Community Heritage Maps is dedicated to providing high quality replicas of detailed neighborhood maps based upon pre-1922 real estate and insurance maps.

Insurance and real estate maps were developed to provide essential information for the real estate and insurance industries and now provides the reader with a record of neighborhood history including individual building footprints and structural information, ownership, urban landscaping, historical place names and ecological features.

These two types of maps served special but overlapping purposes. Insurance maps provided detailed engineering information for individual building and local areas that would help insurance companies assess risk while real estate maps provided detailed land use and ownership information that would be valuable to the real estate industry. These maps provide homeowners, architects, preservationists and city planners with complex detailed community information that is often hard to assemble using alternate primary sources.

Community Heritage Maps specializes in reproducing real estate maps that were published from 1880 to 1922. These maps were produced at the high point of map art, which merged industrial printing, and handcraft painting. These maps are important examples of transitional industrial/handcrafted art pieces that gave way to offset printing after the Second World War, and has now moved into digital formatting.

Community Heritage Maps uses high level digital scanning (200 dpi) and individual restorations to capture the original character of the maps including the lithograph process, hand lettering and individually hand applied colored tints that indicate land usage and individual building types such as: wood, brick, iron, or stone.

These maps were working documents and consumers' access to them was limited to rare bookstores, de-acquisition sales at libraries, insurance or engineering firms. As working documents they were often marked up and are difficult to find in good condition that would be suitable for framing. Community Heritage Maps is dedicated to limiting maintaining the unique character of the original maps. Stray marks and stains are removed while the restoration process is careful to maintain the 80 to 100 year old tone of the maps and the hand strokes of the original craftsman. The only intended substantive change in the restoration process is the application of the publication date on each individual map and option to vary size according to the customer needs and up grading of paper.

The maps are presented as fine arts reproductions and should not be relied upon as original source documents. Source document information is available from Community Heritage maps upon request.

Community Heritage Maps produces these maps at produced using a giclée printing process at 200 dpi Printing size is either in their original 22 1/2" to 32-1/2" format or reduced sizes to facilitate presentation in environments with space restrictions. The maps are printed on Crane fine arts textured, acid free, 100 cotton rag paper using Epson UltraChrome inks that have up to an 80 year life.