Lately I have been focusing on researching historic buildings in Peru, Illinois, and trying to leverage the information published in, I believe, the 1980s in the Historic American Building Survey (HABS) report for that community. What I found was researching properties with these reports can be challenging. Even when covering only one community, the document can be lengthy, and I have not found them to be bookmarked. So if you want to know if a specific property is surveyed and in the report, you need to open the report and scroll or page through it. Even if you find a report online, they are not always searchable so this means at least for the city of Peru scrolling through about 500 pages. And changing the document in Adobe so it can be searched is not always a successful endeavor.
Finally after a few attempts at looking for properties in the Peru report, I decided at least I could bookmark the pages. This didn’t take too long and was super helpful. But there are 257 properties in the report so even looking through the bookmarks can be tedious. As with most things tied to property, being able to view locations on a map is super helpful. So I decided since i had created bookmarks using the addresses, it wouldn’t take much more to plot them on a map. And just to make things easier for myself, I created a URL that would link to the report I bookmarked.
Below is the result of mapping the properties in this report to Google Maps. One important discovery I had from doing this is that two properties obviously had incorrect addresses in the report as they kept mapping to the city of LaSalle. So using the legal description and the description of the building, I was able to fix the addresses to get those two properties to locate at the right location. Another issue I found with this method is if you have an Adobe extension installed for your browser, the link will not take you to the specific page in the report. Instead it will take you to the front of the document, and then you can use the bookmarks to get to the address. Or you can ensure the link opens a browser that does not have the extension.
Here’s an example of an entry in the HABS report for 1403 Fourth street in Peru, Illinois:
