One Block, Nine Maps: Are You Ready For the Map Festival?

Compass Rose from map of sewer system, 1890-1892?

A guest post written by Eileen O’Connell, Branch Manager of Special Collections.

To celebrate our rapidly approaching map festival, we thought it would be fun to trace the history of one city block using nine maps. To orient the contemporary view, take a look at the 2016 aerial map of the 500 block of 12th Street NW. The block is block number 24 of the Perea Addition, bounded by Lomas Boulevard on the north, 11th Street on the east, Fruit Avenue on the south, and 12th Street on the west. The number superimposed over the structures are address numbers.

The earliest map we have at Special Collections that clearly shows this block was published in 1889 and was compiled by the Real Estate Title Insurance Company of New Mexico. It labels the block as block 24 of the Albuquerque Town Site Co. Addition. Of the north-south streets visible in this photo, only Tijeras's name remains unchanged. Block 24 is bounded north and south by Otero and Harrison avenues, respectively.

The W.4 designation refers to the Fourth Ward, a political boundary for the voting and school district.

This map is one of a set of maps produced by H. D. Johnson and Edward A. Pearson that show the layout of Albuquerque's Sewer System. It is also a puzzle for the researcher. We estimate it was produced between 1890 and 1892. An April 18, 1891 article in the Albuquerque Weekly Citizen takes citizens to task for "indulging in adverse criticism" of the contractor tasked with building the system. Johnson is listed in the 1892 Albuquerque city director as an architect. The 1892 city directory also shows that the north-south street names are now New York Avenue and Fruit Avenue.

Real estate records show that Block 24 of the Albuquerque Town Site Co. Addition became block 24 of the Perea addition in 1900. Although block 24 of the Perea Addition is shown on the index sheet for the 1908 Sanborn map, this map from the Sanborn Maps eResource is the first to show the block in detail. Thomas T. Skinner is listed in the 1913 city directory as a resident in the dwelling on lots 9 and 10; his occupation is listed as manager of the family's grocery store.

Digital Sanborn Map of Albuquerque, New Mexico, May 1913, Sheet 7

Although the 1920 map compiled by J.F. Brozo for the Albuquerque Title Guaranty Co. is more colorful, the 1920 sewer map is more interesting. The sewer map lists names of property owners to be assessed for sewer extensions and improvements. Amid the familiar Albuquerque names on block 24 and block 8 (due south) are Huning, Hebenstreit, Luna, Mann, and Simms. Running crossways along the west side of block 24 across lots 3-8 is the name Soo Hoo Pong. The exclusion laws severely limited Albuquerque's Chinese population, but brothers Soo Hoo Pong and Soo Hoo Nong and business partner Ah Kee were well known as proprietors and managers of the Los Angeles Restaurant at 217 West Central. The Records indicate that the brothers were real estate investors as well.

1920 Brozo Map

1920 Sewer Map

The 1924 and 1931 Sanborn Maps show rapid development on the west half of block 24 in the six year interval between map editions. The scale for both maps is 100 feet to 1 inch, "D' over the outline of a structure indicates "dwelling."

1924

1931

Although it doesn't label lots and blocks, the 1952 First National Bank map of Albuquerque still references the Perea Addition. It also shows the new name and new alignment for the former New York Avenue. Lomas Boulevard was the result of a street realignment that affected New York Avenue, Las Lomas, Campus Boulevard, and the Menaul Diagonal. The realignment was part of a larger traffic plan for Albuquerque which was accompanied by several street name changes and the shift to the quadrant system that divides Albuquerque NE, NW, SE, SW along the Central Avenue and Railroad Axes.

Maps and the Fruits of Exploration

World Map 1636. Photography. Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Web. 17 Feb 2016.
http://quest.eb.com/search/139_1946129/1/139_1946129/cite

We have written on the blog before about our fascination with maps, even though they don't always reflect the reality of the globe we're spinning on (hence the True Size website, which is a pretty fun tool). But maps can be more than an atlas, or a piece of paper that's really hard to fold up once it's unfolded, or an app on your phone. We've assembled some quotes from authors about the diverse qualities of maps - how maps affect people, stories that maps tell, the personal geographies that our lives become - and would like to share some books about maps and geography from the library catalog that we hope fit the tenor of the quotes.

Map People

There are map people whose joy is to lavish more attention on the sheets of colored paper than on the colored land rolling by. I have listened to accounts by such travelers in which every road number was remembered, every mileage recalled, and every little countryside discovered. Another kind of traveler requires to know in terms of maps exactly where he is pin-pointed at every moment, as though there were some kind of safety in black and red lines, in dotted indications and squirming blue of lakes and the shadings that indicate mountains. It is not so with me. I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found, nor much identification from shapes which symbolize continents and states.
~John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

Map: Exploring the World edited by Rosie Pickles and Tim Cooke

Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World by Tim Marshall

The Map Thief: The Gripping Story of an Esteemed Rare-Map Dealer Who Made Millions Stealing Priceless Maps by Michael Blanding

Maps of Our Private World

Regular maps have few surprises: their contour lines reveal where the Andes are, and are reasonably clear. More precious, though, are the unpublished maps we make ourselves, of our city, our place, our daily world, our life; those maps of our private world we use every day; here I was happy, in that place I left my coat behind after a party, that is where I met my love; I cried there once, I was heartsore; but felt better round the corner once I saw the hills of Fife across the Forth, things of that sort, our personal memories, that make the private tapestry of our lives.
~Alexander McCall Smith, Love Over Scotland

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing

The Mystical Backpacker: How to Discover Your Destiny in the Modern World by Hannah Papp

Mapping it Out: An Alternative Atlas of Contemporary Cartographies edited by Hans-Ulrich Obrist

Story as Map

A story is a map of the world. A gloriously colored and wonderful map, the sort one often sees framed and hanging on the wall in a study full of plush chairs and stained-glass lamps: painstakingly lettered, researched down to the last pebble and participle, drawn with dash and flair, with cloud-goddesses in the corners and giant squid squirming up out of the sea...[T]here are more maps in the world than anyone can count. Every person draws a map that shows themselves at the center.
~Catherynne M. Valente, The Boy Who Lost Fairyland

Plotted: A Literary Atlas by Andrew DeGraff 

The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami by Matthew Carl Strecher

The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking by Olivia Laing

No Compass

Amazing where your life can deposit you before you know it. One, two, three, and you're on a completely different road than the one you'd always expected to be on at this point in your life. There is no compass when such things happen, no rules and no maps to guide you, and no one who cares if the sun is glaring or if the asphalt is melting beneath your tires.
~Alice Hoffman, Blue Diary

Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies by Alastair Bonnett

The Trivia Lover's Guide to the World: Geography for the Lost and Found by Gary Fuller

The World's Weirdest Places by Nick Redfern [eBook] 

How the States Got Their Shapes Too: The People Behind the Borderlines by Mark Stein 

Atlas of Cursed Places: A Travel Guide to Dangerous and Frightful Destinations by Olivier Le Carrer, Sibylle Le Carrer
  

Maps & Charts

It is not down in any map; true places never are. 
~Herman Melville, Moby Dick
 
To put a city in a book, to put the world on one sheet of paper -- maps are the most condensed humanized spaces of all...They make the landscape fit indoors, make us masters of sights we can't see and spaces we can't cover. ~Robert Harbison, Eccentric Spaces

Maps! We look at a globe or world map and take the borders and dimensions for granted, when in reality the dimensions are not always accurate and every border has a history. In this digital age, when we are more likely to do a search for an address on Mapquest or use an app on our phone to find our location, occasions to read an actual map are becoming scarcer.  But map-reading, like letter-writing, is a skill we would be loath to see die out completely. Here are some books about maps and infographics to whet your appetite for geography. and perhaps improve your cartographic skills.


Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps by Chet Van Duzer

Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography by Ken Jennings

Personal Geographies: Explorations in Mixed-Media Mapmaking by Jill K. Berry

On the Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks by Simon Garfield

Phantom Islands of the Atlantic: The Legends of Seven Lands That Never Were by Donald S. Johnson

Strange Maps: An Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities by Frank Jacobs

In the Memory of the Map: A Cartographic Memoir by Christopher Norment  [eBook]

Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture by Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel

The Infographic History of the World by Valentina D'Efilippo and James Ball


Links

Map Reading Basics

Bad at Reading Maps? Maybe Your Brain Just Needs Better Maps

The Peters Projection World Map

Daily Infographic