What's true & what's implied
This is a stylized reconstruction built on real data — not a survey. Here is exactly where the line sits.
True — measured, from real sources
- Terrain — every hill and the river valley come from the USGS 3DEP 10 m elevation model (15 m grid).
- Building footprints & positions — 63,750 real OpenStreetMap footprints (2026 extract). If a building stands on your block, its shape and location are real.
- Streets, bridges, rail — the real OSM network, with real road classes.
- River course & islands — the real water extent; the fall-line water-level drop (~26 m across the map) is measured from the DEM.
- Tree positions — 153,746 real canopy points.
- Landmark positions — 20 anchors verified against OSM/Wikipedia coordinates (±120 m).
- Historic growth — era extents and road networks digitized from georeferenced period maps (view them at each year stop). For legibility, period road display is limited to the built fabric visible at that stop; documented historic bridges remain independently dated.
- LiDAR roof heights — 58,853 of 63,750 buildings (92.3%) use trusted USGS 3DEP LiDAR measurements. Published landmark heights override them where a more authoritative source exists.
- 1905 downtown core — 2,679 period buildings across ~60 downtown and Jackson Ward blocks use real footprints, materials, and story heights digitized from the Sanborn fire-insurance atlas, replacing modern stand-ins.
- Building ages — the timeline uses the earlier of a building's recorded construction year (City Assessor records, ~90% of buildings) and its area's first urbanization on the period maps.
- The canal — James River & Kanawha / Haxall canal geometry from OSM; the Dry Bed segment drains after the 1880s rail conversion.
- Monument Avenue — markers rise at their real dedication years (1890–1929, Ashe 1996) and are removed after 2020–21.
Implied — inferred or stylized
- Remaining building heights — the 7.7% without trusted LiDAR coverage are inferred from type, footprint, and district.
- Building appearance — colors, windows, and rooftops are procedural archetypes, not photographs of real facades.
- Landmark models — bespoke approximations at real locations, not scans. The Hollywood Pyramid position is estimated.
- Rapids & whitewater — placed where the measured water level drops steeply, which tracks the real fall line — but individual rapids are not surveyed.
- Era of each building — in earlier eras, today's structure stands in as a proxy for whatever stood on its urbanized lot; true period building stock is future work. The canal bed also reads as water at 1737, before it was dug (1789–1840).
- Ghost fabric — the flat, desaturated blocks along the interstate corridor in the 1876–1956 views stand for the Jackson Ward and Navy Hill fabric demolished for highway construction (1950s–70s). The massing is conjectural; the demolition is not.
- Shockoe Creek — shown open before its culverting (~1870s–1920s); its course is traced from the valley floor of the elevation model, not from a survey.
- Street lighting — gas-era lamps (sparse, amber) appear with each era's built extent from 1865; the electric grid arrives at the 1956 stop. Lamp positions are today's streetlights, thinned — not period lamp surveys.
- Life — traffic, trains, kayaks, herons, lighting, and the golden hour are ambience, not data.
- Coverage — the central ~12×12 km at the fall line, not the full city boundary.
Method
- Period maps (1737, 1835, 1865, 1876, 1905, 1956) are georeferenced against the modern datum with ground-control points in QGIS; growth extents and road networks are digitized from them by hand.
- A building's timeline year is the earlier of its City Assessor construction year and its area's first appearance inside the cumulative growth extents.
- Everything conjectural follows one rendering rule: flat, desaturated, or explicitly flagged — confident colors are reserved for measured data.
- Landmark positions are verified by script against OSM/Wikipedia coordinates before each release.
Terrain: USGS 3DEP (public domain). Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL. Building years: City of Richmond Assessor parcel records. Historic maps: Library of Virginia, Library of Congress, USGS. Corrections welcome — this map improves by being argued with.