the 3rd coolest thing I have seen on the internets

A buddy of mine at work showed me this cool website today: Hindsight.

It combines hybrid maps of America with information about housing construction to create an animated display of the growth in a region.

Here is an example with the San Jose metro area:



It reminds me of a fireworks show, celebrating in our case "no-growth sprawl".

You can jump to the map of the Youngstown region and all of NEO here and here.

Here is a screen shot of the animation, highlighting 1917. The dots in powder blue mark the constuction of homes in this period. From Warren, though Niles, Girard, Youngstown, East Youngstown, and onto Struthers, one can see how the growth just follows the river all the way through the Mahoning Valley.


And in the 1950s and 1960s, waves of construction just spreads out from the density near the river.


awesome.