One City Marathon

The third annual One City Marathon in Newport News, Virginia will take place this weekend. Jonah Adkins, the city's most famous cartographer designed a very nice map of the route.

After numerous tries, he settled on this simple two color scheme. These are two colors I would never choose to mix (the Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols color scheme) but it actually looks great. The map also has way more detail than is necessary (every building!) but these details are faded out enough to not distract from the focus on the map while also adding some lovely texture and character. Edward Tufte, with his focus on using as little ink as possible would not approve but I do.

Other nice features include clear mile markers, subtle text masking and a nice gentle mask along the coastal features. Also there is an elevation profile at the bottom.

Here is the whole map.

Jonah also created this animation showing the different designs he considered. I think the final version is by far the best and I like that north is up, as opposed to some of the rotated orientations.

 Unfortunately the marathon organizers are not using this map, instead going for a lame Google Map with line on it-and no further detail.

Cartographic Gems from Women

I was a little hesitant to have a post on women cartographers. On one hand today is International Women's Day. On the other hand, with so many more women in cartography these days it seems kind of unfair to lump them all together as if they all think (and map) the same. On the other, other hand (3 hands?) I do not feature works by women here as often as I should.

In a previous post, I featured the Women in Cartography exhibit at the Norman Leventhal Map Center.  That post covered some major contributors to the field such as Marie Tharp as well as the history of somewhat anonymous women producing maps. For today I want to enjoy posting a few more recent maps.

Paranormal Madison by Chelsea Nestel

Goddesses of Venus by Eleanor Lutz - see my previous post for her Mars map.

Shinjuku West by Geraldine Sarmiento

I also like her Candy Map style. Here is Candy Berlin.

Horses and Cows of France

I found this map online showing the large breeds (mostly horse and cows but also donkeys and mules) of France.

It appears to be a classroom map from 1960 from what I can tell with my bad French translation skills. There are a couple of zoomed in looks on this page.

The top corner compares horses around the world by average(?) size while the bottom right corner does the same for cows.

For 52 euros you can buy a copy here.

Tokyo on Foot

Florent Chavouet is a French graphic artist. He spent six months in Tokyo ("the most beautiful of ugly cities") where his girlfriend had an internship. He spent his days there riding a bicycle to various neighborhoods and sketching them. Eventually these became a graphic memoir, Tokyo on Foot. The book is full of great hand drawn maps. Here is part of the table of contents.

Here is a detail from the house they lived in in Ochiai.

The circled numbers show where sketches on those corresponding pages were drawn. Here are some details from the busy Shinjuku neighborhood.

Scattered comments such as "smells of Yakitori" really bring the place to life.

Gakushuin University

And finally a map of a bike trip to Kamakura and the Miura Peninsula to the south.

The non-map sketches are also wonderful. If you're fascinated by Japan this is a wonderful, unique book for armchair travel

The Shadows of New York City

For Part 3 of my New York trilogy, I am revisiting a fantastic interactive map from the New York Times. It shows a day's worth of shadows on the two solstices (it was posted at the Winter Solstice) and at the vernal equinox. Here is midtown Manhattan on December 21st.

The dark skyscraper canyons are striking. A closer up view shows why building heights cause such political upheavals. Below we see the shadows cast over the south side of Madison Square by the buildings along 23rd St.

 If you hover over a building you get the height and year built. The Madison Green Condos cast a long and persistent shadow over a corner of the park.


The map was created using publicly available 3D models of New York's buildings The diagram below gives a good idea of how the shadows for each area are calculated.

The interactive map is at the top of the article. You can go to an area of interest and choose your season. Here is my grandmother's old building in the Bronx in winter, spring and then summer.

Since people love to look at stadiums on these things here is Yankee Stadium. In winter it does not get much sun but in summer there's plenty of sunshine for baseball. Too bad most games area at night.

The Origins of Hip Hop

Last week I highlighted a map from the colon-heavy You Are Here: NYC : Mapping the Soul of the City. Another good map (by RJ Beals) shows the origins of Hip Hop. Due to copyright restrictions I do not have the final map but an early version is on photobucket via OldSchoolHipHop.

 

The lower right corner of the updated version contains a short history of how DJ Kool Herc threw a party at the 1520 Sedgwick Avenue recreation center (Herc's family's apartment was also in this building) and introduced a new DJ style. This involved playing the same part of a song from two identical records on two turntables to extend the instrumental breaks. Here is a detail showing the rec center and other Bronx locales.

Herc, though considered the father of Hip Hop is an often overlooked character in this history. The Twilight Zone was his first professional DJ job. He also had jobs at the Sparkle Club, PAL and Hevalo. Burger King is on the map because they used to unscrew the tables from the floors and have DJ parties there.

The map is cleverly designed to look like the soles of a sneaker - the final version has "Sneakers Uptown Shoes Down!" added as a subtitle. 

For more info see the message board page at OldSchoolHipHop or buy the You Are Here book

The Meltropolis

There have been many excellent map books lately that I have not had a chance to properly look at. One recent addition is a new Katharine Harmon "You Are Here" volume NYC : Mapping the Soul of the City. One of the best maps is by illustrator Rick Meyerowitz (also see his New Yorkistan map) - "The Meltropolis 2108" - image via Atlas Obscura

The map shows New York as not just the victim of global warming, but also of mass consumerism. The map is full of watery puns such as Central Puddle, the Met Aquarium (the flooded museum), Lagoona Airport, ChelSEA, Brooklyn's Atlantic Avenue changed to Atlantic Ocean Avenue and the former site of New Jersey. Wall Street has become the Outer Banks separated from the rest of the island by the Financial Straits.

Sociopolitical humor is found in place names such as the Snipesland Tax Free Zone, the Condo District, Times Square renamed Murdoch Square, Staten Island re-branded as Mega Store Island and Ivankaville. Other nice touches include the a large spud known as the Freedom Tuber and the Monument to the Last Liberal.

To see more details click the map above, see the Atlas Obscura article or buy the book.