Like Rome! Built on hills! (and sacked by barbarians?)

[rmd.livejournal.com]

What are the steepest streets in Somerville?

I can't seem to find a convenient (free) topographic map of Somerville to answer my local geography trivia questions like this. Is there an online topo map of Somerville that will display in tiff or jpg or gif or something rather than some proprietary (or at least unreadable to my machine) format?

Comments

[xuth.livejournal.com]

USGS maps are public domain (as all works of the federal government are). USGS at least was charging a fee for them so 5 years ago a group of people bought all of them and put them online at the internet archive (archive.org). The specific map you want can be gotten here:
http://www.archive.org/download/usgs_drg_ma_42071_d1/k42071d1.tif

[rmd.livejournal.com]

Amusingly, I was one of those people. :)

Thanks! I hadn't been able to figure out which the correct map was when I posted this.

[ron_newman]

How do i read this file? Google Chrome asks me if it's OK to run Quick Time (I don't know why, but I say yes), and then all I see is a black screen.

[xuth.livejournal.com]

This is a standard tiff image file. I'm not sure what OS you're running but most full fledged image viewers (though not the preview app that come with windows or at least the versions I've run) should have no problems reading it. On windows I'd try IrfanView or an image editor like gimp. On mac, based on a quick google search, maybe something like Xee. This comes with the disclaimer that I've not run windows or macos for a very long time.