The New Yorker Cover and its Imitators

 In 1976, Saul Steinberg illustrated this famous cover for the New Yorker.

The humorously exaggerated myopia of a “typical“ New Yorker led to many imitations across the world. I found a bunch of examples on the David Rumsey Map Collection when looking for something completely unrelated. Here is Milwaukee. 

Interestingly this version has a foreground as well as a background. It also features a better sense of geographic accuracy than the original though the China-Japan-Russia bit is basically duplicated. Look at tiny little Chicago! Saratoga Springs is an interesting addition though its location in Connecticut is a bit off.

 Here is another example with mountains and skiers.

An international perspective, looking westward from Les Deux Magots.

Here is a looking east perspective. This one shows rival colleges. Perhaps ones with better geography departments as the distant locations of Heidelberg and Eton are flipped.

This one is probably my favorite. “One of Chicago’s two great airports“ exaggerating the centrality of Midway while implying that you need to travel almost to Siberia just to get to the chaos of O’Hare Airport.

Differing Personal Maps of Denver

For a recent article in the Denverite, multimedia artist Kevin Beaty drew a variety of "mental maps" based on interviews with neighborhood residents.

Many of the maps focus on the Five Points neighborhood, an area that has shifted from various European immigrant groups, to a predominantly African-American neighborhood, to an area seeing significant gentrification. The neighborhood was once known as the Harlem of the West. The map above was based on 1950's era recollections of the area from brothers Ralph and Charles Dabney. They grew up there eating pig ear sandwiches and visiting their father at the firehouse.

It is interesting to see how the maps change with the age, race, economic status and occupation of the residents. Here is Beaty's map rendering from Yvette Freeman, a younger Black resident.

By contrast here is a map from white resident Heather Dalton, who has spent time in the neighborhood but probably did not grow up there.

Finally, here is a rendering of a developer's take on the neighborhood.

For many more maps see the Denverite.

What Can We Learn From Orientation

This week's popular distraction on the geo-webs is an app that draws every street in a city (or other location) colored by orientation. Here is one of my favorite personal places, Philadelphia.

While seemingly just a meaningless distraction the colors do tell you something about settlement patterns. Settled on a part of the Delaware River that runs due south and then west, the major part of the city is along an almost north-south (red) grid. However most of the river flows at about a 45 degree angle and much of southeastern Pennsylvania is on a grid shaped by the river's direction (the purple and blue lines). In the outer parts of the city these grids collide creating some of the more interesting urban spaces in the city (IMHO). Here is the southeastern part of Pennsylvania. I expected to see more purple but there is still quite a bit in the northern regions of the metro area where I grew up.

Note that the app allows you to change the background color. For most of these images I set it to black because the roads show up more clearly. 

For a more meta view here is all of Pennsylvania.

I do not recommend loading an entire state as it takes a while and may overwhelm your computer (and their server).

Points of interest include the colorful twists and turns of the central valleys and ridges, the separately unique Lake Erie grid, and the holes in the northern forests where no roads run. As a different type of city Pittsburgh, one of the toughest cities in the country to navigate, is quite colorful. There are still many grid neighborhoods but they run at all kinds of angles, often at the whims of the rivers.

Pittsburgh-taste the rainbow!

For a suburban view, here is the area around my childhood home in Levittown, PA. The blue lines in the upper left corner are from a shopping mall parking lot.

Many cities in the western half of the United States strictly follow the township and range grid of the public land survey system. Often the downtown areas run at an angle either to follow a railroad or to accommodate an older grid system. Here is Denver. 

Denver-embrace the yellow!

As a proof of concept here are four other cities with a similar pattern.

I could go on about this for way too long but I'll end with an artistic mashup of some of the more interesting and colorful places I've explored in Philadelphia. You can explore you favorite places here.
 

Clockwise from top left - the art museum area, the effect of the Schuylkill River bends, roads curving around the airport runways, the way Roosevelt Boulevard breaks up the northeast grid, some curvy suburban colors, and a difficult to see Logan Circle.

Quest for Nevada Begins!

Train just pulling out of Denver. According to the Amtrak status map it's going to be a windy route.