1889 Fire Insurance Maps and Atlas of Buffalo, New York, Volume 1: The Complete Sanborn One

In 1889 the Sanborn Map & Publishing Company of New York surveyed Buffalo for the fire-insurance trade, drawing the city at fifty feet to the inch. Every building is shown to scale and color-coded for construction, with its height, use, occupant and hazards noted, alongside the hydrants, water mains and steam boilers that protected it. This first volume opens with the surveyor's report and index, a key map of the whole city and a separate key map of the grain elevators, then covers the harbor and the downtown blocks in forty double-page sheets: the great elevators and slips along Buffalo Creek and the Erie Basin, the Niagara River front and the Erie Canal, the Union Depot and the railway yards, and Main Street with the wholesale and business blocks around it.This Exile Books edition is an unabridged facsimile republication of Volume One of the 1889 Buffalo survey, reproduced complete and in full color from the copy held by the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress: the index, both key maps and all forty numbered sheets, each double-page plate laid out as a two-page spread.