Historical New York Map Tiles

I'm a huge fan of the New York Public Library's Map Warper project. Using the tool people have been digitally aligning the library's historical map collection so that the maps can be overlaid on modern interactive maps. The result is that you can now browse over 10,000 historical maps on the Map Warper website.

CartoDB this week noticed that you can also use the map tiles from any of the over 10,000 historical maps in your own interactive maps. They have even posted a great tutorial, Using NYPL Map Warper maps inside CartoDB, explaining the simple process of adding the map tiles from one of the New York Public Library maps to your own CartoDB map.

Of course you can also use the Map Warper map tiles with other mapping platforms. If you follow the CartoDB tutorial, especially the note on tweaking the NYPL Map Warper URL for the map tiles, you should be able to easily work out how you can add a NYPL historical map to a Leaflet, Mapbox or Google Maps API map.

As an example of displaying one of the maps with Leaflet.js I've added the NYPL's Railroad Map of the United States to my growing map of  Map Tiles for Leaflet.