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Historic Apartment Houses of Portland, tinyurl.com/pdxapts, is a Google-based map which identifies apartment houses listed in Portland city directories from 1904 through 1934. Each apartment house entry provides the name and alternate names of the apartment house, its address, its architect and builder/contractor, its date of occupancy, the source of directory information. The historic address of the building is also provided; in 1931, almost all of Portland's street addresses were changed. The data is revised as more is learned about the buildings. Images for most extant buildings are linked to their corresponding Google Maps images or to images in Building Oregon.
The mapping of the apartment houses requires converting the historic address to the address the building would have if it currently existed. The conversion tool, PastPortland.com, is a convenient database created for this purpose. By mapping the apartment houses using Google Maps and then using the same resource to determine visually if an apartment house is still on site, a listing of extant and destroyed works can be created.
The map and its metadata are continuously being revised as research yields more information. Two resources are of particular value. The Oregon Historic Sites Database, maintained by the Oregon State Historic Preservation Office, indexes and provides full text for National Register nominations and thousands of cultural resources surveys. As useful as this resource is, in many cases the architects and builders associated with buildings are not identified. Of special value is Historic Oregon Newspapers, a digitized collection of newspapers created by the University of Oregon Libraries which provides newspaper content in the public domain. This resources has proved invaluable in discovering information about apartment houses and their creators now accessible in this web publication.
Historic Apartment Houses of Portland
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