Chicago, summer 1835

WASD

walk

Shift

run

mouse

look around

click

inspect a building — its attributes and citations

C

confidence view

F

free-fly — rise above the town

Space Q

up / down (while flying)

G

go to a viewpoint, a building or a street corner

N

what's new

H

this menu

Esc

release the cursor

left stick

walk

push it fully

run

drag right

look around

tap

inspect a building

Go to

the tab beside this one — every viewpoint, building and corner

Fly

rise above the town — ▲ ▼ appear bottom-right

The chip grades the POSITION, not the building: a tavern can be documented down to its landlord and its sign and still stand where no source puts it, because what survives is usually a street and a side of it rather than a corner. The grade is the record's own — the same value the building card shows when you arrive — so the two cannot drift apart. Viewpoints are authored camera positions, not claims about the town, and junctions are the survey control this project georeferenced from.

The default, 1.68 m, is the mean stature of an adult man in the 1830s United States — this walkthrough puts your eye where a person of the period had theirs, which is lower than a modern viewer expects and lower than the prairie grass beside you, because both of those are true of the place. Raise it if the view is uncomfortable; it changes only the camera, never the town.

These are worn earth tracks through prairie grass, and how much bare earth shows is a modelled figure with its own evidence behind it — so the default paints them exactly as the record describes. Raise this if they are hard to follow: on a phone in daylight, or if faint contrast is difficult to see. It changes nothing but how strongly the roads are painted on your screen, and it is not a claim that 1835 Chicago's streets looked bolder than this.

The scene is lit by a sky whose colour was matched to a July photograph taken at this latitude, and the default position of this slider is that measured light — which is why it says "calibrated" rather than showing a number. Raise it if the scene is hard to see: a dim room, a bright window, a phone at arm's length. It opens the exposure by up to one photographic stop and changes nothing else — no wall, roof or street is a different colour underneath it, and the brighter end is not a second reconstruction of how 1835 looked. All of this project's own measurements are taken at the calibrated position whatever you choose here.

• attested — a source attests this at the scene date
• inferred — reasoned from evidence about this thing: a described location, a measured lot, an adjacent record
• reconstructed — no source speaks to this one; built to fill a demonstrable need of the town, and drawn as dithered massing

Every building is clickable. The tint and the citation come from the same record, so they cannot drift apart. Dimensional uncertainty is separate: a building can be well documented in character and still have a guessed size, and the popup says so.

What we made up

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Straight from the project's append-only docs/LIBERTIES.md. Every value a record states without evidence is named in this list — an invented outline or placement, and equally a roof, a height or a porch chosen because it was usual rather than because it was found. An entry says which inventions it admits to — the dashed chips — and the commit gate checks those claims against the records both ways, failing if an invention has no admission or an admission has no invention. The rule now runs the other way as well: where a record states something the model does not build — a stable, a painted sign, a chimney count no generator reads — the popup marks that row not built or not modelled from this, and it too has to be named here. A well-evidenced feature you cannot see is as much a gap as an invention you can.

The ground you are standing on

The buildings are not the only things making claims here. The terrain is a research record too — a documented water surface, three division levels argued out of period narrative feet, a bank face and a river cross-section that no source describes at all — and it dithers under the confidence view like everything else while never saying what was graded. These are its own statements, each with its figures, its reasoning and its citation, straight from the epoch's terrain_spec.json. Where a claim has no reasoning recorded, it says so.

Who was living here

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Each household says when it came, from where, why, where it lived and worked, and whether the sources actually place it here on 1 July 1835 — with the reasoning attached to every one of those, because on this layer the reasoning is usually the finding. A famous man with a conjectural roof is the normal case, not the exception. Open a household to fetch its record. Nobody is drawn in the scene, and the removal of the Potawatomi in August 1835 is not depicted or staged anywhere in it: this is published research, not a population.

What was living here

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Ten habitats and every animal researched into them, stated for 1 July rather than for the year — which is the whole difficulty of the dataset, because July is the quietest wildlife date in the Chicago calendar. The birds are mostly done singing, the ducks are flightless and in cover, and several of the animals a reader expects are here only as sign or are not here at all. Each record says whether you would see it, hear it, or find only its tracks, how many, what it would be doing, and the sources behind all three. None of them is drawn in the scene. This is the research, published where a visitor can read it, and not a claim that the town in front of you is populated.

What grows here

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Ten plant communities and every species researched into them, recorded for 1 July — what each one is doing in its community, how much of it the record asks for, how tall and how wide, whether it is in flower on the day, and the sources behind all of it. The communities' boundaries are the weakest claim here and each says so: the vegetation is documented, but no survey drew the line between one community and the next. Where a community asks for more small plants than the sward lattice can hold, the card says what share of the record you are actually standing in — under the dense timber it is half of one per cent, and that is a limit of the drawing and not a gap in the research.

What is not here

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Two different findings share this one list, and the chip is how to tell them apart: an entry marked not until a later year is dated after 1 July 1835, and an entry with no chip at all had already come down. Each carries the citation the decision rests on. The view from the air stays the honest picture of the rest.

What is still an open question

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Which is why they are not on the list above: a structure standing in the scene cannot be filed under what is not here. Each entry says what is open, what settling it would change, and the evidence it rests on — or that it rests on none.