Old North Minneapolis and Historypin

Top photo, Lowry Bridge 1958; bottom photo West Broadway Bridge, 1978.

In the fall of 2013, a new Facebook group started up called "Old North Minneapolis."  Its administrators tend to focus most of the content on items north of Lowry Avenue, since that's their part of the community.  But the page contains a wealth of photos from across the northside.  Over Christmas break, I downloaded ninety-five photos from the page, and there have been perhaps two dozen more added since then.

My goal is to get every picture that's posted on that page--and eventually the Camden Community Historical Society FB group as well, although there's some overlap of pictures--posted on Historypin. 

For the uninitiated, Historypin is a website and smartphone app that allows old pictures to be layered on Google street view.  Once the picture is "pinned," then anyone with the Historypin smartphone app can stand in front of the physical location of the photo and see, through the camera view of their phone, what was there years ago superimposed over what is there today.  Long-term, I would love to see this app used to coordinate historic walking tours throughout north Minneapolis.  But in order to do that, photos need to be pinned on the site.

And in order to pin a photo, I need three things:  a physical street address where the picture was taken (sometimes problematic if the actual address no longer exists; when a bunch of properties have been torn down and been combined in to one parcel, for instance, then photos can be jumbled together), a year when the photo was taken (and since that's not always clear from the picture or someone's personal knowledge, it's often guesswork based on cars and clothing), and the man-hours needed to layer the photo on the site.  The last item is the most important.  It can take 5-10 minutes to do one picture, which is not too burdensome unless you've got a few hundred pictures to wade through.

But if a few members of these pages made a habit of pinning a photo when the post to Facebook, then we could make our communal history far more accessible.

Historypin at FLOW

Post and bottom photo by the Hawthorne Hawkman, top photo from the Hennepin History Museum, used with permission.

Today at FLOW I will lead a historic walking tour at key nodes along West Broadway.  Although to be more accurate, this walking tour is meant more to showcase the Historypin website and smartphone application.  I consider it quite likely that others joining me for the event will know more than I do about connections to our community's past.  And that's quite the point of the exercise; my goal is to raise awareness about both the application and our history, so that our neighborhoods can strengthen those connections.

Between two and three today, I will be at the Broadway and North 2nd Street node.  From four o'clock to five, I will be at the Capri Theater, showing photos along that stretch.  And from five thirty until seven, I will be around Broadway and Emerson.  That node has the most photographs pinned, and should prove to be the most revealing segment.

Ironically, that same stretch shows the main flaw in the Historypin application:  what were once many separate addresses for individual storefronts have now been consolidated into one or two large commercial buildings that take up entire blocks.  Since the app "pins" photos using Google Street View, the pictures are attached to address numbers.  What should appear as a row of continuous buildings instead results in photographs being jumbled together onto one site.  I am working with the folks who created the app to fix this bug.

If people cannot be at the nodes during the scheduled times, I will mark the ground where you can stand and see a Historypin image on your smartphone or tablet.  Simply download the program and you're good to go.  I can also be reached on my cell phone, 952-210-1086, if readers wish to meet up in the middle of a tour.

"H" marks the spot

I hope to show off a great way to connect people to our history, and in turn I look forward to learning more about my own community.  Come and join the fun at FLOW!

Historypin and a Get to NoMi Challenge

Post and photos below by the Hawthorne Hawkman, photos above from the Get to NoMi Facebook page.

In the summer of last year, I found a nifty new smartphone app called Historypin.  I tried it out on West Broadway and Friedman's, with varying degrees of success.  In essence, here's how the application works:  You take an old photograph, like the one shown above, and upload it onto the Historypin website.  Once uploaded, the photograph can be positioned using Google Street View, like so:

Step 1: find the house on Street View.

Then line up the old photograph; it can be adjusted to be translucent or opaque.

Now the picture is lined up directly over the current map.  We're good to go.

And now anyone who downloads the historypin app onto their phone can go to 2806 James and see the exact same thing, in the palm of their hands.

I have wanted to gather a large number of old pictures to do a historypin walking tour of part of NoMi.  But many older pictures are copyrighted or otherwise can't be used without permission or paying fees.  I've asked around about funding opportunities, but I'd rather get this done myself sooner rather than get funding later.  So when I saw this picture on the Get to NoMi page, I had an idea.  I'm asking neighbors on the page to send me old photographs.  I will pin the first twenty I receive on the application, and we can do a small tour from that initial collection.

Here are the rules for the NoMi Historypin Challenge...

Historypin Puts Neighborhood History in the Palm of Your Hand

Post by the Hawthorne Hawkman, videos from the Historypin Youtube channel.

Historypin.com may just be the web- and smartphone-based feature I've been searching my whole life for.  (I realize smartphones have not existed for the entirety of my life.  Don't ruin my moment.)  A few months ago, I explored the idea of making community history more accessible through QR codes.  For website or text information, that could still work.  But let's say you're walking down the street and you think to yourself, "I wonder what this place looked like fifty years ago?"  Imagine being able to hold your phone up like you were taking a picture of a historic building, and then being able to see a decades-old image of that location right next to what it looks like in the present day.

That, in essence, is what Historypin does.  You can upload photos to it, and overlay those pictures onto Google Street, and then go to the place where the photos are pinned to.  The Historypin application is available for free download on Android phones.  I picture this program as an ideal supplement to neighborhood historic walking tours.  So naturally I tried this out on...