Oh the joys of modeling..

Today I though I was smart, using two images from the Denver Public Library (DPL) website and couple them up with two Sanborn Fire Insurance maps from 1896 and 1900 and make a quick and easy structure..

Yeah, right…

I of course ran into trouble, as I find no way to make all the known info fit together… The Sanborn maps gives med the length and width of the structure, I round it off to a nice metric number, in this case a structure 25 meter long by 7,62 meters wide (1896 Sanborn gave it to be about 25,3 meter and the 1900 Sanborn about 24,8 meter…) as it fills a whole lot in the width department and that is as far as I know 25 feet which rounded of gives 7,62 meters.

The images from DPL was these;

Independence (Teller Co.) Colo.

This gives a quite nice side view of the structure, while this:

Hotel at Independence

Gave me a little more of the front. 🙂

Trouble started when my 1900 Sanborn gives this structure a height of 22 feet, or 6,7 meter, as when I try scale the front view out from that I end up with a doorway less then 2 meter high…

If I use a false front height of 8 meters, I can a good match on the door, windows with 180cm height and my base model looks OK. But, then I drift away from the given 22-foot high structure on the Sanborn…

So, day has gone by with trying to figure out what is wrong, how to make all the knows work together, and so far, I have failed miserable in that part! 😦

To add to the confusion, there are to other known images where this structure appears on the DPL, and they both show a longer structure…

But, as the Sanborn 1896 gives a structure closer to these two images above and one of them appears in a book published in 1896/1896 I know that image has to be pretty close in age to the Sanborn map footprint…

So I assume sometimes after 1900 the structure was extended, and by 1908 it was all gone, together with all structures in that part of the Independence town site as my 1908 Sanborn edition shows no structures there at all…

Hence, the joy of modeling, what to do when known info do not match, and your easy project has taken a wrong turn…

Yes, walk away…

Which I might do, who knows, keep and eye out, I might have adjustments to make here… 🙂

——- Update late evening ——-

OK, I admit, I messed up…

I found the way to make the given height work, but, I had to abandon the way I had cropped, and perspective corrected the front and side views to use as a guide on my model, as the perspective did indeed throw me of course…

I also had to reduce the length of the model from the 25 meter per Sanborn info to 16 meter as a educated guess of 1,5 meter between the poles supporting the structure, and yes, the scale of the model appears way more correct then when comparing to the DPL image.

A screenshot:

Screenshot of my Basic 3D model versus a ca. 1895 picture, taken by H.S. Poley

By using my image editing program and take the nearest corner, just left of the sign saying California Hotel, as a reference point, I was able by drawing lines on top and bottom of the windows as a long line crossing the corner post and measuring the height from the bottom of the wall using a scale sett by the height from bottom to top of that corner with a given height of 6,7 meter (22 feet) to guesstimate the windows to be 90x150cm and located at 65cm and 3 meter on the side wall, and 3,1 meter on the front wall for the three top windows.

I was also able to get the door size to fit a 2,1 meter size including the trim, and the larger bottom windows to be about 150x150cm and 60cm up from the bottom. As a base model, I think I am pretty close and I am happy with this…

How I will solve the fact Sanborn say this structure is 25 meter long?

Easy, I have found, seen two images of this structure from a distance, and one of them clearly shows a structures with more windows on the side, so, of course, this structure was so successful as a hotel they had to extend it, and by the time Sanborn came around, it was already extended and hence, the reason why I never was able to match the above image to the known given length is that this is a early edition of the structure… 🙂

That works for me, feel free to prove me wrong… 😉

Take care

Linda