History Digitized; Old Plans Home-Delivered

A thousand New Haveners will soon get knocks on their front doors — for deliveries of their homes’ original blueprints.

City building inspectors will make those house calls.

Their department is in the process of clearing out vaults of old maps and blueprints, some dating back more than a century and at risk of disintegrating. The city has been digitizing all those documents, to preserve them and make them available to the public, and to free up room at the building department.

“We ran out of space,” said city Building Official Jim Turcio.

Some 1,000 of those documents are original blueprints of plans for homes constructed since 1950, according to Turcio. (Before then, plans didn’t need to be filed with the city, he said.) Turcio (pictured) handed the first 24 of those plans at a City Hall press conference Tuesday afternoon to Bill Casey of Habitat for Humanity, for properties where the organization has constructed homes.

The city is also digitally preserving 200 – 300 maps dating back to 1903; it will soon send out a request for proposals for a company to do that. Upon the job’s completion, the city will donate the maps to historic societies and libraries.

Turcio and Mayor Toni Harp displayed some of the maps at Monday’s press conference. The one pictured above depicts downtown in 1923. A map from 1903 detailed the use of properties along Oak Street between Porter Street and the Boulevard. It listed ​“veg gardens” and four consecutive grapevines; one of the properties had an ​“Ital” notation, meaning it was owned by an Italian-American family, according to Turcio. The maps noted ​“stagnant water” and ​“hayfields.”

Hayfields? ​“i didn’t know we had hayfields in New Haven,” Turcio noted.

Mayor Harp said the digitization project is part of a larger technology upgrade her administration has overseen over the past year and ahalf, bringing computer systems into the 21st century.