This composite image of a set of perspective drawings of St Louis by Camille Dry in the mid 1870’s was stitched together using PTGui as an exercise to see if image stitching methods could produce a well aligned composite image.
There is another composite image available online in the David Rumsey Map Collection which has some significant differences with this set of images from the Library of Congress.
I haven’t attempted to do any colour enhancement or matching between images. Whether or not the customised alignment of images produces any significant improvement I will leave up to you to decide. After looking at the extra plates in the book I noticed that the plate of the bridge spanning the river looked very similar to the image in the composite, and as it turns out it fits almost perfectly even though it is drawn at a different angle. Even the traffic at the top end of the bridge and the 2 boats below the first span are almost identical.
The viewer displaying the composite above is Zoomify’s full screen viewer. The icon at the right end of the toolbar should display the viewer in full screen… and yes I am aware of issues with some installations of Firefox and Safari. I’m currently investigating other display options using the same image set and have a trial viewer using Open Layers.
Pictorial St Louis Composite by Ben Kreunen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at hdl.loc.gov.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at memory.loc.gov.
I can’t thank you enough for the work you have done on the composite map of St. Louis. I’ve the opportunity to view the original work at the Missouri Museum of History, but your format really brings it to life. My love of baseball first brought me to this pictorial as this is the oldest documentation showing the original ball fields (plates 69 & 84) that our professional teams (Cardinals & Browns) played their first games on. Thanks again, Karl.
Thanks for the feedback Karl. Glad you enjoyed it. Having spent many hours joining all of the images I’m envious that you get to see the original. It’s a bit far to travel ;-). There is certainly a lot more to this book than just a series of drawings.
Thank you ever so much for your dedication to this project and to our wonderful city !
I grew up in bevo, my wife in dutchtown, and owning the book is fantastic, but being able to search and search on your map has given us hours and hours of entertainment that has been so special. BRAVO!
Frank and Gwen Williams
Ben,
Thanks for providing this! My 2nd great-grandfather’s watchmaking/jewelry shop was at 1418 Market Street at that time (he operated at that same location for about 40 years!). In lieu of having a photograph of his storefront, having a pictorial map image of the location for genealogical documentation is great. I’m presuming the street numbering is the same as today, making the location the southeast corner bldg at Market and 14th Streets.
(Ref: http://archive.org/stream/policeguidedirec00jone/policeguidedirec00jone_djvu.txt says:
“…The odd numbers are oh the north and west sides of the streets ; the even numbers on the south and east sides. …” , answers that question)
–stephen