Fun With Maps: Oh How the Sloop Has Developed...

Curbed Chicago posted a fun map thingy yesterday from Google maps showing how places have changed over the past 3 decades:

We’ve all heard the stories about Chicago’s stagnant population growth, but yet at the same time, the city is experiencing a construction boom that hasn’t been seen in years. The stats say that the city is changing, and now with satellite images from Google Earth, we can get a pretty good view of how exactly the city has developed over the years. Google teamed up with Carnegie Mellon University’s CREATE Lab to create an interactive map tool which features 33 cloud-free comprehensive mosaics of the earth (Google says that over 5 million satellite images from over the past three decades were used to create these mosaics).

While their post has some fun then and now photo sliders, we really enjoyed clicking this link and play around with Google's Earth Engine.  Type in Chicago and zoom into the Sloop.  It's pretty fun to see Northerly Island transform over the years, or McCormick Place expand or the hundreds of buildings pop up in the neighborhood.  Try it out...it's a great Friday activity: