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.

Summer Light Reading 2024

Here is another installment of what is becoming an annual summer tradition. Just like the light beach reading, here is some light map reading. Not much to comment about, just some maps and related items I like.

First of all since the Olympics are in Paris, a nice papercut map you can enjoy, or buy here.

A very colorful map from Wikimedia Commons showing the different sections of the Rhine River. As one reader pointed out it looks like a water quality map and probably is as river quality tends to get worse as more cities and farms downstream dump pollution into them.

A map of things to do in New England. I copied a portion and highlighted some of my favorites such as "loafing", "sleeping under blankets" and "doing nothing".

Transit map of Kaohsiung on Taiwan. There are some great station names like Dream Mall, World Games and Oil Refinery Elementary School.

A screen shot from Yahoo Japan that I like for no specific reason.

Finally, Tsunami Generating Earthquakes. I think this originally came from some social media site that was once known as Twitter. Maybe from the U.S. Geological Survey.

OK, back to your beach read.

Paris Olympics 1924

Paris will host the Olympics in a few days. They previously hosted them 100 years ago. Here is a small map of the 1924 Olympic venues. 

via metropolitiques

Artist Pauline de Langre has some nice, artistic maps showing the venues in 1924 and 2024.

A bit hard to read at this scale but you can click above or here to see it better.

Here are screen shots of the central area for 1924 and 2024 respectively to compare them more easily.

1924

 

2024

It is easy to confuse the Stade de Paris (now Stade Bauer) and the Stade de France. Their locations are nearby but Stade de France is where many 2024 events including the closing ceremonies will be held. Most of the venues are different but the main 1924 stadium (Stade du Colombes, renamed Stade Yves-du-Manior) will still be used for Field Hockey. The famous Roland Garros tennis complex was built a few years after the 1924 Olympics and was used in World War II as a detention center for "undesirables", people whose big sin was being from the wrong countries or having Communist leanings.

These maps and other maps and drawing can be browsed in more detail here.

The Grand Paris Express

I was recently in Harvard University's Graduate School of Design (GSD) when I came across this fantastic exhibit on the Grand Paris Express. The GPE is a hugely ambitious project to add several metro ring lines connecting the suburbs of Paris to each other and to the central city. It will be 90% underground and consist of 200 km of new rail lines and 68 new stations.

Map via STM

Construction began in 2016 and is planned to be completed by 2030. The new lines are shown in white on this image from the exhibit.

The project won the GSD's Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design. "The overarching goal of GPE is to challenge the current monocentric model of Paris and create an open-ended megalopolis by radically changing existing patterns of circulation and decentering Paris itself." The project's ambitions go well beyond simply building 68 new stations. There has also been a huge effort to design these stations to be artistic, consider the flow and mood of spaces as you move from the street down towards the train platforms and to reflect the localities of each station. Here is a 3D model of the Noisy-Champs station.

Here is part of a "landscape strategy" map showing the types of terrain the new stations will be located underneath.

This map of "Sensoriality" is difficult to understand.

Even after figuring out the French, the legend is still almost impossible decipher,

and even more difficult to pick up from the map detail.

This map shows how the lines will serve the lower income (lighter colored) areas,

and another one shows areas where housing is overcrowded.

The increase in access to jobs is shown here. I left off the legend for formatting purposes but the darkest circles will have a more than 150% increase in access by 2030.

Here is one showing "urban momentum" highlighting housing construction projects that the project has spawned. The blue buildings are the larger projects.

Finally from the exhibit, a maps showing new areas (darker lines) that will be walking distance to a metro station.

The graph in the lower right corner is a bit hard to decipher from my poor photography but it tells an interesting story of transportation. Basically, pink is walking, yellow is various forms of transit starting with the horse and green are cars. The time period runs from about 1810 to 1930 and you can see the rapid rise and predicted decline in car use in favor of transit, bicycling and various other forms of mobility.

 One major issue, only briefly addressed by this exhibit is that Paris will be hosting the Olympics next summer. I think the plan is to have the parts of lines 15, 16 and 17 that serve the stadium and Olympic Village finished in time. Here's a map of Line 16 from the GPE web page.

Unfortunately this exhibit ends March 31st so if you want to see it live hurry up. Hopefully they keep the online exhibit up for a while.

Paris Election Map, 1869

Cartographers have been trying to figure out how to best show election maps for a long time. Here in the United States, the typical county map can badly represent vote totals when large counties with tiny populations dominate the map. In 1860's Paris, a cartographer named Louis Montigny used this interesting approach to map the city's neighborhoods.

A square centimeter represents 1000 votes, with the political parties color coded. This clearly shows who won each neighborhood but also gives a great picture of how well each party performed. Yellow represents the governing party of Napoleon III, while opposition parties are colored blue, pink and red. Socialists are orange. Viewing the entire city, there are some pretty clear patterns of strength and weaknesses of the different parties.

As you approach the city's edge, the larger, less populated neighborhoods get the appropriate level of visual prominence.

I discovered this map on Cartographia, a blog has been inactive for many years. The blog post illustrates the historical importance of this map as it shows the beginning of the decline of Napoleon III's empire. His party was clearly losing popular support as shown by the absence of yellow on much of this map. Shortly after this election he began a war with Prussia in order to boost his legitimacy. The Franco-Prussian War was a disaster for France and spelled the end of the Second Empire. A detailed history can be found on the blog post.


See a large, high resolution version of the map here.

Pictorial Maps-a more detailed review

Last week I visited the Osher Map Library where The Golden Age of American Pictorial Maps runs through September 3rd. I did a very short blog post. Now that I have more time here are some more detailed highlights. Most of the exhibit's maps can be seen and zoomed into online at this link. I took my own pictures to give a detailed look at parts of the maps and also to make the text more readable

The "Golden Age" of American pictorial maps is defined as the 1920's-1960's, a time when maps were part of and a reflection of the popular culture.  There are seven parts to the exhibit - I will try and show highlights from each in order.


1. Early Pictorial Maps
The first map in the collection is actually not from this time period - it is from a 1662 Joan Blaeu world atlas.  The point is to illustrate an early version of a map with many pictorial elements.

After touring the exhibit, I got a chance to hold a volume of this atlas in my hands. The atlas is full of great details that I hope to revisit in a future post.

George Walker & Co., Bird's Eye View from Summit Mt. Washington (ca. 1905)

 This is a spectacular art/map combination. Here's a picture I took of the summit.

Fresno County and Mid-California's "Garden of the Sun" (author anonymous) is another one of my favorites:

Also in this section is the London Wonderground Map  that was the subject of a previous Map of the Week post.


2. Maps of Place and Region

Ilonka Karasz, Plan de Paris (1927)

Of course I love Paris but I also love the way the streets have hatch lines that make it look like they were stitched onto the map.

Carl Crow and V. V. Kovalsky Illustrated Historical Map of Shanghai (1935)
I liked the title block so I photographed it.

3. Maps to Instruct

Arthur B. Suchy Ohio, Mother of Presidents (1939)

The regions are interesting and new to me-lots of good small details too.

Emma Bourne, America-A Nation of One People From Many Countries (1940)

This was published by the Council Against Intolerance in America to show how well immigrants have been integrated into society. "With the exception of the Indian all Americans or their forefathers came here from other countries." While I was at this exhibit, Donald Trump was across town trying to blame Maine's Somali immigrants for an imaginary rise in crime.

 Edward Everett Henry, The Virginian (1960)

a remarkably detailed map illustrating the first "western" novel.

4. Maps to Amuse
Ray Handy's Paul Bunyan map is some good, ridiculous fun.

Also, similar to my old Texan's map postcard is this Angeleno-centric "brag map"- proudly showing off local geographic ignorance. Chicago is a state but Wisconsin a mere city within Minnesota.  States are placed in ridiculous locations with a giant Iowa in the middle and phony places like "Feudville" in Kentucky.

5. Maps for Industry

Cleveland Terminal Group, The Capital of a New Trade Empire (1929)

Civic pride on steroids! I chose this one because my wife could find the intersection where she once lived on the map-it's right there in the lower right - see it?

Map of Michigan (Slightly Exaggerated) Shafer's Bakeries, Inc. (1949)

Similar to the LA "brag map" but also advertising bread ("such crust!") and using loaves as border decorations. Nice references to Florida as "Southern Michigan," California as "Western Michigan" and Chicago as the "Gateway to Michigan."

6. Maps for War.
 Ernest Dudley Chase, Japan, The Target: A Pictorial Jap Map (1943)

World War 2 in the North Sea Area...(1944)

This one was in a big glass display in the center of the room. As a result I was not able to get a picture without lots of reflections so use the link to see it better.

7. Maps for Postwar America.

There are lots of good maps in this collection, but I like this juxtaposition of an optimistic map of New York from 1958 followed by a gloomy view of LA from a decade later. The LA view features pink sky, smog and a sickly sun.

Nils Hansell, Wonders of New York (ca 1958)

Gene Holtan, Los Angeles (1968)

One final note: The staff at the Osher Library were extremely welcoming and helpful. Mr. Osher even dropped in to see what I was doing. I would like to thank them for all their help - and the lunch recommendation!