Exhibit
April 16, 2014
In my research I found that Union Station was actually built in the middle of a working class neighborhood, called Swampoodle, of Irish immigrants that worked on a lot of the monuments and wanted to be close to work. Union Station ended that neighborhood and ultimately the Irish immigrants kind of disappeared.
I found this really interesting, and almost changed my research question for it; however, I have decided that I will make this a specific exhibit in my project. It is a bit of a side story that branches off of the history of Union Station and I think plays into the social scene that has developed. ( I could be wrong, I don’t have evidence yet.) I found some interesting pictures on Ghosts of DC that got me researching this Irish settlers group. I do not have the items in my archives yet, but here is one of the images if you care to look.
One Response to “Exhibit”
April 16th, 2014 at 3:52 am
Hannah, that’s a very thoughtful way to incorporate and consolidate your topics. Since you’ve found the Baist real estate map, you might find it interesting to check those out further. It’s a series of Atlas-style city street maps digitized on the Library of Congress site.
Another resource that will tell you about the layout of the neighborhoods is the Sanborn Insurance Maps. These, two, are map books of the street grids. It’s a little challenging to match buildings to their names, and they’re not always a quick fix for finding information, but they’re iconically useful these days.
http://www.loc.gov/collections/sanborn-maps/about-this-collection/ explains what they show.
Then, you’ll find several for the District of Columbia: 1888, 1903, 1916, and I think three more.