Tag: cities

New Boston-Focused Map Exhibitions at the Leventhal Center

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Atlas of the city of Boston, Roxbury: plate 14 (1931)
From Atlas of the City of Boston (1931). Norman B. Leventhal Map Center, Boston Public Library.

Opening today at the Boston Public Library’s Leventhal Map Center, Building Blocks: Boston Stories from Urban Atlases is an exhibition that explores street-level changes to Boston in the period between the Civil War and World War II. Media release.

Building Blocks: Boston Stories from Urban Atlases features rare materials from the BPL’s historic collection of maps and atlases alongside lithographs, photographs, and sketches of familiar local landscapes. Visitors will discover how the atlas collections opens up a world of fascinating stories, with vignettes including the city’s first African Meeting House in the heart of Beacon Hill, landmarks of leisure like the “Derby Racer” and “Giant Safety Thriller” amusement rides in Revere, public health infrastructure on Gallops Island in Boston Harbor, and many more.

The in-person exhibition at the BPL’s Central Library opens today; a digital version will follow online. Runs until 19 August 2023. A curatorial introduction will take place next Wednesday.

Meanwhile, a permanent exhibition, Becoming Boston: Eight Moments in the Geography of a Changing City, also opens today at the Leventhal: “In the eight cases of this exhibition, we follow the changing spatial forms of the place we now call Boston—from before the landscape carried that name all the way through the struggles, clashes, and dreams that continue to reshape the city today.”

See the Leventhal’s exhibitions page and their preview of 2023 events for more details.

NYC Tree Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Screenshot of the NYC Tree Map
Screenshot

The impressive and/or insane thing about the New York City Tree Map is that it maps individual trees: now about 860,000 of them, all managed by the city’s parks department on city streets and in parks, down to the species and trunk diameter, which also means you can filter for those parameters, plus get most recent inspection and tree care data on specific trees. You can even favourite individual trees. If trees had social media accounts, they’d be here. [Bloomberg CityLab]

Previously: Mapping Central Park’s 19,630 Trees.

Topsy-Turvy: The London Underground in the Style of the New York Subway Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

London Underground map in the style of the New York subway map

Plenty of cities’ subway maps have been reimagined in the style of the London Underground map. Cameron Booth, for example, has redone New York’s subway map in that style. But a map posted by a graphic designer named Sean to Reddit does the exact opposite: it reimagines the London Underground map in the style of New York’s subway map. Bringing the design language of Michael Hertz to Harry Beck’s sovereign territory is probably blasphemous in some quarters, but as a pastiche of the New York style? Cameron says: “Sean has absolutely nailed the New York Subway map style, and perhaps even improved upon it in places—I note with pleasure that all of his station labels are set horizontally, instead of the many varied angles used on the official NYC map.” His bottom line? “One of the best style mash-ups I’ve seen: technically excellent, well-researched and actually really informative. Wonderful!”

It’s available as a print on Etsy, because of course it is.

Pictorial St. Louis

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Pictorial St. Louis (Plate 2)
Richard J. Compton and Camille N. Dry, Pictorial St. Louis (1876), plate 2. Library of Congress.

On the Library of Congress’s map blog, World’s Revealed, Julie Stoner takes a look at a rather unusual example of a bird’s-eye (or panoramic) city map. “The Geography and Map Division has over 1,700 of these beautiful panoramic maps in the collection, but one item stands out above all the others as one of the crowning achievements of the art, Camille N. Dry’s 1875 atlas, Pictorial St. Louis; The Great Metropolis of the Mississippi Valley. A visually stunning atlas, instead of only one sheet, it was produced on 110 plates, which if trimmed and assembled creates a panorama of the city measuring about 9 by 24 feet.”

Frederick Pierce’s ‘Dazzle Camouflage’ Map of New York’s Nationalities

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Map of City of New York showing the distribution of Principal nationalities by sanitary districts

At Worlds Revealed, the Library of Congress’s map blog, Tim St. Onge looks at, and provides the background on, a series of six maps prepared by Frederick E. Pierce for a report on living conditions in New York’s tenement housing in 1895, including a stunningly bizarre map of ethnic groups living in the city.

Pierce’s map of nationalities, however, is a more memorable, if confounding, centerpiece. Aiming to convey diversity among immigrant communities in New York, the map depicts the proportion of major “nationalities” in each sanitary district of the city. The result is a dizzying array of zigzag stripes and scattered points. As Pierce writes in his explanatory notes accompanying the Harper’s Weekly publication, the original map was produced in color and adapted to black and white for publication, but the reproduction “is almost as effective and quite as illustrative as the original.” Despite Pierce’s confidence, perhaps the average reader could be forgiven if they find the map to be more difficult to parse. In fact, the map seems to resemble more closely the dazzle camouflage, a design aimed at confusing the observer, used on British and American warships in the first half of the twentieth century.

Where Americans Go without a Car

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Map of car-free households in New York CityGeographer Christopher Winters maps car ownership—or rather the lack thereof—in The Geography of Carfree Households in the United States. In only a few census tract do more than 75 percent of the population go without owning a car. Not surprisingly, most of them are in New York, plus other densely populated cities: “New York has many more such households than any other urban area. It’s the one large place in the United States where only a minority of households have a vehicle available.”

A Map of Every Chinese City

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Map of Every Chinese City (Alfred Twu)
Alfred Twu (CC licence)

Inspired, he says, by Itchy Feet’s maps of Every European City and Every American City, Alfred Twu has come up with a Map of Every Chinese City. (Chinese version here.) Twu is no stranger to these parts: he worked on rail maps for California and the Northeast Corridor some years back.

Previously: Itchy Feet’s Map of Every European City; Itchy Feet’s Map of Every American City.

The Eternal City: A History of Rome in Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Eternal City (cover)Something I often do when reviewing a book is talk about it in terms of the expectations of its potential readers—particularly if readers might come to a book with expectations that the book does not meet, because the book is doing something different. If you’re expecting The Eternal City: A History of Rome in Maps, written by the art historian Jessica Maier and published last November by the University of Chicago Press, to be basically A History of Rome in 100 Maps, it isn’t: the count is more like three dozen. This doesn’t mean that The Eternal City is a slight book—it most certainly is not, though at 199 pages it’s a bit shorter than, say, A History of America in 100 Maps (272 pages).

But counting maps would miss the difference in Maier’s approach. To invoke xkcd, this is depth-first rather than breadth-first: there are fewer maps here, but they’re discussed in much more depth than the two-page spreads of the hundred-map books, and provided with much more context. This is a history of Rome in maps in which history, Rome and maps all get their proper share of attention.

Continue reading “The Eternal City: A History of Rome in Maps” →

Fire Insurance Maps Online

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Penn State University Libraries’ collection of Pennsylvania Sanborn fire insurance maps dates to 1925, which means that as of this year they’re in the public domain—and freely available to use. Meanwhile, Maps Mania has a roundup of other fire insurance maps resources. The Library of Congress has a collection of 50,000 Sanborn atlases, 35,000 of which are available online (collections, navigator). In the United Kingdom, fire insurance maps were produced by Charles E. Goad Ltd.; Goad maps are available via the British Library and the National Library of Scotland.

Fire insurance maps are an invaluable resource for historical researchers: they’re extremely detailed snapshots of the built environment of virtually every city and town, and there are usually several such snapshots (I’ve seen at least three for my little village, for example), so you can chart a town’s growth over time at a level of detail an OS, quad or topo map can’t match.

COVID-19 in Los Angeles

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
New York Times (screenshot)

The New York Times maps the distribution of COVID-19 cases in Los Angeles. “County officials recently estimated that one in three of Los Angeles County’s roughly 10 million people have been infected with Covid-19 since the beginning of the pandemic. But even amid an uncontrolled outbreak, some Angelenos have faced higher risk than others. County data shows that Pacoima, a predominantly Latino neighborhood that has one of the highest case rates in the nation, has roughly five times the rate of Covid-19 cases as much richer and whiter Santa Monica.”

Critical Tourist Map of Oslo

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Markus Moestue’s Critical Tourist Map of Oslo turns the unremitting positivity of tourist maps on its head, painting the Norwegian capital’s landmarks and history in a bracingly negative light.

In most countries, what we are taught about our own nation in school does not correspond much to reality. And Norway is no exception. We are made to believe in myths surrounding our own nation and are given a perfect mirage of excellence and good intentions in our history lessons. Stories of abuse, greed and war are often swept under the carpet, and it seems that, by some twist of faith, we are born into the best country in the world, and that all other nations are beneath us. Is Norway really the most happy place, the most environmentally conscious, the most peace loving or the most ethical? Hardly!

In this map I aim to correct a few myths, point to some problematic aspects of  Norway and Oslo. And I wish for this map to be a contrast to the mindless commercially motivated map you’ll receive at the tourist information centre.

In a short video, Markus tries to stunt-distribute the map on the streets of Oslo:

London Trees, Pyongyang Architecture

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Blue Crow Media, which for the past few years has published a series of maps focusing on urban architecture, sent me samples of two of their most recent maps. The Great Trees of London Map is the first of a series of maps highlighting noteworthy trees in a city’s urban forest (Amazon). (A similar map for New York is forthcoming.) The second is another in their line of architecture and urban design maps: Pyongyang Architecture Map features 50 buildings in the reclusive North Korean capital, and includes text and photographs shot by Guardian architecture critic Oliver Wainwright (Amazon). An architecture map of Tbilisi, Georgia, in English and Georgian, has also been released (Amazon). Each map costs £8.

Previously: Architectural Maps of London; London Underground Architecture and Design Map.

Charles Booth’s London Poverty Maps Online

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Screenshot

Last year I told you about Charles Booth’s London Poverty Maps, a book collecting and analyzing the maps produced by Booth’s block-by-block survey of poverty and the social classes of late 19th-century London. Somehow I missed the fact that there has been an online, interactive version of said maps for several years now. [Open Culture]

Previously: Charles Booth’s London Poverty Maps.

Underground Cities

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Amazon (Canada, UK)
Bookshop

Mark Ovenden has made a career of publishing books about transportation systems and their maps that are both comprehensive and copiously illustrated. These include books about transit maps, railway maps and airline maps, as well as books about specific transit systems like the London Underground and the Paris Metro.

His latest, Underground Cities (Frances Lincoln, 22 Sep), is in some ways a natural progression from his past work: in the introduction he muses on the link between transit geekery and wondering about “what else lies down there beyond the walls” (p. 6). But in other ways this is quite a different book.

Continue reading “Underground Cities” →