As I continued to peruse the book Nineteenth Street (mentioned more throughly below), I began to realize where I had seen some of houses in it before. Or, at least, one of the 19th century etchings of a particular house.

A while ago, I discovered the online map collection of the Library of Congress. Naturally, I went to the Cities and Towns Section and entered the places I have lived to see what historic maps I could find. For Portland, I found two wonderful Bird’s-eye-view maps, one from 1879 and one from 1890. The map from 1890 is the one whose border highlights certain buildings about town, including a couple of the houses in Nineteenth Street. In looking at the one from 1879, you can see the progress they made. You can also see in the foreground the gulch of a dry river bed that I believe is the basis for the 405 bypass. And if you zoom in on the upper right, just across the river on the forward swell of land, you can see Old Asylum Street that used to run right close to my house. (Item No. 16 is the Asylum itself)

But actually, the city that I found that had the most impressive maps over time is San Franciso, in a from-a-wilderness-into-metropolis sense. Although, I have heard that the funeral home just up on Hawthorne used to be the main building of a dude ranch…