Just wanted to say thank you to all who responded to my geocoding query. The suggestion to create a new address locator based on local street centerline data did the trick. The City of Chicago did have a file of street centerlines (deprecated as of 2013, but good enough for me) and I learned a lot about address locator options, tips and tricks (as in, if you don't have zip codes, you can set the option to "match without zonal attributes" to Yes, but it also helps to just add a column called ZIP and leave it empty -- thank you, Geonet). Now I have an app in AGOL with points that are pretty much in front of the right buildings.

And yes, the city did renumber its streets in 1909, but since my data was either 1912 (Sanborn maps) or later (census data), this did not affect me, fortunately. I do wonder how they managed to pass an ordinance in 1908 that went into effect in 1909; there's an interesting history project.

Thanks again and Happy Friday, everyone!

Deborah Reichler

Hamilton College

On Tue, Aug 23, 2016 at 10:14 AM, Deborah Reichler <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Now working in earnest on those Chicago Sanborn maps I mentioned earlier ...

So I have a file of census data prepared by students including the street addresses of the residents. I'd like to upload all those records (600 in one file, 700 in another) to AGOL so that the class can develop map apps working with this data.

It is incredibly easy to just add the file in AGOL and it magically locates all the addresses, creates points, populates the popups, etc. Except ... the points are not really in front of the houses (which is really easy to see in those Sanborn maps, with the very carefully written-in street numbers). The points are clustered in the northern half of the avenues, not spread along the entire street.

I've tried geocoding these files in ArcMap, with the modern Streets layer as a base layer, with the same results. I know that the geocoding process interpolates the points, based on what the range of addresses is along the street, which side of the street, and how far down the street it calculates the location of the point should be. I don't mind the interpolation, but ...

Is there any way to make it use the entire length of the street, not just the northern half? I'm using the default World address locator, if that makes a difference. I've looked through some of the documentation and haven't really found anything related to this issue.

Thanks as always for any illumination of this issue,

Deborah Reichler
Hamilton College