Something you can do to waste time during the snow day – UCLA has a great website with a series of historical maps scaled and overlaid on a contemporary aerial image for select cities around the world.  The closest to DC is New York, but this is still a lot of fun to play around with.

Hat tip to Dale for the link.

Some screenshots to give you an example of the interface and how it works:

The Hypercities interface. Note the base aerial photo, various maps to toggle in the right sidebar, other available cities in the upper right map, and the usual Google map interface navigation.

New York, base aerial photo.

New York, with 1766 map overlay

1766 map, with opacity adjusted.

Same as above, with a 1775 map of Lower Manhattan overlay.

There are tons of historical maps and an incredible amount of detail to explore here.  I’ve been playing around with it and feel like I’ve only scratched the surface.  Very cool stuff.

Again, the URL is hypercities.ats.ucla.edu. Check it out.