Panoramic View of Detroit 1908

During the early years of the Twentieth Century the Detroit Publishing Company traveled around America taking photographs and selling postcards of different cities. When visiting a city the photographers would often find a high building from which to take a series of bird's eye view photographs. When stitched together these pictures could be made into one long panoramic image of the city.

I've stitched together seven images of Detroit, which were photographed in around 1908, to create an historical view of the city as it looked at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. The General View of Detroit uses the Leaflet mapping library to provide an interactive interface for the panorama, which allows you to zoom in and out and pan around the image.

Unfortunately the software I used to stitch the seven images together omitted one of the images. Therefore there is a glitch in the panorama. You can view the missing image (and the other six original images) on the Library of Congress website. I used Microsoft's Image Composite Editor to create the panorama. Normally this image stitching software is very good. In this case I think it is thrown by an error in the bottom corner of one of the Detroit Publishing Company negatives.

To create the 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.