Posts Tagged “maps”

Google Maps’ Street View feature - wherein they send car-mounted cameras tooling around the streets of an area and use whiz-bang technology to stitch the photos together into an eye-level view of everything along the streets - has come to Boston. So, naturally I poked around, looking at my home, my friends’ homes, places of personal note, and so forth. The images are obviously not live, but I still got a strange feeling when I was able to spot my own car parked across the street from my home.

I can see by the shadows that the picture was taken mid-day and by the foliage that it was in a more temperate season. The fact that I’m parked near my home not at work suggests a weekend or holiday.  The whole thing summons up creepy echoes of Rear Window or Blow Up or some other paranoid story in which a crime is revealed through some form of semi-illicit surveillance - or is it?

It was my first semester away at college in a small Connecticut town. A group of other freshmen were talking about going down the hill into town and I heard the word “subway” in the conversation. “There’s a subway in this town?” I asked incredulous and at the same time hopeful - I had no car (or drivers license for that matter) and the prospect of public transportation was exciting and home-sick-making all at the same time. Of course, they were talking about Subway, the chain sandwich shop. Still, the fantasy of widely interconnected subway systems set up camp in my head to stay.

Some years later I was joking around with N and we developed the idea that all subway stations with the same name are connected. For example, if you took the Boston MBTA Orange line to Forest Hills (Jamaica Plain), you could go through some kind of wormhole there and transfer to the F train on New York City’s MTA at Forest Hills (Queens). The fact that the F train is orange on the MTA map just adds credence to this goofy concept, plus the bonus synchronicity that there’s a Jamaica stop at the end of the F train. More exciting still, there’s the possibilty of an interchange between my current home stop, Central on the MBTA Red line with Central on the Tsuen Wan line of Hong Kong’s MTR, which is also colored… red.

Imagine my carto-geeky joy at finding this fantasy global subway map on the Strange Maps blog.

It’s clearly based on the London map with little regard for the realities of politics or geography or the relative importance of the stations - for example, Newark and Rotterdam are interchange points but New York and Amsterdam are not (and how cool would it be to take a train from Amsterdam to New Amsterdam?) - but it’s an awesome work nonetheless, and it provides a checklist of major metro systems to visit and ride

I also like that the line connecting New York and Boston is red, the color of the MTA 1-2-3 trains and MBTA Red line which run past my childhood home in New York City and my current home in Cambridge - and which also connect those homes with the cities’ respective train stations, Penn and South stations, which define the endpoints of the Amtrak and Acela route from New York to Boston.  Wow.

Check out the book, Transit Maps of the World, by Mark Ovenden, for which this fantasy map was a promotion. It’s too bad they didn’t use this promo as the actual cover of the book.

Hot chocolate, a peanut butter cookie, and a map!

This is the third post this month featuring Broadway, and the second one combining it with chocolate.  Not the most helpful web site, but giving credit where soupy, chocolaty credit is due: The City Bakery on 18th street in NYC.

Last night I attended an excellent photo lecture by Andrea Robbins and Max Becher sponsored by the Photographic Resource Center in affiliation with the New Center for Arts and Culture at the BU Photonics Center. (Photonics Center?? What goes on at such a place?) And after, I was able to join some PRC people for dinner with Max and Andrea. (Yes, he’s the child of Bernd & Hilla Becher, but we weren’t there to talk about them.)

A married couple, Andrea Robbins and Max Becher work individually as well as collaboratively using photography, film, video, and digital media, to create highly conceptual and critically acclaimed images. The primary focus of their work is, what they call, “the transportation of place” — situations in which one limited or isolated place strongly resembles another distant one. Whether the subject is Germany in Africa, Germans dressing as Native Americans, American towns dressed as Germany, New York in Las Vegas, New York in Cuba, or Cuba in exile, their interest tends to be a place out of place with its various causes and consequences. They will discuss examples of this work from their two recent books Transportation of Place and Brooklyn Abroad .

I won’t go on at length about their work, you can check it out yourself (buy the book buy the book) but I will mention what was a somewhat offhand comment - Becher or Robbins said, “In order not to go blind, you have to travel” (it’s characteristic of them that which one said what is not entirely clear after the fact, and they have no interest in helping you figure it out) Meaning that if you stay in one place too long, you cease to really see it, and that only by traveling to new places and returning can you maintain real vision of your own place.

You can see that this idea appeals to me.

Among other great topics of conversation and presentation, Robbins & Becher showed photos and short film about St. Pierre & Miquelon, a small island part of France that’s located in North America just off Newfoundland. Let’s be clear, I’m not talking about American islands or towns that dress up as French or have French heritage, this place is in fact part of France (see how they voted in the recent French election!) just 800 miles Northeast of Boston. I must visit.

And finally, I found this on Becher’s web site. Early work, but I must cite it here because it speaks to so many limeduckian themes: Chocolate Broadway.  I can see the block where I grew up.

This seemingly innocent bit in the New York Times today set me off on a strange journey. It’s about the (long-overdue, IMO) installation of some compass rose directional signs on the sidewalk outside of subway stations in New York, to help people orient themselves.

I thought this was pretty much unambiguously a good idea and didn’t think much more about it.  But in a related piece on the CityRom Blog, the question is posed, How Do You Find Your Way in the Big City? I started looking through the responses while pondering mine.

It turns out I use a variety of methods, depending on where I am and how familiar I am with that area and what clues are or are not available. I know some of the tricks, I have a decent spatial memory, and I know some landmarks. But then I remembered my stand-by trick for navigating lower Manhattan – find the World Trade Centers, they’re pretty much at the southwest end of everything, and work out your position and heading from there. Turns out I was not alone.

Before 9/11, one of the best ways to orient myself when exiting a subway station in the Village was to look for the World Trade Center towers, because I’d know that way was south. Day or night, they were the perfect compass, and that’s one of the things I miss about them.

It’s a great idea. I was born and raised in Manhattan and am usually diaoriented when I leave a subway. I look for famous skyscrapers for direction. Sadly, the Trade Centers are not there for help in lower Manhattan.

Apart from that, there were always the Trade Center towers to mark the trail…like hills in the distance.

And most eloquently,

97.
October 17th, 2007
9:00 am

I landed into a hot-summer-day-New-York-City in June 1998, completely disoriented. My French accent and male pride did not help me overcome the shame of asking around for directions. Popping out of the subway quickly became a game of “I spy”, with my little eye circling in search for the two friendly towers. The world Trade Center eternally pointed to the South and was visible from everywhere downtown and up to at least 46 street. This regular twisting of the neck did the trick.
Now my illusions are gone and eternity exists only in destruction. Powerful landmarks have been replaced by ubiquitous devices. I don’t look up to the skies but down to my iPhone screen and google maps. As long as I have my neck bowed to the ground, like a mourner of times gone-by, I sticker showing North is very welcome to cross paths with my little eye.

— Posted by Regis Zaleman

All these New Yorkers commenting on the blog about their private navigation rituals and all the thoughts of the World Trade Centers on this fall day with a perfect empty blue sky made me think of the odd habit of Bostonians to navigate by landmarks that no longer exist. While New Yorkers talk wistfully of the WTC as a way to find your way around, Bostonians refer to renamed, rebuilt, and just plain vanished landmarks in the present tense.

Mostly the obsolescence of the landmark correlates with the age of the person using it, but these directions are inherited and some people continue to refer to places like Scollay Square and the Necco Wafer Factory. Several people I know refer to a Whole Foods Markets as “Bread & Circus” which they were called before being taken over years ago. Some refer to new Whole Foods stores as B&C even though they were built after the acquisition. I pity the newcomers and tourists who get directions from these urban historians.

In fact, just now I got an instant message asking “where are you?” to which I had to reply “at the place that used to be Ras Cafe” because I could not recall the current name of the place providing my blogging wifi signal for the evening.  And a really really good hummus plate, too.  For the record, it’s Andala Coffee House.

I call this conflation of past and present geography navistalgia – a portmanteau of navigation and nostalgia. The Boston version I described is more or less a caricature of Bostonian provincialism, but every time I look south in lower Manhattan, I’m finding my way by the empty spaces in the sky and experiencing bittersweet navistalgia.