Recreational Map of the Berkshire Hills

I'm spending a couple of days in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts. In the hallway where I'm staying hangs this pictorial poster map.

Produced in 1939 by the Berkshire Hills Conference, it is full of nice details as you look closer.

Here is the corner locator map, designed to look like a book with a charmingly misshapen Massachusetts.

The dark, woodsy marginalia makes the world outside of Berkshire County look spooky,

even with the happy sun shining on it,

while inside county limits people are happily golfing and fishing.

Finally here is an art deco north arrow plus mileages to other places so you don't get lost.

Herring Run

I took a bike ride with a friend the other day to Horn Pond in Woburn, Massachusetts to watch the Herring make their annual journey upstream to spawn. They swim upstream to lay and fertilize eggs in freshwater streams and lakes and then return to the ocean. The young grow and mature in fresh water and then head out to the ocean in the fall. 

There are several dams blocking their passage but there are also fish ladders up to the dam at the south end of Horn Pond. There is a narrow passageway up this dam. We talked to some watershed association volunteers who were counting fish and they were hoping to improve the passage into a more formal fish ladder. As it is now many fish get stuck under the impassable part of the dam. While we were there two people came with large nets and were scooping huge numbers of fish from under the dam and tossing them into the lake above the dam.

Here is a video I took of fish waiting to climb up to the pond.

On the way back we stopped at the fish ladder at the Center Falls Dam in Winchester which has some informational displays including the map above. Unfortunately because of the grate covering the ladder you can't really see the fish. Here is a map of the entire watershed via the Mystic River Watershed Association.

Schematic Newton

I have worked in the City of Newton, Massachusetts for almost two decades creating maps of the City. As part thought exercise and part learning project for using Inkscape, I decided to try a very schematic map.

Newton's geography is very complicated. There is no downtown, rather 13 (or 14 depending on who's counting) villages, each with some central downtown or at least crossroads. The city outline was extremely simplified. The diamond shape I went with made it hard to fit in some major roadways in the far eastern (Hammond, Hammond Pond) and western (Grove and Lexington) parts of the city.  
The EST. and INC. are from the signs at the borders.

This evolved quite a bit after finding some mistakes (this was all done from memory) and some comments from city residents and even elected officials. I like simplicity of this early version, though there is a major mistake in not showing that Commonwealth Avenue crosses Interstate 90 in the western part of the city. Still there's always a level of accuracy that gets lost in the name of simplicity.

The Secret Life of a Highway Interchange

Living in Eastern Massachusetts means for many people trudging up and down Rt 128-Boston's dreadful (but necessary?) beltway. Much of it is also part of I-95, an interstate highway that I have lived within a few miles of for most of my life. To get to most places by car or bus from my home requires traveling eastbound on MA Route 2, then heading south on Rts 95/128. I travel the northwestern leaf of this cloverleaf exchange on a regular basis (more often as a passenger than a driver) and have often wondered about the life within - so I drew a map.

Drawn with colored pencil, I made a separate overlay of the text for fear of ruining it. I used various sources of aerial photography such as Google and Apple as drawing aids. Most features are real but I'm not sure about the swamp. I have vague memories of seeing it (maybe on a wet day) but am not sure it's still there. Fairy shrimp are a species that live in vernal pools, a subject I've mapped in a past job. These are swamps that are dry for much of the year. A swamp trapped inside a highway junction is what inspired this project.

As I've looked more over the years, I have found many other points of interest. The concrete pad at the north end seems to grow and shrink and change configurations. There is a sign for Outfall 1 (though it might say 11, it's hard to read at highway speeds), some raised beds with no obvious purpose and abandoned tires seem to come and go. There are also a few stands of mature trees, even more extensive than what I've drawn, that may harbor some very interesting life within.

If you click on the map, you can see a larger, more clear version. If you click on "Location" below, you will get the Google Maps view of the place. What's hiding in your local highway interchange?

Public Libraries of Massachusetts

Across the street from my office is a public library, where a copy of this map (circa 1904) hangs.

The library is a modern building so it is not on the map, but many of these libraries are still standing and in use today. That includes the Boston Public Library, shown on the bottom of the map, which houses the Norman B. Leventhal Center, which has this map in its digital collections.

The map beautifully illustrates each library. Above is the library in Arlington, near my house and also near the home of the map's author - "designed and drawn with pen and ink by George Hartnell Bartlett (author of 'Pen and Ink Drawing'). Arlington, Mass." 

So to recap, this map hangs in a library near my office but that library is not ON the map. It does show my (and the author's) home library which still looks the same except for an addition, and also shows the Boston library (which still looks the same except for an addition) where a copy of the map is located. So it's a circular thing. Now that we've cleared that up enjoy some classic old libraries from Worcester County.

The diversity of architectural styles is fun. Some of them are just mere Cape Cod style houses,

like this one, about as far from the Cape as you can get in the state. Others look like Greek temples or haunted houses.

Here's one from a town that no longer exists - it was flooded to create a reservoir so that when you visit the Leventhal Center, you can get a drink from the "bubbler" there.

The text at the bottom of the map reads

"A public library free to every man woman and child. Annual circulation three volumes to every inahbitant. 4,250,000 volumes. Annual circulation 9,000,000 volumes."

The Maps of Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau is mainly known for nature writing, but he was also an accomplished surveyor and cartographer. Here is a detail from an 1853 Concord, Massachusetts farm survey. Note the north arrows and the name of one of the abutting landowners "N. Hawthorne."

An excellent article by Daegan Miller in Places Journal (source of the image above) details his involvement in disputes between farmers and industrialists over the water levels of the Concord River. He carefully surveyed the river, noting depths, fords, sandbars and bridges with some interesting written embellishments such as "here is a shallow place", "quick current", "willow", "bottom soft", etc.

The article has a nice detail from a 91 inch wide rolled survey of the river. Unfortunately I cannot show it here because of permissions issues but you can see it from the web page of the Concord Free Library. One important takeaway is that through his notes on the map Thoreau sought to bring life to the map by filling details into the empty spaces. Previous maps had treated the river as a resource to be plundered. To quote Miller

"all those notes pinpointing where the plants grew, all those piles of figures and ghosts of surveys past, make of Thoreau’s a deep map — a view of an impressively interconnected world where nature, commerce, culture, history, and imagination all grow together — something nonfungible and specific: a full, a wild land living at once beyond and beneath the confined landscape of the town’s grasping improvers, both agricultural and industrial, who, despite their superficial differences, ultimately agreed that the best use of a river is to turn a profit."

Thoreau mapped many of the places he traveled to such as Cape Cod - via OpenCulture,

and the Merrimack River in New Hampshire via Mapping Thoreau Country.

You can see a huge collection of his maps a surveys via the Concord Free Library's Thoreau Surveys page. Most are farm surveys from Massachusetts but there are also plans for industrial sites as well as copies of historic maps of North America.

The Seven Hills of Everywhere

Rome was built on seven hills. Here they are (the ones inside the city walls):

Many other cities decided that they wanted a piece of Rome's glory and created their own seven hills legends. Here is Wikipedia's extensive list of cities claiming to have seven hills. Of course the nature of hills make it easy to cherry pick various topographical features to come up with seven hills, and also to dispute those claims. Cincinnati seems like a good example of a city that's trying too hard to arrive at exactly seven hills.

Also cities tend to expand to include more hills and many of the original ones have been leveled. Here is a collection of various seven hills maps for your reading pleasure.

Jerusalem - they had seven hills long before Rome. Here is a sketch showing seven hills within the old (third) city wall 

One of the first cities to jump on the seven hills bandwagon was Constantinople (Istanbul) - here is a map from the Hebrew wikipedia. The hills are numbered but not named.

Rome, Georgia - if you're going to name your city Rome, it might as well have seven hills.

Richmond, Virginia took the extra step of listing their seven hills in a 1937 ordinance. The goofy colored triangles represent "official" hills. Several other gray triangles shown are "unofficial" hills. The far west hill is called "Oregon" because that's how far west it seemed to the rest of the city at the time. The complete list is here. You can explore them interactively here.

St. Paul, Minnesota - they can only agree on five of them, and some of them are really just bluffs rising up from the river. A full accounting of them can be found here.

Here is a nice map and description of Seattle's seven hills...

... except maybe there are really twelve?

In Africa, Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon is known as La Ville aux Sept Collines (city of seven hills)  - all of them are on the west side of the city.

Thiruvananthapuram-capital of Kerala Province India

Maybe not. The Hindu (souurce for this graphic) says "if we start counting the hills in the city, it becomes confusing. Hills there are, but to decide on the seven that the city rests on, is near impossible. The really high hills are outside the city."

Near me Somerville, Massachusetts claims seven hills and has a park devoted to them with cute towers marked for each hill.

I was unable to find a good map of the seven hills so I made my own hand drawn one. Enjoy!

Massachusetts Then and Now

The Incredible Journey of the Baby Hat

My wife knitted a gorgeous baby hat for our niece's little boy. She even hand dyed the yarn!

Unfortunately we had an incorrect zip code for her in Brooklyn. That sent it on a five state journey.

So far the hat has made two round trips between the Boston-Nashua vicinity and the Brooklyn-Long Island-New Jersey area with more to follow assuming it reaches its destination. The USPS Tracker below lists the destinations in reverse order.

Processed at USPS Origin Sort Facility	NASHUA, NH 03063	February 12, 2014 4:41 pm
Processed at USPS Origin Sort Facility	BOSTON, MA 02205	February 12, 2014 2:02 am
Arrive USPS Sort Facility	BROOKLYN, NY 11256	February 10, 2014 7:38 am
Depart USPS Sort Facility	FLUSHING, NY 11351	February 10, 2014 6:51 am
Depart USPS Sort Facility	FLUSHING, NY 11351	February 10, 2014
Processed through USPS Sort Facility	FLUSHING, NY 11351	February 10, 2014 5:33 am
Depart USPS Sort Facility	BOSTON, MA 02205	February 8, 2014
Processed at USPS Origin Sort Facility	BOSTON, MA 02205	February 8, 2014 5:54 pm
Depart USPS Sort Facility	KEARNY, NJ 07032	February 7, 2014
Processed at USPS Origin Sort Facility	KEARNY, NJ 07032	February 7, 2014 8:12 am
Undeliverable as Addressed	BROOKLYN, NY 11223	February 1, 2014 11:05 am
No Such Number	BROOKLYN, NY 11223	February 1, 2014 11:05 am
Insufficient Address	BROOKLYN, NY 11223	February 1, 2014 11:01 am
Arrival at Post Office	BROOKLYN, NY 11223	February 1, 2014 10:29 am
Processed through USPS Sort Facility	BETHPAGE, NY 11714	January 30, 2014 1:58 pm
Depart USPS Sort Facility	NASHUA, NH 03063	January 30, 2014
Processed at USPS Origin Sort Facility	NASHUA, NH 03063	January 29, 2014 10:33 pm
Dispatched to Sort Facility	ARLINGTON, MA 02476	January 29, 2014 6:56 pm
Acceptance	ARLINGTON, MA 02476	January 29, 2014 2:17 pm

Where Your Money Really Goes

Boston Globe columnist Brian McGrory began a series of columns about the insurance industry recently, beginning with Soaring greed at Liberty Mutual. The column described the mutual (owned by policy holders like you and me) company's air force, based out of Hanscom Field in Bedford. Mass. He used the Wall Street Journal's Jet Tracker to show the important places these corporate jets are taking their executives.

Former chief executive Ted Kelly, when not whining about the "excess" salaries and "very rich" benefits that public employees like myself get, has no problem taking the public's money and flying to his vacation house on Cape Cod - a very short drive from the Boston area. One of the most popular flight destinations is Vero Beach, Florida, near another one of his properties. All of those trips took place in the cold weather months. There were also several trips to commercially important places like Bermuda and Hawaii. Apparently his $50 million annual salary was inadequate to pay his own way.

The Wall Street Journal made Freedom of Information Act requests to the FAA to compile this flight information and display it on an interactive map. You can find a company that you are a shareholder of or that you pay bills to and see where your money goes. The table view lists the dates and times of flights and the map view is what you see above.

My previous mortgage holder, Citigroup also appears to have a bit of a taste for spending your money on vacations with 14 trips to Nantucket, 4 to the Bahamas, 21 to Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks, and one to Marco Island, Florida. My current mortgage holder, Wells Fargo is harder to track because there are so many different entries for them.

Have fun seeing where your money goes while I enjoy my fabulous salary and benefits.

A Christmas Ramble with the Dog

Map of the Weekend-Cape Shot

It's the weekend. Time to find your favorite map shot glass and drink a toast!

What I do for a Living-Part 1

Things are really busy for me this week. We have a big infrastructure evaluation project that I need to map and analyze every which way. Since I don't really have the time for an interesting, well researched post, here are some storm drainage pipes somewhere in Massachusetts. This is what I do in my non-spare time.

Map of the Week-Mainegon and Wiscachusetts

Next week I will be traveling to Portland for a workshop.
If I use Andy Woodruff's map of Portland I should be able to find my way, right?

Maybe on the way up there I'll stop in Madbridge, Wiscachusetts. Here is a detailed street map.

Where in the World is (was) John Quincy Adams?

John Quincy Adams is on Twitter! He has over 13,000 followers! The Massachusetts Historical Society has been recounting his voyage as a diplomat to Russia 200 years ago, before he became the sixth president of the United States (1825-1829). His 200 year old diary entries are released daily as "tweets" - and you can follow his progress on google maps. He sailed from Boston to Denmark and then to St. Petersburg. As of Saturday he was just heading out into open sea.

8/15/1809: Weather fine- wind scanty. Lat: 44-13. Long: 53-40. This afternoon I found the Caboose on fire.

Map of the Week-Patriot's Day Edition

Monday is Patriot's Day here in Massachusetts. We commemorate the first revolutionary war battles by taking a day off from work and re-enacting these battles. We also have related activities like a morning Red Sox game,  a marathon, drinking beer out of paper bags on the T and bragging about our "wicked awesome" sports teams.  Here is a map of the activities of April 19th, 1775 - some of it happened right down the street from me.  

Thanks to the Department of Military Science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute for the map. Their timeline of events (and this map) can be found here. 

The Daily Masshole Obstacle Course

I frequently complain about my commute. Yes it's "only" 8 miles but 8 miles of stress. It is much more stressful than my job and probably the main thing that leaves me drained at night. In addition to the usual problems of heavy traffic, construction, bad roads and "Masshole" drivers, the route itself is a crazy serpentine pattern-there is no straight line to get me there.
Below is a map of my route through eastern Massachusetts. I've generalized it a bit and left off place names to make it less obvious where I live and work. Green text indicates southbound issues, purple northbound and black means the problem is in both directions.

The 8 mile route takes me 25 minutes with no traffic, 35-40 minutes typically and can be up to an hour in bad traffic situations. I can ride my bicycle there in 40-45 minutes when I don't get whacked. Public transit is a 3 bus system and takes an hour and 20 minutes. Walking? I haven't tried that one yet.