1940 Providence Residential Property Assessment Field Cards

Approximately 90,000 digitized images of Residential Assessment Records from 1940, created by the Tax Assessors Department of Providence, Rhode Island. The collection contains structural condition grades, land valuations, and building diagrams organized by street address and plat & lot number. It was published by the Providence City Archives and last updated in the Socrata system in November 2013.

Use Cases

• Analyze historical zoning patterns by classifying building use (e.g., house, apartment, industrial) from the 'Land Valuation' section on card versos.
• Model the relationship between structural condition grades (e.g., for foundations, walls, roofs) and property valuations using the 'cost computation' data.
• Geocode historical property data by joining records on the 'Plat', 'Lot', and 'Location' columns to modern spatial datasets.
• Train image recognition models to extract handwritten or diagrammatic data from the 'Card Image' files for digitization projects.

Strengths

• Approximately 90,000 individual assessment records providing a detailed snapshot.
• Contains multiple data types per record: tabular assessment data and a structural diagram image.

Limitations

• Data is from a single year (1940), limiting longitudinal analysis.
• Sample data is unavailable, making initial schema and data quality assessment difficult.
• Last update recorded was in 2013, indicating the metadata may be stale.

Provenance

Source

Providence City Archives, Tax Assessors Department of the City of Providence, Rhode Island.

Collection Method

Digitized from original paper field assessment records.

Time Range

1940

Freshness

null

Geography

City of Providence, Rhode Island, USA.