Historic Philadelphia Schools (Playing with Google Maps Engine)

(If that map is uncooperative the original from Google Maps Engine is here.)

The initial idea for this map was to chart the construction of Philadelphia schools throughout the city’s history.

I went to the School District’s website which has well organized data sets available through their Open Data Initiative. Unfortunately for the historian, this data only has schools which are still, or at least until recently, opened. It does not contain all the schools that were opened in the past.

Luckily, I remembered that few months ago researching the centralization of the school district I came across the School District of Philadelphia’s Nomination Form for the National Register of Historic Places. (The Form) The form nominated sixty-four school buildings constructed between 1825 and 1937. The school district also periodized its buildings to align with major school laws, the most influential of which was the centralization of the school district in 1905.

Going to the National Register's website and filtering their data on enabled me to acquire a decent list of historic schools in Philadelphia. Because this data does not contain when the schools opened I had to search each school individually to get the dates. (This is why there’s not more schools on the map.) Another problem with the National Register is that it largely contains the schools that were architecturally significant and well preserved. It is not a list of all the schools that the district built throughout its history.

Importing the data to Google Maps Engine did not involve any hiccups, yet I did spend a good amount of time playing with the design specifications. I decided to use simple circles to make the locations of the schools and a gradiated fill color to signify when the school was built. Because I only imported twenty schools, I broke the dates into three ranges, 1848 to 1905 (pre-centralization), 1906 to 1929 (centralization plus time for the city to acquire land/architect/contractor/construct the school), and 1930 to 1938. With a full data set I would pick more specific periods to account for other historical events such as the increases in population in the late nineteenth century.

What I like about this map (or more accurately, what this map would look like with all the data) is that it simultaneously displays where and when the city built schools. While this map is only a sampling of the schools that were built, a map with a more complete data source would be an effective research tool to study how administrative laws affect schools. How quickly did newer schools come to areas which were experiencing population growth? What does that say about the city government? It would also be a good tool to study population growth and the city’s responses to population growth.

The last addition to make the map complete would be to layer it with a map of school closings. A map of school closings would give a more complete history. Schools close for a variety of reasons: population loss, outdated buildings and outdated function are only a few reasons why schools close. For example, many of the schools, especially ones from the thirties were constructed over older schools. Having a layered map would highlight population shifts and also which neighborhoods the city is invested in.