Alice Hudson, chief of the New York Public Library’s map division from 1981 to 2009, died in 2024. Last month The Cartographic Journal published a long look at Hudson’s life and career, written by Daniel Anger and Elizabeth Baigent. It was done as part of a special Cartographic Journal issue on women in cartography, which grew out of a 2021 conference on the subject. The issue does not yet have a single page I can point you at, but until it does you can see the contents via the latest articles page. A few articles are free/open access, including the editorial preface, a look at two map librarians at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, an article about the 19th-century mapmaker Selina Hall, and an editorial refuting the notion that women didn’t do cartography.
Category: Obituaries
Gladys West, 1930-2026
Gladys West has died at the age of 95. An African-American mathematician who grew up in Jim Crow Virginia, West “devoted herself to solving one of science’s most complex challenges: accurately modeling the shape of the Earth. Her painstaking calculations and programming helped transform raw satellite data into precise geodetic models, enabling reliable satellite-based navigation. That work ultimately became the backbone of the Global Positioning System (GPS)—now essential to aviation, shipping, emergency response, smartphones, and daily life worldwide.”
Previously: Gladys West, GPS’s Hidden Figure.
Ferjan Ormeling Jr., 1942-2025
The International Cartographic Association announced the passing of Ferdinand Jan (“Ferjan”) Ormeling Jr., “a pioneering figure in thematic and atlas cartography and a backbone of the development of the International Cartographic Association.” He was 82.
A champion of cartographic education, Ormeling co-authored with Menno-Jan Kraak the well-regarded textbook Cartography: Visualization of Spatial Data, now in its fourth edition, which remains a foundational reference for generations of mapmakers. Both during and after his career, he curated an impressive collection of atlases and historical maps. In 2003, his collection—enhanced by books and wall maps—was generously donated to Utrecht University, enriching its map room alongside his father’s legacy.
Bob Wegner, 1941-2025
Bob Wegner, an illustrator who spent 42 years drawing railroad maps and model train track plans for the Kalmbach line of magazines—Trains, Model Railroader and Classic Trains—died last week at the age of 83. Classic Trains has a rememberance; obituary here.
Karen Wynn Fonstad’s Belated NYT Obituary
Karen Wynn Fonstad, the cartographer of fantasy worlds best known for her Atlas of Middle-earth, died in March 2005 aged 59. Nearly twenty years later, she gets a comprehensive obituary in the New York Times, replete with lots of examples of her mapmaking, as part of its Overlooked series, which gives belated obituaries to “remarkable people whose deaths […] went unreported in The Times.” Paywalled; workarounds via the usual suspects.
Alice Hudson, 1947-2024
Alice Hudson, who from 1981 to 2009 was chief of the New York Public Library’s Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, and as such responsible for one of the world’s significant map collections, died on 6 November 2024 from complications of kidney disease. She was 77. The New York Times published her obituary yesterday.
Carl Sack
Carl Sack, activist, cartographer, professor and NACIS stalwart, died last week of a sudden cardiac arrest at the age of 41. Here is his memorial page. On Mastodon, Daniel Huffman wrote: “I will have more words about him later on, but for now I will say that Carl was a beloved educator and member of the NACIS community, and a valued friend. It’s still pretty hard to believe he’s gone.”
Harold L. Osher, 1924-2023
Harold L. Osher died on 23 December 2023 at the age of 99. (Today would have been his 100th birthday.) He and his wife Peggy (who died in 2018) amassed a sizeable map collection, which they then donated to the University of Southern Maine; they went on to donate to and campaign for the map library that would bear their name. More: Maine Public Radio, WCSH.
Virginia Norwood, 1927-2023
Virginia Norwood, called “the mother of Landsat” for her invention of Landsat 1’s multispectral scanner system, died on March 26th at the age of 96. See also Landsat’s memorial. [Lat × Long]
Previously: The Mother of Landsat.
Albert H. Small, 1925-2021
Albert H. Small, whose donation of maps and other items to the George Washington University Museum in 2011 became the Albert H. Small Washingtoniana Collection, died on 3 October, shortly before what would have been his 96th birthday. NEH statement, obituary. [Tony Campbell]
Previously: The Albert H. Small Washingtoniana Collection.
Michael T. Jones, 1960-2021
Keyhole co-founder Michael T. Jones died January 18th at the age of 60. He’d been undergoing cancer treatment. Geospatial World: “Words can’t describe the contribution and impact of Michael Jones’s work on democratizing and personalizing maps. He is to be credited for not only launching Keyhole in 2000—the original version of Google Earth, quite accidentally as he put it in a conversation with Geospatial World—but also for his years of work on improving on it as the Chief Technology Advocate of Google after its acquisition by the IT giant.” Last year the Royal Geographic Society awarded him the 2020 Patron’s Medal.
(To be honest, between Jones, John Hanke and Brian McClendon I’m not sure who did what at Keyhole and Google Earth: the company history isn’t quite as ingrained in computer lore as, say, Apple’s is.)
Norman Thrower, 1919-2020
Norman J. W. Thrower, cartographer, emeritus professor of geography at UCLA and author of Maps and Civilization: Cartography in Culture and Society, among other things, died last Wednesday at the age of 100. His obituary in the Los Angeles Times. The Palisadian-Post ran a profile of him last October on the occasion of his 100th birthday. [Tony Campbell]
Seymour Schwartz, 1928-2020
Seymour I. Schwartz was known to map aficionados as a collector, cartographic historian and author of five books on the history of cartography (The Mismapping of America and Putting “America” on the Map, among others1). He donated his collection to the University of Virginia in 2008; a smaller tranche, regional in focus, went to the University of Rochester in 2010.
But maps were his side gig, a hobby his wife got him into to give him something else to do. Schwartz was a renowned surgeon with a long and distinguished career, a professor of medicine and the co-author of what became the standard textbook on surgery. He died Friday at the age of 92. Additional coverage: Associated Press, Rochester Democrat & Chronicle.
Previously: Seymour Schwartz at 90; Seymour Schwartz at 90.
Tim Robinson, 1935-2020
Tim Robinson, cartographer and chronicler of the Irish regions of the Aran Islands, the Burren and Connemara, died of complications from COVID-19 on 3 April 2020; he was 85. “Generations of tourists have been guided and enthralled by his marvellous maps of these radiant places,” writes Fintan O’Toole in the Irish Times. “But it is his astonishing books, the two-volume Stones of Aran and the Connemara trilogy, that will stand as timeless monuments to a genius who combined the linguistic brilliance of a poet with the precision of the mathematician he once was.” Also in the Irish Times, Paul Clements looks at Robinson’s idiosyncratic cartography: “For Robinson everything was mappable, and for good measure, he added a few puzzles, doodles and whimsies.”
Michael Hertz, 1932-2020: ‘Father’ of the New York Metro Map
Michael Hertz, whose design firm created the map of the New York City subway that in 1979 replaced a controversial (though critically acclaimed) design by Massimo Vignelli—a map that today’s map design largely follows—died earlier this month at the age of 87, the New York Times reports. See also BBC News, CNN, NBC New York, the New York Post—that’s rather a lot of attention.
That 1979 map that has been critiqued, fulminated against and re-imagined over and over again has nonetheless managed to become iconic; however much the map offended various design aesthetics, as the Times obituary (and previous coverage) shows, it was created with care and purpose: the curves were deliberate, the references to aboveground landmarks were deliberate. It was a team effort, but the Times obit had this interesting item about who should get the credit:
There has been some sniping over the years as to who deserves credit for the 1979 map, with Mr. Hertz taking exception whenever Mr. Tauranac2 was identified as “chief designer” or given some similar title.
“We’ve had parallel careers,” Mr. Hertz told The New York Times in 2012. “I design subway maps, and he claims to design subway maps.”
In 2004, the Long Island newspaper Newsday asked Tom Kelly, then the spokesman for the M.T.A., about who did what.
“The best thing I could probably tell you is to quote my sainted mother: ‘Success has many fathers,’” Mr. Kelly said. “That’s not to disparage any work that anybody else put into the map. But, in all honesty, it’s Mike Hertz that did all the basic design and implementation of it. In all fairness, the father of this map, as far as we’re concerned, is Mike Hertz.”
The 1979 map isn’t quite the same as the current version. Transit Maps posted a copy in 2015, and has this to say about it: “It’s funny how we call this the ‘same’ map as today’s version, because there’s a lot of differences, both big and small. The Beck-style tick marks for local stations as mentioned above, no Staten Island inset, the biggest legend box I’ve ever seen, the colours used for water and parkland … the list goes on!”