As the 2 train travels from Brooklyn through Manhattan up to the Bronx, it journeys along 49 stations of neighborhoods as varied as Flatbush, the Financial District, and Wakefield.
maps
Posted inArt
Mining Tax Data to Map the Past and Future of Urban Development in New York
Last year, the City of New York released a huge trove of tax data to the public. Called Property Land Use Tax Lot Output (PLUTO), the information might not seem terribly thrilling, a dry assortment of building dates, square footage, and property value, but for those looking to map the city’s history and potential future it is an incredible resource.
Posted inArt
Gallery Whispers and Lunch in the Cafe: Mapping Museums Through Their Sounds
“There are so many sounds in museums that we usually ignore that are absolutely engrossing once you take the time to focus on them,” says artist John Kannenberg, who’s been recording museum noise for 15 years.
Posted inArt
Mapping ‘Madeline’ Creator’s New York Haunts
Madeline, the smallest of the “twelve little girls in two straight lines” who lived in “an old house in Paris that was covered in vines,” was born in Manhattan. In Pete’s Tavern on Irving Place in 1938, Ludwig Bemelmans scrawled those first rhyming lines that would introduce his petite heroine of the Madeline books.
Posted inOpinion
A Compendium of Comic Maps
The best fiction often succeeds because its creator has constructed a convincing world. By that I don’t mean a place that seems realistic, but rather a world that’s believable because it’s been thought through — pages of notes, characters described down to their beauty marks, the relationships between them, their homes and towns mapped out.
Posted inArt
A 19th-Century Map of the Geology Hidden Beneath NYC Streets
There was much rejoicing among cartography lovers when the New York Public Library’s Lionel Pincus & Princess Firyal Map Division recently released over 20,000 maps for free use.
Posted inArt
American History Digitized and Animated Through Hundreds of 1930s Maps
Back in 1932, a naval historian named Charles O. Paullin and a geographer named John K. Wright published a colossus of cartography called Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States.
Posted inArt
How Cartography Helped Make Colonial Empires
If you want to claim a territory, it’s good to have a map to show what’s yours. Defining Lines: Cartography in the Age of Empire at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University examines how maps were a form of political control and public perception by Western colonial powers from the 16th and 20th centuries.
Posted inArt
How Ancient Cartographers Mapped the World We See Today
No maps remain from the Ancient Greeks and Romans, yet we know that they looked to the stars and to the widening world around them and responded with their own influential cartography.
Posted inArt
The Obsession With Mapping New York City’s Past
People in New York City seem to have a particular fixation with mapping the past.
Posted inArt
Ostrich Egg Globe Might Be Earliest Depiction of the Americas
The New York Public Library’s 1510 Hunt-Lenox Globe better watch its bronze throne because a new globe portends to be the oldest to show the Americas. And it has the curious advantage of being carved into the round form of an ostrich egg.
Posted inArt
Mid-Century Illustration Maps Folkloric Americana
John Henry with his hammer, Rip Van Winkle taking a snooze, the Celebrated Jumping Frog rests alongside Coronado scaling a mountain, while Babe the Blue Ox sprints towards the famous Idaho potato. All these figures of American folklore are sprawled across the United States in a 1946 map by artist William Gropper.