The Industrialization of Long Island City (Lic), New York
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EXPLORING URBAN CHANGE USING HISTORICAL MAPS: THE INDUSTRIALIZATION OF LONG ISLAND CITY (LIC), NEW YORK by Elizabeth J. Mamer A Thesis Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF SCIENCE (GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY) August 2015 2015 Elizabeth J Mamer DEDICATION In memory of my father, who loved and collected old maps. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Karen Kemp for her continued guidance as I worked my way through this research. Her patience and instruction were invaluable. Thank you as well to my mom and sister for their constant support throughout this process. A great thanks to Florence, whose boundless and persistent spirit motivated me. And finally, to Spencer, for both encouraging me and putting up with me. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii LIST OF TABLES iii LIST OF FIGURES iv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS vi ABSTRACT vii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1 1.1 Motivation 2 1.2 Study Area 3 1.3 Research Goals 5 CHAPTER 2: BACKGROUND AND LITERATURE REVIEW 7 2.1 Historical GIS 7 2.2 Historical Narrative: The Urban Development of LIC 8 2.2.1 Pre-industrialization 9 2.2.2 Industrialization 10 2.2.3 Transportation Expansion 12 2.2.4 Residential Changes 14 2.3 Trends in Industrial Societies 15 CHAPTER 3: DEVELOPING THE DATASET 17 3.1 Historical Maps as Data Sources 17 3.2 Georeferencing 19 3.3 Digitization 22 3.4 Data Organization 26 3.5 Assign Shifts 30 CHAPTER 4: EXPLORING THE STORIES 33 4.1 Enumerating the Shifts 33 4.2 Visualizing the shifts spatially 34 4.3 Drawbacks of the Widespread Culturally-Focused Method 36 4.4 Diving Deeper 37 4.5 The Story at the Local Scale 40 4.6 Looking Backwards 45 i 4.7 Identifying Other Types of Change 47 CHAPTER 5: DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS 50 5.1 Implications and Limitations 50 5.2 Further Historical Conclusions 52 5.3 Future Work 53 5.3.1 Applying Methods Elsewhere 54 5.3.2 Expanding the Research 55 5.4 Summary 56 REFERENCES 57 APPENDIX A: Georeferenced Maps 60 APPENDIX B: ModelBuilder Model 65 ii LIST OF TABLES Table 1 Turnstile percentage change at subway stops in LIC and Astoria between 1920 and 1927................................................................................................................................... 15 Table 2 Map years and sources..................................................................................................... 19 Table 3. Building use type and subtype ........................................................................................ 24 Table 4 The count of each building use type for each year. ......................................................... 28 Table 5 Classification of shift type from originating year to the consequent year ....................... 30 Table 6 Shift ratings for each point type. 31 Table 7 Sample of the resulting dataset, documenting Types, Subtypes, Ratings and Shifts through time periods ......................................................................................................... 32 Table 8 Each type of shift for each period.................................................................................... 33 Table 9 Subtypes included under the Other type in the new dataset ............................................ 40 Table 10 Number of each type of shift in Hunter’s Point............................................................. 40 Table 11 Percentage change in point types between each time period......................................... 41 Table 12 Shift rate in shifts per year............................................................................................. 42 Table 13 Initial building type and consequent building type through three time periods ............ 46 Table 14 The subtypes “Other” type and its shifts to industrial locations.................................... 47 iii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1 Long Island City in Queens County, New York City. ..................................................... 1 Figure 2 Long Island City and Long Island (2015). ....................................................................... 4 Figure 3 1896 Long Island City by J.S. Kelsey .............................................................................. 5 Figure 4 Astoria and historically significant LIC sub-neighborhoods............................................ 9 Figure 5 Hunter’s Point, LIC. (left) 1849 (right) 1858 after the land had been leveled to install streets...................................................................................................................... 10 Figure 6 Hunter's Point on a Sunday in 1898. .............................................................................. 11 Figure 7 Transportation methods and years in LIC ...................................................................... 13 Figure 8 Sanborn map from 1915, Sheet 16 ................................................................................. 18 Figure 9 1891 New York Atlas Map of LIC................................................................................. 19 Figure 10 The black and white key, showing all forty-seven Sanborn maps covering LIC......... 21 Figure 11 Mosaic of 1936 Sanborn maps georeferenced to modern-day LIC.............................. 22 Figure 12 Ravenswood Park lot changes from 1891 to 1950 ....................................................... 25 Figure 13 Type and subtype of cultural institutions for all five years. ......................................... 27 Figure 14 Cultural institution locations over all five years........................................................... 29 Figure 15 Shift types for each time period.................................................................................... 35 Figure 16 Diagram demonstrating how shifts were determined based on the footprint of the latter year’s categorization.......................................................................................... 39 Figure 17 Building use shifts in Hunter’s Point from 1898 to 1950............................................. 43 Figure 18 Industrial Shifts and Residential Disappearances and their distributions over three time periods.............................................................................................................. 48 Figure 19 The Atlas of New York 1891 Long Island City map georeferenced to modern LIC... 60 Figure 20 Sanborn 1898 Long Island City map georeferenced to modern-day LIC .................... 61 Figure 21 Sanborn 1915 Long Island City map georeferenced to modern-day LIC .................... 62 iv Figure 22 Sanborn 1936 Long Island City map georeferenced to modern-day LIC .................... 63 Figure 23 Sanborn 1950 Long Island City map georeferenced to modern-day LIC .................... 64 Figure 24 ModelBuilder model that organizes cultural institution point data. ............................. 65 Figure 25 ModelBuilder model to determine type of shifts in between time periods .................. 66 Figure 26 Python script assigning shift types based on previous year's category ........................ 67 v LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AAG Association of American Geographers GIST Geographic Information Science and Technology LIC Long Island City LIRR Long Island Railroad NYC New York City RMS Root Mean Square SSI Spatial Sciences Institute USC University of Southern California vi ABSTRACT The goal of this thesis was to develop a process in which historical land use can be tracked in order to gain a better understanding of an area’s history. The study area, Long Island City (LIC) is historically an industrial neighborhood within Queens County of New York City. By documenting its land use shifts from 1891 to 1950, it is possible to visualize and analyze the changes that occurred as industrialization took place. This study compiles a digital historical narrative to provide a foundation for understanding the data, as well as a reference for making new conclusions from the results of the analysis. Old fire insurance maps provide building footprints categorized by use. These were used to digitize locations of interest as points that were catalogued under five different categories: Cultural, Industrial, Residential, Shop, and Vacant at each of five time periods. The resulting spatiotemporal database makes it possible to track a single building and its use through a period of 59 years. The methodology developed for this thesis collects and classifies building use as points so as to develop efficiently and quickly an accurate historical dataset. In doing so, the project tracked the cultural development of LIC through an examination of a set of key buildings, as well as the overall land use change of a sub-neighborhood, Hunter’s Point. It determined that by tracking the use of every building through every map year, one gets a better historical analysis. Such methods can be used not only to help support previously known historical narratives, but also to allow for new conclusions to be drawn. vii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION Long Island City (LIC) is a neighborhood in southwestern Queens County, New York. It is the closest neighborhood to Manhattan in Queens, making it particularly accessible by both public transportation and car (Figure 1). However, unlike many outer-borough neighborhoods that are close to Manhattan, LIC has not experienced the same public popularity. Instead, throughout much of its history, it has undergone rapid and constant industrial business. This