Historic intersections

[danvk]

This adds intersections from the NYPL's nyc-streets.geojson that don't exist in today's OSM. There are 1636 of these. Some of them are due to street renaming (4th Avenue → Park Avenue South) but many correspond to intersections that existed when the Milstein photos were taken but no longer exist today (example: Tompkins & Broome).

This significantly reduces the need to interpolate and extrapolate existing streets (see #179 and #106 and this blog post).

We pick up a bunch of new items (401) and a bunch of others move (450). The moves are almost exclusively wins, but some are not. For example, 717831f has a title of "Broadway - 9th Avenue". Formerly this was unambiguous and near 220th street. But historically this was also an intersection around 65th Street. Other information on the photo makes it clear that 220th is the correct location.

The additions all seem fine. I'm excited to see that we're picking up some intersections along the erstwhile 13th Avenue!

Here are a few before/after GIFs:

Lower East Side, where housing projects and highways totally changed the grid:

Downtown Brooklyn, where the BQE and expanded Brooklyn Bridge onramp changed the grid:

Lower Manhattan, showing a very satisfying "filling in" of the map:

Data update: oldnyc/oldnyc.github.io@16b5b51

[danvk]

@riordan @bertspaan thought you might enjoy this. Thanks so much for nyc-streets.geojson!

[bertspaan]

Hey Dan! Thanks for tagging me, this is great!!! So happy to see the datasets I published during my NYPL days are still useful!