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).
- 1905 downtown core — across ~50 blocks (Clay to the canal, Foushee to 12th), the 1905 view shows real building footprints, materials, and story heights digitized from the Sanborn fire-insurance atlas, replacing the 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
- Building heights — only ~2% carry real height data; the rest are inferred from type, footprint, and district. Downtown towers use published heights.
- 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.