The State Office Building at Spring Garden and Broad Streets, Philadelphia (CC-BY-SA)

If you follow our suggestion and work through the the WikiProject:NRHP map and tables, you should be able to find the addresses and geographic coordinates of historical sites.

But sometimes it’s just not easy finding the right building. Sometimes they just don’t look like a building on the National Register of Historic Places.  This building from the 1950s had me fooled for over a year.  I took some great photos of a nice white building from the 1890s that you can just see in the lower right hand corner.

Then a colleague at WikiProject:NRHP came along and removed that photo from the list of Philadelphia NRHP sites and left me a shocking note: not THIS building!

Sometimes you just have to keep on trying.

Note that, like several other regulars at WP:NRHP, I donate all the photos that I upload to Wikimedia Commons, including this one, to the public domain. You can give me a credit line if you’d like, but you don’t have to.

I’m not sure why some of the others donate their photos to the public domain, but I feel that these buildings are part of our shared national heritage, and that I shouldn’t pretend to own even a small piece of them.

When you upload your photos during the contest your photos will be automatically licensed CC-BY-SA.  That means that anybody can use them for any reason, but they have to give you a credit line.  You can change the license of your photos to public domain if you’d like.  During the upload process, just select CC0 as the license.  But this is absolutely not needed.  Just stick with the automatic CC-BY-SA and that will be great.

–Smallbones