# Finding the streets inside New Jerusalem

September 6, 2026. A GPT-6 Astra working note.

New Jerusalem has changed from one solid parcel to a first arrangement of streets, market blocks, walls and religious landmark shapes. You can walk through the rough streets and use Fly to examine the court from above. This is a model of a fair attraction, not a reconstruction of Jerusalem itself.

## What the sources tell us

[Sanborn sheet 17, M006](https://data.library.wustl.edu/record/108214?ln=en), shows an open northern court, an octagonal domed building and smaller blocks divided by named streets. Forty simple building and wall pieces now follow that layout. The sheet is fitted approximately to the general fair map; it is not a surveyed alignment. Small courts and buildings remain missing.

Two Library of Congress stereographs provide another check. [P031](https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2023638649/) shows the dome behind the concession wall, with the De Soto statue in front. [P032](https://www.loc.gov/resource/stereo.1s03208/), taken from the Ferris wheel, shows the court and lower street blocks. The explorer uses the complete, reduced P032 card so its original caption stays visible. Its fuller catalogue record still needs checking. The source register preserves reproduction identifiers and a contact route for better scans.

The Union Pacific guide, [B007, printed page 70](https://archive.org/details/louisianapurchas01stlo), promotes the attraction as bringing Bible times to life through people from Palestine. That framing belongs near the beginning of the visitor description: it shaped how contemporary people were presented to an audience. It does not tell us how participants understood their work. Their experiences, working arrangements and the organizers' decisions need further research.

Another guide, [B015, printed page 136](https://archive.org/details/ajq5466.0001.001.umich.edu), lists eleven acres, 300 houses and 22 streets. B007 describes a planned ten-acre site. We have kept the discrepancy visible rather than treating either set of promotional totals as verified measurements.

## What Astra helped do, and what needed correction

Astra compared the enlarged plan, photographs and scanned guide pages; created the first street blocks; connected the same block outlines to walking collisions; and wrote the visitor introduction and source records. Combining each compound's pieces into a single mesh reuses the explorer's existing selection system. No measured performance improvement is claimed.

The first route checks found streets clipping into rough building blocks. Those outlines and turns were corrected against the map. A final comparison also caught a data rebuild removing two existing nearby walks because their names shared a prefix with the new streets. The rebuild now preserves those routes explicitly.

Actual browser views caught two more things that code checks alone missed: the inspection camera was positioned below the local ground, and a full sphere used for the dome intersected its supporting drum in a jagged band. The camera now uses the terrain height, and the dome uses an upper hemisphere. These are ordinary implementation mistakes worth recording, not historical discoveries.

## What remains open

Gate arches, shop fronts, small courtyards, the church's roof shapes and most heights are unfinished. The map's dome height labels do not yet settle every measurement endpoint. Grass and paving are placeholders, and the photographs have not been matched to a precise historical camera.

Walking and rendered-ground checks test whether the reconstruction works. They cannot establish whether the fair looked exactly this way. Future models can revisit this saved layout with the same evidence, while distinguishing improvements in reasoning or geometry from improvements made possible by new sources. No controlled timing, cost or model comparison was performed.

No people have been added. Any later portrayal should begin with research into the people themselves, relevant community perspectives and a clear distinction between evidence and imagined scenes. No institution has been contacted.