Butt's Land and Cuckold's Delight: Mapping D.C.'s Historic Subdivisions
You may live in Cuckold's Delight or Butt's Land, or maybe just Petworth.
We mapped out the city's historical subdivisions, the original divisions of land made by developers, and found that there are some names we're familiar with and some that are... colorful. The data comes from a list of subdivisions from 1919 compiled by historian Matthew Gilmore, we then linked each subdivision to its modern squares, the way the land is divided in the city today. Hover over a colored area on the map to see its name and any other alternate names for the subdivision.
"Subdivisions are when a developer purchases a large tract of land, usually farmland, and subdivides the lot into smaller lots which will contain houses that get sold to individual property owners," says historian and author Kent Boese. "It doesn't matter if these are free standing houses, rowhouses, or commercial properties. They all originally belonged to a single property owner and were once recorded as a single tax lot prior to development."
...
We mapped out the city's historical subdivisions, the original divisions of land made by developers, and found that there are some names we're familiar with and some that are... colorful. The data comes from a list of subdivisions from 1919 compiled by historian Matthew Gilmore, we then linked each subdivision to its modern squares, the way the land is divided in the city today. Hover over a colored area on the map to see its name and any other alternate names for the subdivision.
"Subdivisions are when a developer purchases a large tract of land, usually farmland, and subdivides the lot into smaller lots which will contain houses that get sold to individual property owners," says historian and author Kent Boese. "It doesn't matter if these are free standing houses, rowhouses, or commercial properties. They all originally belonged to a single property owner and were once recorded as a single tax lot prior to development."
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