1906 Fire Insurance Maps and Atlas of Atlantic City, New Jersey: The Complete Sanborn Fire Insurance Atlas of Atlantic City, Ventnor, South Atlantic City and Longport

In 1906 the Sanborn Map Company of New York surveyed Atlantic City for the fire-insurance trade, drawing the resort at fifty feet to the inch along the whole of Absecon Island, from the Inlet down through Ventnor and South Atlantic City to Longport. Every building is shown to scale and colour-coded for construction, with its height, use, street number and hazards noted, together with the hydrants, water mains, steam boilers and fire walls that the underwriters needed to know.

The atlas opens on two index sheets of every street, hotel and named building, then a key map of the island, and works block by block along the Boardwalk and its great hotels and piers, the cottages, boarding houses and bath houses of the avenues named for the states, the railroad terminals, the ice plants, gas works and electric-light stations, and the wharves and yacht clubs on the bay side. Twenty-four skeleton sheets bound with the volume record the outlying blocks in outline.

This Exile Books edition reproduces the volume complete and in full colour: the two index sheets, the key map and all seventy numbered sheets with their skeleton supplements. Printed at 8.5 x 11 inches on heavy colour stock, it is a working reference for historians, genealogists, architects, preservationists and anyone tracing an Atlantic City address back to the Boardwalk's golden age.

The Sanborn Map Company of New York was the leading maker of fire insurance maps in the United States. From 1867 its surveyors drew American cities block by block at fifty feet to the inch, recording every building's footprint, construction, height and use for the insurance trade. The Sanborn maps are now the most detailed record of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century American city.