The Before and After of Miami Beach: Overlaying Historical Photographs of Miami Beach Properties in their Contemporary Locations
Aspects of Digitization: Resource Sharing

12/07/21

By: M. M.

If you have an interest in Miami Beach history, love real estate or modern tech that enhances historical information, Miami-Dade Public Library’s Digital Collection has something truly special for you.

The Miami Beach Real Estate Listings Digital Collection comprises approximately 4,000 photographs of commercial and residential properties used by real estate companies and agents to list properties during the 1930s to the 1960s. Each record in this collection has been enhanced with geospatial information. (The coordinates captured in our spatial location data are gathered using USGS Earth Explorer.)

One of the Miami-Dade Public Library Digital Collection new initiatives has been to join Historypin with the Miami Beach Real Estate Listings Digital Collection. Historypin is a user-generated digital archive created by the non-profit company, Shift (formerly We Are What We Do) with funding and support from Google.

Historypin users are able to use the location and date of their content to "pin" it to Google Maps. Where Google Street View is available, users can overlay historical photographs and compare it with the contemporary location. It is a collaboration in progress that we started with some of the more prominent streets from Miami Beach like Ocean Drive, Collins, and Alton Road.

Records with the Pegman icon in the left bottom corner have the overlay feature. While some places have completely changed, others remain intact over time. Using the fade bar, you can see the before and after of the location.