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 Whataburger Power Outage Map

When Hurricane Beryl struck Texas last week it left nearly 2 million Houston area residents and businesses without power. Local power company Center Point Energy's online power outage map has been unavailable since May. Social media user BBQBryan noted that Texas based Whataburger's app could be used as a de-facto power outage tracker.

The orange W's indicate an open location while a gray W means closed. Whataburger is open 24 hours so gray means a likely power outage. Here is a more complete area map from July 9th via KERA. 

I'm a little late to the game here so when I checked their web site a week later (I don't have the app because I live in a Whataburger desert) the Houston area looked completely open.

Maps and Views at the British Library

The British Library contains over 4.5 million maps, atlases, globes, and digital models dating back to medieval times. A small sample of these are displayed on the walls in a section called "Maps & Views". Here are some mediocre pictures I took with links (where I can find them) to online resources. As the British were the ultimate colonizers, here are a few maps from their colonial empire.

Plan for a New Capital, Punjab - when Pakistan was split off from India, the state of Punjab was divided between the two with the capital, Lahore on the Pakistan side. India needed a new state capital for East Punjab and the Prime Minister Nehru hired Le Corbusier to design it in a grid pattern. He conceived the Chandigarh Master Plan as analogous to human body, with a clearly defined head (the Capitol Complex), heart (the City Centre), lungs (the leisure valley, and open spaces), the intellect (cultural and educational institutions), circulatory system (roads), etc. More details about this map can be found on this page from Planning Tank.

Gertrude Bell's Military Intelligence Map - Gertrude Bell was an English writer, administrator and  archaeologist who spent much of her life exploring the Middle East. She was influential in the founding of Iraq. She was summoned to the area during World War I and recorded the positions of features on the land using surveying equipment. Red diagonal lines show her path of travel, while details from subsequent travelers were added later. You can read more about her life and maps in this Library of Congress blog post.

Map of the county of Dinghai in the Island of Zhoushan -  Zhoushan is an island south of Shanghai that the British captured and lost few times during the Opium Wars and attempted to colonize as a major trading port. The walled area is the city of Dinghai. There is no credit that I can find for the map's author but the rendering of mountains is truly unique. Some of them look like jumping dolphins. I have not found this exact map online but there is a similar version at the Reading Digital Atlas.

 

An Appreciation of Ordnance Survey Maps

I spent some time in May at the British Library randomly looking at atlases and maps, some of which will be featured here in upcoming weeks. They have a huge collection of Ordnance Survey atlas books of 1:1056 scale (1 inch = 88 feet) map sheets. While these maps are primarily black lines on white paper, their beauty lies in the remarkable detail.

Note: these maps are in great shape, with fairly pristine white paper. My phone has a tendency to darken maps when I photograph them. I could have brought back the actual color by adjusting the brightness and contrast but I kind of like the old-timey sepia look of these images.

Here are the gas tanks at Kennington.

Here is some nice detail of the railroad infrastructure at the Nine Elms Works, near the Battersea Power Station.

 The only color I saw in any of these is in the water bodies.

One of my favorite places is the Greenwich Observatory, right on the Prime Meridian.

Finally, a little more detail in Greenwich Park showing the Queen's Oak and Bower and the old Magnetic Observatory.

Snickelways of York

Note: In May, I spent some time traveling through England. This is the first of maybe several posts from that trip.

In York, England a snickelway is a narrow passageway variously referred to as a"snicket", "gimmel" or "alleyway", the word being a combination of all of these. Mark Jones mapped the snickelways and wrote a guide book to them.

I took this photo as an example of a snickelway.

His book only includes the ones on the north side of the river Ouse. He created a path where you do not repeat your steps. This map nicely illustrates the circuitous route you need to follow to accomplish this.

This route takes a few hours to complete and if you're in York you will likely find other things you want to do. I covered almost the entire route because I am obsessed with these things. The route begins and ends at Bootham Bar, one of the city gates near the Minster, York's impressively large cathedral.

The middle area is where the most action is with a whole bunch of sneaky passageways and the Shambles (a medieval street whose buildings look like they could tumble over at any time).

Also in this area is Victor J's Bar, featuring their own "snicketway" map on the wall.

Jones fills the book with commentary,

very detailed instructions, various other current and historic facts about York and even advice for navigating "shopsnickets", passageways that require walking through stores and behaving as any normal prospective customer.

Emancipation National Historic Trail

It took over two years for the Emancipation Proclamation to reach Galveston, Texas. Specifically June 19, 1965 hence the Juneteenth holiday. Galveston was the largest slave market west of New Orleans. The newly emancipated fled Galveston to Freedmen's Town and other parts of Houston that had large African American communities.

via Texas Highways

In 2019 the US House of Representatives passed the Emancipation National Historic Trail Act. This act would create the second National Historic Trail centered on the African American experience, after the Selma to Montgomery trail in Alabama. The map above traces the approximate route of this trail.

Map for Bloomsday

I have not read Ulysses by James Joyce, few people have. Even fewer have understood it. To honor the annual Bloomsday festival going on right now, here is a map showing the wanderings and locations within the book. The map about as easy to understand as the plot itself.

I have not found much information on the map's author, Aimee Stewart. Her company seems to have disappeared from the internet. 

The routes of the main characters are color coded by episode (or chapter) and the line pattern represents the mode of transportation (walking, vehicle, dreaming or floating). The novel begins with Stephen Dedalus at the Sandycove Martello Tower on the coast near Dublin while the second episode features him lecturing about the Greek statesman Pyrrhus. The clocks indicate the time of day, as the entire novel takes place during a single day (Bloomsday - June 16th, 1904).

In episode 8, Leopold Bloom eats a cheese sandwich at Davy Byrne's pub while contemplating his wife's infidelity, then heads to the National Library.

The final episode consists of Molly Bloom's thoughts as she lies in bed with her eye-less husband. 

There is a very subtle grid on the map with a street index at the bottom. On the side next to the color legend is a list of symbols. The meaning of this is unclear as none of these appear on the map.

Stewart states "The novel needs to be made more accessible, especially to us Dubliners, so I hope this helps." I'm not sure it does.

Of course if you really want to clear things up you can look at this blurry copy of a map by Vladimir Nabokov who said "Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom’s and Stephen’s intertwining itineraries clearly traced."

via Paris Review