{"id":11037,"date":"2012-02-27T01:56:32","date_gmt":"2012-02-27T01:56:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/?p=11037"},"modified":"2012-02-27T13:17:41","modified_gmt":"2012-02-27T13:17:41","slug":"maps-of-midtown-manhattan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2012\/02\/27\/maps-of-midtown-manhattan\/","title":{"rendered":"Maps of Midtown Manhattan"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"manhattan1.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Midtown Manhattan by Constantine A. Anderson.<\/em><\/p>\n

Yesterday’s link to a Domus article, The importance of being axonometric<\/a>, features an interview with map and chart collector Michael Stoll whose Flickr account<\/a> has some wonderful samples from his archives. Among the many city charts there are several maps of New York in various axonometric projections including this example<\/a> designed by Constantine A. Anderson for the Manhattan Map Corporation in 1985. Anderson’s map is like a modern equivalent of Turgot’s map of Paris<\/a>, and caught my attention for possibly being the one that comic artist Dave Gibbons used for reference when he was drawing Watchmen<\/em> in 1986. Gibbons and Watchmen<\/em> writer Alan Moore mentioned the map in the huge round table discussion<\/a> I posted here in 2006 (the discussion at this point concerns the story’s recurrent street corner location):<\/p>\n

Dave Gibbons:<\/strong> I didn\u2019t actually make a model of it, although when we first conceived it I did draw a streetmap.
\nAlan Moore<\/strong>: Well, we checked it up on a map of New York.
\nFiona Jerome<\/strong>: It\u2019s really there?
\nDG:<\/strong> It\u2019s a feasible corner\u2014I\u2019ve got a map at home.
\nSteve Whittaker:<\/strong> I noticed you put Forbidden Planet N.Y. in there at one stage\u2014where they\u2019re selling all the pirate comics.
\nAM & DG:<\/strong> No, that\u2019s Treasure Island.
\nDG:<\/strong> Which would, if you had pirate comics, be FP. At home I\u2019ve got this brilliant map they do which is an isometric projection of New York, so not only is it a street map but it\u2019s all the buildings standing up and it\u2019s got all the post boxes and the trees.
\nAM:<\/strong> It\u2019s lovely, it\u2019s a work of art you can wander round New York in your head.
\nDG:<\/strong> It\u2019s about this big but\u2026 you know the joke about New York people look at it and say \u201cWhen\u2019s it going to be finished?\u201d It\u2019s the same with this map, it\u2019s never actually finished because as fast as they put buildings in it, other ones are torn down. There are places in it where there\u2019s just a site with a crane or something.
\n[…]
\nDG:<\/strong> But that corner, l\u2019m sure that at some time I\u2019ve been to New York I must have walked past that corner. In fact, what I\u2019d really like to do, the next time I go, is actually walk to that junction and see what\u2019s there. On the isometric map there is a fairly new high rise building which could be the Institute for Extra Terrestrials, another building which looks like a cinema to me because it\u2019s got a curved front, and there are some other, lower buildings.
\nSW:<\/strong> And a fast food chain, perhaps?
\nDG:<\/strong> That intersection is feasible, right down to the way that the sun rises. This isn\u2019t just down to me. Alan obviously made specific provision for this in his script. The sun actually does rise in the east end sets in the west, and if you look at the thing, if it\u2019s afternoon the shadows are going this way and in the mornings the shadows are going the other way.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I could no doubt have confirmed this by asking DG on Twitter but didn’t want to pester him. Suffice to say there can’t have been many super-detailed axonometric maps of New York being produced at this time. As Gibbons notes, city maps date very quickly: to see a century of change at work compare this equally detailed map<\/a> from 1879 with Anderson’s views. Stoll has a more recent axonometric map of New York<\/a> by Tadashi Ishihara but that’s now twelve years old so it’ll also be out-of-date. If we want a close view of New York’s streets today we can simply fire up Google Earth but there’s still something graceless and clunky about the 3D boxes it imposes on the city’s streets. For the moment these views, especially Anderson’s meticulous line renderings, remain hard to beat.<\/p>\n

\"manhattan2.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Previously on { feuilleton }
\n\u2022 The Turgot Map of Paris<\/a>
\n\u2022 Watchmen<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Midtown Manhattan by Constantine A. Anderson. Yesterday’s link to a Domus article, The importance of being axonometric, features an interview with map and chart collector Michael Stoll whose Flickr account has some wonderful samples from his archives. Among the many city charts there are several maps of New York in various axonometric projections including this … Continue reading “Maps of Midtown Manhattan”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8,51,9,4],"tags":[103,3416,641,3415,3414,247],"class_list":["post-11037","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-architecture","category-cities","category-comics","category-design","tag-alan-moore","tag-constantine-a-anderson","tag-dave-gibbons","tag-michael-stoll","tag-tadashi-ishihara","tag-watchmen"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-2S1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11037","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11037"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11037\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}