Giant Isometric Pixel-Art Map of New York City

Andy Coenen has created this amazing gaming style map of New York City.

Using a combination of Google Maps 3D tiles and artificial intelligence, he was able to extract a model of the entire city as well as parts of New Jersey.

You can read about the entire process here. The upshot is that if you really understand how .ai models work and how to work with these tiles, you can do a massive job with minimal coding and in a relatively short time frame. These buildings look even better than most gaming models I’ve seen though if you zoom way in, you can see his complaints about how the trees look. I did a deep dive into some places of personal interest, like where my sister lived in Brooklyn for decades before moving last summer,

to my brother’s building, mostly obscured by the taller one to the south.

One appealing, but also disconcerting aspect of this map is the lack of people and their imprint. There’s no trash on the streets, no distressed property and very few cars, mostly in parking lots. The scaffolding that you see everywhere is missing. Ugly urban details like razor wire, construction fences and fire escapes are also gone. Everything looks happy and empty.

Here are more areas; Coney Island,

and some interesting details at LaGuardia Airport.

For a taste of the suburbs here is part of Cliffside Park, New Jersey with some fancy houses and their million dollar views overlooking the fancy Alexander building.

Liberty Island,

and Central Park.

Explore the whole thing online here

Weaving a Map

One challenge for cartographers is how to clearly show multivariate data, ie. multiple layers of data. Here Jeff Allen shows the predominant mode of travel for residents of Toronto.

One method is to use “small multiples” as you see on the bottom of this image. The woven pattern is a clever way to show all of these travel modes together. This is a much simpler way to visualize the travel modes than by moving the eye back and forth between the individual maps at the bottom. It also looks nice. 

The patterns are not too surprising; walking is most popular in and around the center, bicycling along certain corridors, transit where available and driving gets more common beyond a small radius of downtown. One revealing pattern is how some areas are transit deserts, especially northeast of downtown.

The map above is based on a python library/Github page called weavingspace that describes the process in detail and gives some other examples like this map, showing different ethnicities in Auckland, New Zealand (Pākehā means European New Zealander),

and this one showing anthromes (land uses) around Auckland.

The author of this page (David O’Sullivan) gives some other cool looking examples in a slide presentation. Some are not well explained but they’re fun to look at. This one (not exactly a weave?) is about crime in Auckland.

I don’t know what this one shows (most likely population related) but it’s quite colorful.

Finally this one (Auckland again) is quite striking.

U.S. Interventions in Latin America

Many numbers can be tossed around about how much the United States has intervened in Latin American countries. In the case of this map, there have been 56 military interventions - and this does not include our latest poorly thought out venture into Venezuela. 

This map also doesn’t include our heavy influence on elections such as the recent one in Honduras. Making every country dark green implies that each has been invaded, but there are very few in the region that have not been. Unfortunately this image is blurry, making the small text hard to read and I have not been able to locate a higher resolution version. It originally came from Liberation News but does not seem to be on that site anymore. 

For a less biased take, Wikipedia has a list of nearly 400 military interventions by the United States since 1776. This map shows just the ones carried out under Theodore Roosevelt.

 

 

Overlooked Mapping Highlights from 2025-Part 2

Here are some more mapping highlights from the last year:

 5. Silk World War II escape maps

This is from an episode of a podcast called What’s Your Map featuring former cartographic researcher in the UK Ministry of Defence Barbara Bond

Top secret British intelligence agency the MI9 produced a series of maps on silk (and later rayon) designed to help soldiers evade or escape from capture. This map is of Danzig (Gdansk), where the Vistula River enters the Baltic Sea.

Escapees used their knowledge of these areas to direct others to Swedish ships where they would be safe to escape to that neutral country. Maps were printed on fabrics such as silk, which could be stitched into clothing or kept in a pocket and did not make any noise when folding or unfolding them. The maps showed where coal is loaded onto Swedish ships, the arc of light to be avoided, ditches where people could hide and the network of railroad tracks that would need to be traversed. More on these maps and on Bond’s career can be heard on the podcast.

6.  Mapping the Wikipedia Rabbit Hole

WhereWiki allows the user to enter any Wikipedia page and see all of its hyperlinked connections in any given area. When I first saw this, the keyboard player for the Cure had just died so I chose the band’s page and the area around Crawley, UK* where they were formed.

A click on any point brings you to the referenced page. The green dots are locations and the blue are people or groups.

*You can choose the default area (where you are now) or just about any other place on earth and you will likely find plenty of geographic links to whatever page you chose. 

-via Maps Mania

 

7. Smell Map of the Minnesota State Fair

Jake Steinberg, a cartographer and journalist for the Minnesota Star Tribune created a map of the smells of the State Fair. You can see the full map and article here but you might hit their paywall

8. Inundation Map of the Town of Guadalupe (1819)

Guadalupe, now part of Mexico City suffered a major flood in 1819. The entire area was in the basin of former Lake Texcoco and floods were a frequent occurrence

-Maps via Pedro Zurita Zaragoza on that great mapping site known as LinkedIn.

The map shows inundated areas in aqua tones. Two waterfalls shown at the bottom are breaches of the Guadalupe River.

Text in the legend describes how canoes were needed in the plaza and a note at the bottom states that the floodwaters receded “by virtue of the wise measures of His Excellency (the viceroy), thus preventing its spread to the capital.” Plans to drain the area took almost a century after this to be implemented and this was largely responsible for drying the entire region.

9. 12 Foot Wool Map Needs a New Home

 A group of up to 18 women in County Wicklow began making a 12 x11 foot knitted and crocheted map of Ireland in 2019. 

As reported by The Journal (Ireland). Most of the project took place at Carnew Community Care, a centre for older people. Now that it is finished they are looking for a place where it can be publicly displayed. This was from July. I have not been able to find any follow up on whether they’ve found a location for it.

 -via The Map Room

 

 

Overlooked Mapping Highlights from 2025-Part 1

Many people are putting together their best of lists for 2025. I don’t have time to stay on top of all map content so rather than a best of, here is a list of inetersting map-related posts I’ve missed this year. Due to content length restrictions, I will break this into two separate posts so here is Part 1.

1. Overthinking about vertical writing of Hangul labels on maps - Here is a wonky problem I have never considered in my cartographic career. Hangul is the Korean alphabet. In a system that can be written vertically or horizontally, how do you orient your text on the vertical (north-south) roads? Author Hanbyul Jo surveyed her Korean friends for a preference. When no clear preference emerged, she turned to Korea’s main map services, who approach the problem differently.

   
   
   I reformatted the maps above from the original post for ease of comparison. It may be a little difficult for westerners to interpret but you can clearly see how the number 12 is written differently. Next, she turned to paper maps with the conclusion that maps that mixed Hangul with Chinese characters tended to label these road vertically, while maps in pure Hangul went horizontal. 

The map above (Seoul City Map -Seongji Publishing, 2024) appears to be in the latter category. Mainly I’m showing it because it’s a nice looking map. While the author remained on the fence she considers maps with the vertical text “a precious example of two writing styles naturally mixed together”.

2. A North Korean Atlas

While on the subject of Korea, Miguel from A Cartographer’s Tale acquired an electronic copy of a North Korean atlas from the early 2000’s. It is fascinating. The narrative is that the Communists won the Korean War and the country is united, as in this physical map of Korea.

Maps of other countries are shown in various colors but they chose gray for “enemy” countries such as the United States and Japan. Here is the United States, because it’s the country I know best. What are the red lines? Roads, railroads or just random lines connecting cities? They appear to loosely follow rail lines. Also, the city locations are odd. Note the major city in central Oregon, Perhaps that’s Portland but if so the location is way off. Is the furthest Northeast dot also Portland? The text is different.

The ocean current maps are nice though a bit hard to follow.

You can see many more of these maps at A Cartographers’s Tale.

3. A Sketch of Isle Royale

Daniel Huffman, who has always been generous about sharing his mapmaking techniques, made his first National Park map. It is a beautiful sketch of Isle Royale in Lake Superior.

The map uses a plan-oblique view, a hybrid between a bird’s-eye style view and an overhead (typical of most maps) view. If you’re interested in technique or want to buy a copy you can do so here.

4. The Sahara Desert and its Lakes

From that well known map site, Instagram comes this map showing northern Africa when it was a much more humid place, full of rivers and lakes. Aside from a few oasis towns, Lake Chad is about the only surviving water body and it is drying up.

This map came from Alex Vicente Conde who posts “bizarre maps” under @egm_bizarros. Translated into English from the author’s text: “This is what North Africa and the Sahara looked like 8,000 years ago at the height of the African Humid Period. 🙂 Subfossils of fish and other creatures that inhabited these lakes can still be found there today.”

More highlights to come, probably next week.

The Battle of Trenton

 249 years ago today, at a low ebb of the Revolutionary War for the Americans, George Washington set out a plan to turn the tide of the war by making a surprise attack on Hessian soldiers in Trenton. On Christmas night the general, 2,400 soldiers and 18 cannons crossed the icy Delaware River by moonlight. The troops approached Trenton from two directions and surrounded the Hessians.

image via American Battlefield Trust

The resounding victory helped save the Revolutionary cause and create momentum towards winning the Battle of Princeton a week later. As a child in Bucks County Pennsylvania, I have vague memories of getting up early on a cold day to watch the Reenactment at nearby Washington’s Crossing on Christmas Day. 

More on the battle and video content can be seen here on the PBS American Revolution’s web site.

Mood of the USA Heading into 2026

 Well. it’s been quite a 2025 here in the U S of A. America sure is great again. I have surveyed the mood of the country as we head into a new year and created this map. It is based on robust data sources such as: 

• Anecdotes

• Conversations with random people

• Stuff seen on the internet

  and most importantly…

• my own personal prejudices

  
  Have a great holiday season!