectangle as a final step. The georeferencing is straightforward but there will be hundreds to do, so this will take some weeks.

tl;dr; - This all looks very hopeful for creating new 1950's, 1960's and 1970's regional maps, with some limits to the coverage.

 

[Boyd]

Atsion from the 1970 Atlantic County aerials. The resolution isn't as good on these.

 

[stiltzkin]

This is exciting. I'm glad you are looking at adding these. Anything that helps to fill the 50-year gap between the 1930s and 1980s aerials would be most welcome.

As far as Ocean County goes, I am sure you have seen this page, which says that their layers include "Aerial Photography," but I do not see any available. I suppose that you will not want to ask directly, but if someone is so inclined, there is an email contact there for the county GIS Specialist, who might be able to provide more information on what they have. If it helps you at all, I can certainly try reaching out.

 

[Boyd]

Thanks. Yeah, I saw that page and don't believe they have anything beyond NJGIN. I actually laughed when I saw they linked to Historical Aerials. And the link to NJGIN just gives a page not found error.

On the website from some other county, vintage aerials turned up with a document search. The details said they were actually four boxes of photos on a shelf in some county warehouse.

But you will start seeing some updates soon. For starters, will update the 1930 aerials to include New York City from 1924 and Philadelphia from 1928. Next, will be updating the 1980 aerials to cover the entire state of NJ plus (hopefully) parts of adjacent states. All of this should happen in the next week or two.

Then I hope to introduce new 1950's, 60's and 70's aerials from whatever imagery I can find. So far, looks like the 70's will be the most complete. I'd expect these to be complete in a month or so. But we shall see...

 

[66C10]

Awesome I’m excited.

 

[Boyd]

As I posted earlier, 1970 is the most complete coverage of these vintage aerials, because of the wetlands/tidelands and additional DVRPC imagery. Looks like this is as good as I can do from all the different sources. The Atlantic County and Delaware State aerials are very complete. Have overlaid these on the 1970's wetlands, then filled in any gaps with 1977 tidelands aerials where possible.

The blue grid represents DVRPC imagery that needs to be georeferenced. There are 380 of these in NJ alone, with around 330 more in PA. Will see how fast things go, but 380 is a very tall order in and of itself, so the PA imagery may have to wait for a future update.

But before I start on this map, am going to finish the expansion of the 1980 NHAP (Natl High Altitude Photography) aerials. Already have the full state of NJ ready to go and just discovered that all of New York is available from the USDA - downloading now. Full coverage of PA is also available from PASDA, but not georeferenced. That's too much work right now, will continue looking. Otherwise, might just do a map with only NJ and NY.

Looking ahead, will probably do the 1950's map next. Coverage will be much more limited. Basically, just Atlantic County supplemented by DVRPC for Northern Burlington County and the greater Phila area. DVRPC has much less coverage for the 1950's and 60's. In spite of the limitations, I'm pretty excited to finally have some coverage from these years, plus improved maps for the 70's, 80's and 90's. I had all but given up on finding open data for these.

Finally, will do a 1960's map, but it will have very similar limited coverage.