A Panoramic View of 1907 Indianapolis

The Detroit Publishing Company's vintage photographs of America are a great resource for exploring the United States of the early Twentieth Century. When visiting cities the photographers of the Detroit Publishing Co would often find a high building from which to take a series of bird's eye view photographs. When stitched together these pictures can be made into one long panoramic image of the city.

Indianapolis 1907 is an interactive Leaflet map which allows you to explore a panoramic view of the city of Indianapolis in 1907. The panorama looks west towards the Indiana State House and the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument. The panorama provides a fascinating view of the city as it looked over one hundred years ago. Aside from the State House and the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument very few of the buildings in this historical panorama still exist. The streets in the panorama are dominated by trams, horse drawn carriages and pedestrians. There were very few cars on the streets of Indianapolis in 1907.

I created this vintage panorama by stitching together four photographs from the Detroit Publishing Co. You can view the original images on the Library of Congress website. I used Microsoft's Image Composite Editor to create the panorama. To turn the panorama into an interactive map I adapted the Non-geographical Maps example from the Leaflet tutorials. This allows you to easily create an interactive map from any image or photograph. If you are interested in the code behind the panorama you can view and clone it on Glitch.

If you are interested in interactive panoramas created from vintage photographs then you might also like:

The General View of Detroit - a panorama of 1908 Detroit
Take a Photo Tour of Minneapolis - an interactive panorama of 1907 Minneapolis