The Mysterious Howard Fogel

 I had an opportunity to try out an Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool to help college instructors brainstorm class activities. I asked the tool to suggest a class syllabus about mid 20th Century pictorial cartography. The AI (based on Claude) suggested highlighting various cartographers including Howard Fogel. Having never heard of him I asked some follow up questions that did not get me any closer to this person. After my session was over I went directly to Claude, who had no results about him. A search of various platforms and map sites came up empty, except for this one map attributed to “Fogel” from Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps Inc.

I contacted the company to ask if they had any more knowledge about “Fogel” and the answer was no. The author is merely “Fogel”. If anyone out there knows anything about Howard Fogel, please let me know. Is this just be some kind of strange AI fabrication? In the meantime let’s appreciate Fogel’s (one and only?) map.. . 

A film crew spotlights the centrality of the hotel, across from the Chinese theatre and adjacent to the other theaters and television studios. Mickey Mouse points out the numbered landmarks. There’s a bunch of fun going on as people are playing golf, tennis and polo, racing horses, conducting orchestras at the Hollywood Bowl, watching sports at the Coliseum, having picnics and flying their planes, all while the cops are guarding Beverly Hills. Downtown Los Angeles is just a tiny sideshow in the far corner. You’d barely know it’s there. The flip side of the map shows you all the exciting hotel details. Let's "thrill to the pageantry"!

 

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.

Flood Zone Exemptions for Camp Mystic

Last week’s devastating floods in central Texas killed more than two dozen people, many of them at Camp Mystic, a children’s camp for girls. The camp asked FEMA to change their flood maps after a 2011 revision placed much of the camp in a floodplain. FEMA responded by removing more than a dozen buildings from their flood zones in 2013 and then again in 2019 and 2020. Buildings outside of the 100 year flood zone (areas that tend to flood much more frequently than every 100 years) are exempt from needing flood insurance. They are also exempt from more stringent requirements such as elevating the buildings or shoring up their foundations. 

Here is a screen shot from FEMA’s map showing the “floodway” (the zone where water moves quickly during a flood) in the hatched colors and the 100 year flood zone in blue. This is where many of the girls were swept away by moving water. Some of the cabins were in the orange or unshaded areas which are not considered part of the flood zone.

 Another section further up Cypress Creek shows more clearly that many cabins are outside of the blue 100 year floodplain.

First Street, a climate risk modeling agency drew their own maps showing an increased risk of flooding for many of the cabins exempted from FEMA’s maps.

map from First Street, via KUT Austin

An excellent article from NPR's KUT affiliate in Austin shows these maps and provides links to letters of map amendment asking for exemptions of certain buildings.

Banana Point

Banana Point (Pointe de Banana) is a peninsula at the mouth of the Congo River in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). I was looking at the area on Google Maps when I found this image.

Image by local guide Fabrice Kaj

What is this map? Where does it reside? Does it just sit on the beach, getting wet? Probably not. I did some research but the only thing I could come up with is this Facebook video, showing a local historian and sailor (name not listed as far as I can tell, though he is referred to as the "library of the Republic" ).

Image via Facebook

My poor translation abilities mean that some of my takeaways from the video may be incorrect. The "bibliotheque" stands at the mouth of the river pointing out the various features of the map and gives a little history and geography of the area.

Image via Facebook

 

 

 

Banana Point is the large crown-like symbol. The map is oriented so south is at the top and looks to Angola. Curiously after a mere 35 kilometers of DRC coastline to the north, you are in Angola again, in the exclave of Cabinda. The Congo River has the third largest discharge and is the deepest river in the world. The flow between Banana Point and Angola is broken into three zones with the middle 2 kilometers representing the river flow out to sea. I believe the video states that the river flows 135 kilometers beyond the mouth into the ocean.

Portuguese sailors knew they were near a large river's mouth when their ship was suddenly pushed to the west by the current.  The islands inland from the mouth are full of mangroves and contained native settlements when colonists took over. The large island marked Bulambemba was taken over and used as a prison by the colonists. Diogo Cão was credited in Europe for having "discovered" the river's mouth in 1482 but, of course, there were millennia of history and knowledge of the river's geography and culture before him. 

 

 

In 1977, the Kinney Shoe Corporation, in cooperation with the President’s Council on Physical Fitness put out a series of walking tour brochures for historical sites across the United States. Perhaps the idea was, walk more, wear down your shoes and buy some more.

Here is an example from Paterson, New Jersey, “America’s first great industrial city”. Alexander Hamilton saw the power potential of the Great Falls of the Passaic River, the second largest waterfall east of the Mississippi River.

The walks range from rustic, historic ambles (I chose this one for both personal history and because it’s near where I’m writing this from),

 to college towns,

 to downtown tours,

 museum and garden loops,

and finally to a “redwood grove near Santa Cruz”.

Along the way, you learn about the ghosts of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Mann and John O'Hara haunting the libraries and tap rooms of Princeton, Chicago's architecture, the friendliness of Woodstock, Illinois, miscellaneous redwood facts and that Scottsdale, Arizona has some of the "prettiest women".
 

Three Part World

Via Newsweek - The current tyrants governments of the United States, Russia and China may be wishing for a three superpower world where spheres of influence are carved up among them.  

You can hover to identify the countries.

 Apparently the southern hemisphere does not rate much with any of these leaders so maybe that’s the place to go if you’re looking for freedom.

 

Medieval Murder Maps

Medieval Murder Maps is a project of the Violence Research Center at the University of Cambridge. Using data from the coroners of the cities of London, Oxford and York they have created maps showing the locations of murders in the 14th Century.

Sadly the image above (from York) does not indicate death by pancake. That is merely the murderers name, though it makes for a great headline. The red icons indicate female victims or perpetrators while blue are men. here is a legend to translate the murder weapon,

and incident type.

London, unlike the other cities has a full menu of incident types.

A click on an incident gives you more information.

Unlike today, murders correlate more with areas of affluence and college students are frequently listed. In London there is a large cluster or murders on the western end of Cheapside (or Westcheap), an area of upscale clothing stores now.

The background maps are from the Historic Towns Trust who create modern digital historic maps that represent the towns as they appeared at the time. For London, you can also switch backgrounds to see a map from Braun and Hogenburg, circa 1560.

Credit to a recent Washington Post article for bringing this site to my attention. Explore on your own here.