Talk:Norris, Tennessee/Archive 1

Dubious

The 40,000 acre area given for the historic district appears to be some sort of error. See Talk:Norris, Tennessee for discussion of my reasoning. --Orlady (talk) 18:21, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

• I have a download of the National Register coordinates database, and in that one, the acreage is listed as 4000 acres, not 40,000 acres. There are four points defined as boundaries for the historic district, and they include approximately the southwest half of the city (the part that's built up). I plotted it out in Google Earth. The boundaries also include small bits outside the city, such as parts of Andersonville and Bethel, but it's entirely possible that there are properties within those boundaries that aren't contributing properties to the historic district. I'll see if I can generate a map at some point. Regardless, it looks like the 40,000 acre figure in the NRIS is off because of a typo. --Elkman ^(Elkspeak) 17:42, 20 July 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for providing this info! By the way, as uncovered in this conversation, the "UTM" points available for historic districts seem to provide the general location of a historic district, but the actual detailed outline of the district cannot be constructed from that. In the one CT case discussed there, it would take more than 100 points to show the bounds of a district, but there were only a dozen or fewer UTM coordinates available (which I assume are like those you have for this one). With some appropriate labelling explaining the map shows the approximate location but not the specific boundaries, that would be a helpful contribution. doncram (talk) 20:05, 20 July 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for your help, Elkman. I'm glad for the confirmation of the acreage, but those coordinates are clearly wrong. They include some areas outside Norris that no sensible person would deem to be part of any historic district, unless perhaps we're thinking "historic automobile graveyard" (aka junkyard).

The deal with Norris is that the city is a well-defined planned community surrounded by greenbelt areas. I think of "Norris" as approximately round in shape, with the southwestern portion of the boundary defined (at least approximately) by the Norris Freeway (US Hwy 441) where it curves around Norris. It also includes the municipal park area extending northward toward the lake, but I don't know how far "Norris" goes in that direction. Most of Norris is still unmistakeably a planned community from the 1930s (the notability for which the city was listed on the National Register before it was fully 50 years old). If there are any differences between the city and the HD, my guess is that they relate to (1) small annexations that may have occurred over the years and/or (2) newer development on the east side of town (for example, on Dairy Pond Road). However, it is likely that newer development on Dairy Pond Road would be treated as "noncontributing" within the HD, rather than as outside the HD, since I think that the area was included in the original town plan. --Orlady (talk) 20:44, 20 July 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm thinking that those coordinates in the spatial database are just a general overview -- or, in some cases, just wrong. I checked out the coordinates of a couple historic districts in Saint Paul, Minnesota and found that the coordinates describe areas that can't be part of the historic districts in question. I think the boundaries of Irvine Park Historic District are cutting off the top half of what is clearly Irvine Park, for example, and the coordinates for Summit Avenue (St. Paul) are just a rectangle when the actual district is irregularly bounded. Back to Norris, though: I think we'd need to get a copy of the actual NRHP nomination form to truly find out what the boundaries are, and I don't think that's online. I checked NRHP Focus and the Tennessee SHPO and they don't seem to have the NRHP nominations online, though I didn't check all that thoroughly. --Elkman ^(Elkspeak) 21:17, 20 July 2009 (UTC)

As has been shown in many cases (but still just a tiny fraction of all NRHPs nationwide), the single point coordinate given by the National Register for the location of NRHPs (as merged in by Elkman and made available in the county list-tables and in the NRHP infoboxes) can sometimes be completely wrong by hundreds of miles. However, I have seen no case documented, ever, where the multiple UTM coordinates describing an NRHP HD in an actual NRHP application (or in any other source) are all wrong. Possibly all the single points being completely wrong are typos introduced at a later stage. Or, possibly all the UTM points given for some NRHP HDs in their original application are all shifted, together, by an applicants misunderstanding of the Days/Minutes/Seconds info on a U.S. Geological Service quadrant map. It would be interesting to get any actual report of UTM coordinate sets being wrong. Here, we still don't know that they are wrong. There could be an NRHP HD which happens to be in the area of Norris and/or include it. Others are free to speculation about what the NRHP HD is, in the absence of collecting the NRHP HD documents which describe it, but I don't care to engage in that. doncram (talk) 16:06, 21 July 2009 (UTC)